Business based on an open source project
Does anyone here have experience launching a business based on an open source project? Like, offering the whole source code as open source for self hosting, together with a managed/hosted version of the same thing? I would love to hear about experiences, challenges and anything that might be worth knowing about this kind of operation.
Lead Platform Architect at the day job, Ethical Hacker/Bug Bounty Hunter on the side
Comments
As far as I heard from friends, it can be done via various licensing models and/or gaining traction such that the monetary side of things comes from providing enterprise-grade support/features.
I was thinking to to do something like Coolify, which doesn't limit features in the self hosted version so it's a guarantee of continuity for potential custoemrs
Lead Platform Architect at the day job, Ethical Hacker/Bug Bounty Hunter on the side
isnt that exactly what canonical is... kinda?
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
Coolify has an Apache license, which doesn't prevent others from selling it as a service. I find this weird. If I go for something similar I want to ensure that noone can compete with me with my own software
Lead Platform Architect at the day job, Ethical Hacker/Bug Bounty Hunter on the side
One recent (successful) example that comes to mind: plausible.io
They have good blog posts and maybe you can even reach out to them.
you mean gitlab,posthog,chatwoot etc?
Good example with Plausible. They are indeed a success story as open source business
Oh, I should have thought of Gitlab. I am not familiar with the others but will look into them.
Lead Platform Architect at the day job, Ethical Hacker/Bug Bounty Hunter on the side
I understood "personal experience with their own business".
If the 'own business' is not a requirement, there are many you must already know. To name a few: proxmox.com, matrix.org, redhat.com. Even though Proxmox is fully open source, they run a profitable business themselves in a wider ecosystem of Proxmox services providers.
I'll keep a tab on the discussion: the place where I work has some kind of 'open core' model, as it is called. I hope to push/lure them into (full) open source, giving back instead of only consuming, even if it is only with part of the portfolio.