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Ask HN: Why isn't there more open source SaaS?

2 points by addcn ↗ HN
Open source projects routinely outperform their proprietary counterpart. However, it seems like in the age of SaaS our open source libraries, OSes, and other tools become parts of a SaaS solution, but rarely the solution itself (exception do exist of course). It just seems that compared to other types of software open source is very underrepresented in popular SaaS tools.

Why is this? Do you see thing changing?

I'm an idealist and I think it'd be great to wrestle CRMs amongst other things from proprietary companies for instance.

5 comments

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smt88
CRMs aren't the best example of proprietary/closed-source SaaS. The CRM world is absolutely dominated by WordPress[1].

The reason open-source SaaS isn't more popular is that people don't want to worry about the technical details of the SaaS. I'm a software developer, and I'd still rather pay Trello a small amount of money rather than install and maintain my own open-source Trello. My time is much more valuable to me than the fee that Trello charges me.

The same is true of Gmail and all the other SaaS I use. I'm paying someone to maintain and operate these SaaS, not just to build the software in the first place.

1. https://trends.builtwith.com/cms

addcn
Just to be clear you mean CMS right?
smt88
Sorry, yes!
addcn
Follow up question then. If there were a way to run it seamlessly, same level of effort as Trello.com would people do it?
smt88
I'm not sure, but you can look at GitLab, WordPress, and Sentry[1]. All of those can be run fairly seamlessly with a little bit of research. All of them have customer bases who choose to use the hosted option.

There are some pros to the paid/hosted option that can never be replicated by self-hosting:

- someone else handles crashes, bugs, and other emergencies - economies of scale (large, purpose-built operations with costs shared my many customers) - free (or cheap) customer support

The biggest reason I see people moving to self-hosted options is to keep their data private.

1. https://github.com/getsentry/sentry