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Ask HN: Can a company be built using open source code?

10 points by tiuPapa ↗ HN
Well, for companies like Docker or Mongo, I guess their revenue model is to provide support for enterprise customers. But can a new company like say the next Uber or Facebook or Netflix or Amazon be built on top open source products where their core offering is available for everyone to check and read? What about licensing the code? What kind of licenses should they use?

5 comments

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cjbprime
Sure. Amazon seems like a good example -- if the source code to the site and backend were released, you'd still have a company as profitable because the hard part is the global logistics work, relationships made, warehouses they've built and staffed.

I don't think it matters which license is used in most cases. GPL vs BSD used to be a big argument, less so now that we're not all running desktop software on our own machines for everything.

git-pull
I think product-izing open source projects is a long shot, but:

I would go the SAAS route, the way WordPress.com does it. Self-serve DIY hosting and enterprise clients (the kind of stuff you'd have account managers for).

There also is a recipe for a permissively licensed library, with a commercial front-end: spaCy, the NLP library [1], and prodi.gy, the front-end [2].

The spaCy devs are my favorite success story. A solid library, and using their know-how to create a value-added front-end on top of it.

There is a lot in play when this happens. SaltStack is a superb configuration management system. But when I make tickets on GH to pressure them to make things more fluid for non-enterprise deployments, they don't get much traction. I can't help their bottom line, and their incentive to cater to enterprise clients takes them astray from the values that made it great: the masterless, solo quickstart [3] (this is strongly my own observation).

By far the biggest usage of open source is going to be intermixing permissively licensed libraries and build tools in larger works. By the time you see a polished service or product, you may not be able to tell what it's built in, even though they stand on the shoulders of giants. PS4 and Switch is built on FreeBSD.

[1] https://spacy.io/ [2] https://prodi.gy/ [3] https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/tutorials/quicks...

tedmiston
You nailed it with the first part. Another big example is Mesosphere. Yes, you can open source everything* (my company does) because most B2B customers don't want to bother running it. Most small ones would rather just use your SaaS and not have to run and maintain some boxes, if they're even that technical.

Not to mention cloud pricing these days is complexed and nuanced when your app uses a bunch of services and deals with lots of inbound and outbound traffic — more things customers don't want to deal with.

Most big companies want support around the clock and are used to going for enterprise licensing deals. At the end of the day, you're providing a solution to their problems, and hosting and running the code for them makes solving their problem and their lives easier. If a problem costs them $50k in lost revenue or opportunities, and you solve it for $45k, you have a happy customer, even if they could have done a lot of work and run it themselves for say $20k.

I don't think this works as well in the B2C space, but it really depends on the price point of your service and your user base. For instance, I run a Ghost blog because I can have the skills to install and maintain it, which isn't much, and they charge $20/mo for their SaaS while I can run it on DigitalOcean for $5/mo.

*except a small bit of secret sauce

chatmasta
To add to this, open sourcing your code also provides a bit of insurance policy if your company ever goes out of business. This is especially helpful in infrastructure markets; businesses don’t want to build their foundation around proprietary dependencies that might disappear when their creator company goes belly-up. If the code is open sourced, then even in the event of you going out of business, your customers can find a way to recover.

There is also the nice bonus that open sourcing your code means you’ll get a bunch of “free” contributions, bug fixes and security reviews.