Comment by nunez
4 months ago
At the same time, I'm concerned that a YC investment means more of the same, eventually: open-source until it's no longer fiscally prudent.
4 months ago
At the same time, I'm concerned that a YC investment means more of the same, eventually: open-source until it's no longer fiscally prudent.
free software until mainstream acceptance. naive MBAs call it leaving money on the table, Microsoft calls it a monopoly-preserving strategy. no VC has the balls to go for the jugular anymore.
Is open source and making money in conflict? If they do a good job, I am willing to pay.
Not necessarily, but if there's a cost to providing free support to the community like official container images, then it will get cut. People comment that it's "free" to provide these things through Github, but it actually has a cost to the maintainers in time, and it's frankly an easy business decision to stop doing that at times in favor of roadmap work that produces business value.
What I'm learning from this is to provide basically zero support from the outset and let it grow organically if I ever build a business on an open source product. As soon as you stop supporting anything for free someone feels entitled to it.
"but if there's a cost to providing free support to the community like official container images, then it will get cut.", but here's the kicker, supporting creating docker images when you're on github is close to negligible as to be paper thin.