Open Core Ventures Blog

Yep, more about OCV on https://opencoreventures.com/ TLDR; we start new open core companies around existing open source projects.

While it’s great to see more high profile deployments of Matrix, this is another instance of the failure mode described at https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022 where an organisation with massive funds depends on an open source project like Element and Matrix for critical infrastructure… but doesn’t contribute a cent to the underlying development (yet, at any rate). As a result, Matrix funding continues to be at risk - and basically forces us increasingly down an open core model like the one described by Sid at https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-04-red-hat-model-only-worked-re… It’s incredibly frustrating; in this instance we’ll reach out to Poland and see if we can find a way for them to contribute by donating to the Matrix Foundation, or by buying stuff from Element, or both.

Yes, that's the MongoDB variant which codifies it directly, and SF Conservancy and other legal entities promotion FOSS licenses states that the network stack contagion concern does not actually apply for the AGPL. But because AGPL doesn’t dig into the definition of "access", simply defining it as “users interacting with it remotely through a computer network”, nor define clear boundaries for how the "contagious" part of GPLv3 interacts with the rest of the network stack of this clause, it has meant that some lawyers think that a court may overly broadly interpret the definition. So far this contagion concern hasn't actually played out, and big corporations/hyperscalers are often using AGPL software somewhere in their stack if they're using common Linux distros - and nothing thus far has been compelled to be open sourced that isn't AGPL software. This might be insightful about the concerns as well as why lawyers still think it's straightforward: https://www.opencoreventures.com/blog/agpl-license-is-a-non-starter-fo… https://discuss.logseq.com/t/on-the-agpl-license-and-the-idea-to-move-… https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL (not a lawyer): https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html

Looks really great! But regarding monetization, one word of caution that other commenters haven't mentioned so far: make sure you have a really good understanding of the licensing concerns before proceeding. Initial disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Your project is using AGPL, without a CLA, and you have third-party contributors. If I understand correctly, this essentially prevents anyone from having an enhanced closed-source version (SaaS or otherwise) of your product -- even you. Although you created it, you only own the copyright for your own portion of the code. Third party contributors own the copyright for their contributions, which are equally subject to the terms of the AGPL for everyone. So if you wanted to monetize an enhanced version, you have two options, if I understand correctly: A) Keep the enhanced version entirely open source. You can charge for a hosted version but users must be able to self-host. Obvious downside: this leads to weird misaligned incentives where your revenue can depend on your project being difficult to install/host. or B) Obtain a licensing agreement from all third-party contributors since the time you switched to AGPL, or completely re-write any code where you can't get that agreement. Might not be practical. You could try alternative monetization methods that don't rely on an enhanced version, such as support contracts or sponsored development of new features, but these are hard to scale... especially…

I fell in love with this article at this sentence: > Still. Many in the open source community have interpreted Red Hat’s decision for what it really was: A dick move. I've had a short essay in draft for a while about the difficulty of a small business trying to make money using The Red Hat Model (https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-04-red-hat-model-only-worked-re… Red Hat seem like an outlier who're doing well with that model, but smaller places like Sidero or Bitfield had to find other ways to monetise their open source efforts, and sometimes that had pushback from the community. Red Hat, though, were acquired by IBM, and IBM made it harder for an otherwise thriving ecosystem to exist. Not impossible, but harder. IBM makes money hand over fist (billions according to https://www.ibm.com/annualreport/). Was there really a reason to make Red Hat harder to redistribute? The interviews I've read come down to "our Red Hat team works hard and we don't want to give that away to low effort projects", though if you've got an interview with a different perspective I'd love to read it.

DISCLAIMER: I do some paid work with with Open Core Ventures[0] and I've been a GitLab fan for a while so I'm quite biased. Just tried to use some GitLab repos I have and ran into a well specified 503 error page: > We are splitting our database into Main and CI! > > For more information about what we're up to, you can check out our blog article. For progress updates, please check our status page. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/06/02/splitting-database-into-main-… Don't know how I missed it, but it's pretty nice that the downtime is clearly specified, and the blog post (and related posts) were very informative. Some random thoughts below: > GitLab.com's database architecture uses a single PostgreSQL database cluster. This single cluster (let's call it main), consists of a single primary and multiple read-only replicas and stores the data generated by all GitLab features. Database reads can be scaled horizontally through read-only replicas, but writes cannot because PostgreSQL does not support active-active replication natively. All you need is Postgres. IIRC Reddit had a similar starting story. Excited to see how much faster gitlab.com will be and how much more reliable their CI gets (I don't have numbers on hand, but I think they've gone down less than GH Actions in recent memory at least -- maybe there's some recency bias there). In a world where Citus is now fully open source[1], I wonder if it needs to just get pulled into contrib. [0]:…

>Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc. >In truth the license doesn't matter. It's funny to bring that up in the context of Red Hat who have started to circumvent the GPL by terminating their relationship with anyone who tries to actually make use of the rights granted by it. "The license doesn't matter" because they've found a loophole in it, but it clearly does matter in that they had to do so in the first place and weren't able to adhere to its spirit due to business concerns. [1]: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ [2]: https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-08-redhat-gets-around-gplv2-lic…

I'm not sure if I understand your point. OSS != FOSS https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misunderstood-b…

After posting this I realized it may be very similar to https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-06-27-ai-weights-are-not-open-s… that already got discussed extensively the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36601622