Some companies like to call it a Community Backed Up by a For-Profit Business.
But it's also fair to call it a For-Profit Business Backed Up by a Community.
I really like what Forem and Dev.to are doing.
But it's a shame that some companies use this business model as a honeypot.
Situations I've witnessed:
I was working in a company building a private cloud for a foreign government.
And they wanted to have all sorts of offerings in that private cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS).
They wanted those offerings to be based on open-source software.
At some point, they were looking for a CRM solution, so they googled "open-source CRM" and landed on a company's website and wrote them a message.
That company immediately flew in 3 Sales Reps, and I was in that meeting.
One of the first things they said was "Our Community edition isn't really updated, you'll want to have the Enterprise option.", which was something like $150k per year.
Obviously, they didn't make a sale.
But that company was literally using "open source" and "community" as buzzwords, as a honeypot.
Developer decides to use some open-source solution.
Doesn't check the website to see all the details.
At some point, he had to provide his email address.
Sales Reps from that company get in touch with the Execs from the Developer's company, and intentionally keep the Developer out of the conversations.
They end up charging the company a huge amount, because the open-source solution itself wasn't enough, and it was already too deep in the codebase of the company. It required certain additional services to run at a production level.
The Developer's company had enough resources, that wasn't an issue, they didn't care too much.
But the Developer was never included in the discussions, he still thinks that the solution is completely free and probably built by "some cool dudes" instead of a sneaky for-profit corporation.
I wish developers would learn to spot these things, just because it says "npm install" or "community", doesn't mean there's an actual community behind it.
And yes, it's perfectly fine for a for-profit corporation to offer both open-source and paid solutions. But it's unethical to use that honeypot approach.
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Some companies like to call it a Community Backed Up by a For-Profit Business.
But it's also fair to call it a For-Profit Business Backed Up by a Community.
I really like what Forem and Dev.to are doing.
But it's a shame that some companies use this business model as a honeypot.
Situations I've witnessed:
I was working in a company building a private cloud for a foreign government.
And they wanted to have all sorts of offerings in that private cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS).
They wanted those offerings to be based on open-source software.
At some point, they were looking for a CRM solution, so they googled "open-source CRM" and landed on a company's website and wrote them a message.
That company immediately flew in 3 Sales Reps, and I was in that meeting.
One of the first things they said was "Our Community edition isn't really updated, you'll want to have the Enterprise option.", which was something like $150k per year.
Obviously, they didn't make a sale.
But that company was literally using "open source" and "community" as buzzwords, as a honeypot.
Developer decides to use some open-source solution.
Doesn't check the website to see all the details.
At some point, he had to provide his email address.
Sales Reps from that company get in touch with the Execs from the Developer's company, and intentionally keep the Developer out of the conversations.
They end up charging the company a huge amount, because the open-source solution itself wasn't enough, and it was already too deep in the codebase of the company. It required certain additional services to run at a production level.
The Developer's company had enough resources, that wasn't an issue, they didn't care too much.
But the Developer was never included in the discussions, he still thinks that the solution is completely free and probably built by "some cool dudes" instead of a sneaky for-profit corporation.
I wish developers would learn to spot these things, just because it says "npm install" or "community", doesn't mean there's an actual community behind it.
And yes, it's perfectly fine for a for-profit corporation to offer both open-source and paid solutions. But it's unethical to use that honeypot approach.