There’s been a relatively recent swelling of $100M ARR commercial open-source businesses (Confluent, Elastic, Mongo, GitLab). The common strategy seems to be an “open core” with $$$ enterprise-level addons. Are there any examples on that scale with consumers as customers?
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Perhaps you should look farther back and look at the introduction of the web as an example. The other examples a great businesses but isn’t there a way that a proper new tool for thinking should create an entire ecosystem?
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In the case of the web, TBL was able to build on top of a number existing protocols with something that was both pragmatic enough to work when created, incomplete in some ways that were patched, broken in some ways that we still suffer...
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Isn't this what the freemium model is? Evernote, Dropbox, Spotify would all fit into this mold.
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A given wholistic Open-Source core as the core value creation mechanism is fundamentally different from freemium. The former is permissionless, the latter is the opposite of that (permissioned) on basically every dimension.
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COSS, Fremium or Open Core - this is the default business model for software. Enterprise CIOs are coming around to accepting COSS as low risk option.
From the maker, adoption is easier. Once adoption is in place, they provide a market place for developers to build plug-ins.
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Linus Torvalds started open source but Apache Software Foundation & Google have been torch bearers of the open source movement in software. Will there be similar momentum in hardware design? Likes of Raspberry Pi Foundation have miniscule influence. Maybe Nvidia changes things!!
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All the analogies I can think of aren't software.
- Free recipes on the internet vs. restaurants.
- Seeds vs. hiring a gardener
My hunch is that the consumer base of people who interact with code not-for-their-job is small enough that the overhead of open source isn't worth it.
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Maybe some online course sites? (Free,but get the “masters” for $$$). Or any freemium model? (Unless you only pay for adds?)
My understanding is that their big-$$$ revenue comes from consulting services (e.g. for NYT) rather than hosting services. Do you happen to know?
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