Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?

[malvim]

@timconsidine Sorry, but that's not it. Putting the "woke socialism" label everywhere is really not what we should do.
I've seen more entitled pro "freedom" people whine about a company not doing what they want, saying they'll call for a boycott or what have you, "vote with your wallet"-style, than anyone else.

I, too, don't like the attitude of "cloudron NEEDS to go open source bc my admins are whining about it". I'd love for cloudron to be open-source, but I understand why it's currently not, and I'm okay with it. So much so that I have been a paying customer since early 2017 on version zero dot something, and have no plans to cancel my membership anytime soon.

I'd much rather have serious, respectful, adult discussion about open source software and business models (which most people in this thread are doing) than slapping labels on others willy-nilly.

[adison]

@marcusquinn mainly, the admins are looking for sourcecode, witch they cant find. i've even searched for it this morning, but couldn't find it.
if i may ask, where is the source code?
most of the time, they hate it when they use proprietary products that don't contain any source code.
though, if they do make us stop using it, i will at least use it for my personal infrostructure.

[BrutalBirdie]

@adison said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

mainly, the admins are looking for sourcecode, witch they cant find. i've even searched for it this morning, but couldn't find it.

If you visit the homepage of Cloudron https://www.cloudron.io and scroll to the bottom, you find About => Open Source.
And at the bottom => ...and all Cloudron app packages are open source at our GitLab instance.
In there you got all apps and also the Cloudron internals like the box code.

So if you or your admins could elaborate on what you/they are looking for, we are happy to assist.

[nebulon]

@adison that is totally understandable from a sysadmin perspective. We also think one should be able to introspect the code running on ones server. This may not be made overly clear from our side, as we sometimes lack focus on the non-technical stuff. But to be clear, Cloudron is source-available and as @BrutalBirdie already mentioned, the platform code is at https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box there is nothing to hide from our side, anyways one can just ssh into the server and open the source files, it's all plain-text javascript.

[robi]

The code also flows from the installer package which is not encrypted or gated by a license code or further obfuscation. It's all there if you're willing to look.

[adison]

i have.
thank you

[marcusquinn]

@ryangorley said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

software-focused incubators like Y-Combinator continue to churn truly open source companies. I'm pretty sure it's not because they want to be nice but because the benefits outweigh the costs. They believe it will make them money.

The operative word being them. I don't see Y-Combinator as a attractive path, quite the opposite — when independent creator-owned products retain freedom to put the user first, without investor overheads, or increasing support costs for the many, at the expense of the few.

The only investment Cloudron needs is community, and that has steadily grown in all the year's since I've joined.

The apps packaging by the community are almost all offered as open-source.

There doesn't seem to be a problem to solve here, more a preference for some to bend others to their will.

Hours contributed to code contributions will have many times the influence over opinions.

Until there's community code contributions showing that the burdens of development and maintenance are in the main offered beyond the things asked of the founders, I don't see substance being committed beyond opinion — and everyone is still free to have those opinions.

[marcusquinn]

@adison We agree on having source code available, and I'm not a fan of compiled code, either. This one of the many reasons that drew me to Cloudron. Sure, there's alternatives, but I value my time enough to prefer the many time-saving conveniences of Cloudron, and the confidence that things can carry on running, whatever happens in future.

[adison]

@marcusquinn eitherway, at least its source-available. better than completely proprietary with no look.

[ryangorley]

@marcusquinn said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

The operative word being them. I don't see Y-Combinator as a attractive path, quite the opposite — when independent creator-owned products retain freedom to put the user first, without investor overheads, or increasing support costs for the many, at the expense of the few.

I may not have communicated clearly. I'm not suggesting Cloudron should join an accelerator or seek venture backing (their product is good enough I think they could though). I'm calling attention to the erroneous assumption I've seen frequently repeated in this thread that switching to an open source license is commercially non-viable. Venture capitalists want to earn lots of make money, period. If it was not possible to monetize open source software, they would not invest in such companies. But they do, perhaps for the reasons I have mentioned or better reasons.

The only investment Cloudron needs is community, and that has steadily grown in all the year's since I've joined.

The apps packaging by the community are almost all offered as open-source.

There doesn't seem to be a problem to solve here, more a preference for some to bend others to their will.

The problems related to proprietary licensing have been expressed repeatedly here. The primary issue is not how we paying, committed customers feel. The issue is about how the 99.9999% of potential users who are not using Cloudron feel and more importantly whether they'll even have the chance to form an opinion at all. When was the last time you told someone about Cloudron and they were already using it? When was the last time they had even heard about Cloudron? If your experience is anything like mine, you'll come away feeling that Cloudron is being utilized far less than it could be for how incredibly powerful, affordable, and easy-to-use it is. That problem is of concern to both the Cloudron team and those of use who depend upon their software. One solution may be open source licensing.

Hours contributed to code contributions will have many times the influence over opinions.

Until there's community code contributions showing that the burdens of development and maintenance are in the main offered beyond the things asked of the founders, I don't see substance being committed beyond opinion — and everyone is still free to have those opinions.

Find me a single person who would not contribute to Cloudron should it once again be freely licensed. I can point to many I know personally who will not contribute with it licensed as is. How can you blame them? At any moment we could get an announcement that Cloudron has been purchased and will no longer be source available? There's no protection against that. I like the Cloudron developers, I think their hearts are in the right place, but who says their feelings won't change and they won't lock things up or sell the code to someone else who will? A developer who doesn't take this into account hasn't been around very long.

Still, logic should be the only basis for any action by the Cloudron developers, not opinions weighted by volume of code commits. I have no reason to believe you have anything but sincere motives, but brushing aside arguments you don't value as mere opinions and belittling the people who express them as just wanting to bend wills does no service to our shared interests here. I think we can agree Cloudron is an incredible tool and we'd love the people who made it to be successful and we want all our friends to use it. Can we keep that in focus?

[ryangorley]

I'll add a counter-argument to my own argument regarding VC-backing as a sign of commercial viability. Venture capital, in software especially, isn't always motivated by earnings in the way that a normal business would have to be. As I understanding it (I'm no venture capitalist), these folks don't generally recoup their investments through dividends on earnings but by selling their ownership shares to a bank or larger private equity fund or through an IPO. So they'll often run these companies at a loss for years to try to grow the user base as much as they can to get that big cash out at the end. That's not really compatible with a business operating by its own earnings.

Still, not all open-source software companies are VC-backed. Not all of them that are VC-backed are cash negative. The underlying point remains, that open-source grows adoption. Scaling at practically no cost is what makes software such a unique product to sell, and what makes it so enticing for investment in the first place. Open source as a means to scale and ultimately monetize should be taken seriously.

[marcusquinn]

@ryangorley AKA hyper-scaling, it kinda works, but is also predatory and monopolistic. Often based on moat-building and lock-ins through migrations efforts.

Perhaps you can demonstrate by example of sustainable projects making the best of both ways or working?

[adison]

@marcusquinn i personally believe all products should be at least source.available.

[timconsidine]

@adison have you tried suggesting this to Microsoft ?

[adison]

@timconsidine uh, what? what does microsoft have to do with this post?
i don't get it

[ryangorley]

@marcusquinn I'm happy to.

• Nextcloud (managed hosting)
• WordPress (managed hosting, paid features)
• Krita (user donations, corporate sponsors)
• Blender (user donations, corporate sponsors)
• Godot (user donations, corporate sponsors)
• Red Hat (support services, curated builds)
• Gitlab (managed hosting)
• Strapi (paid features)
• 11ty (user donations, corporate sponsors)
• Astro (user donations, corporate sponsors)
• Dokku (user donations, paid features)
• LibreOffce (user donations, corporate sponsors)
• Plausible Analytics (managed hosting)
• Kaleidos/Taiga (managed hosting)

These are a few that come to mind. None are a one-for-one match to Cloudron, but to my knowledge they're all profitable companies/projects. I'm sure in the 100+ posts above this has been said, but just from the examples that come to mind one could monetize an openly licensed Cloudron with:

• Managed Hosting - A hosted Cloudron option was once available. A lot of these open source projects generate revenues that way. You're selling an additional level of convenience and security that is appealing to a lot of people.
• Paid Features - This could be a centralized Cloudron dashboard for managing multiple installs, commissioned sales of commercial software, backup hosting, domain management for in-home installs with non-static IP addresses, etc. The biggest opportunity would be to charge for access to those apps tested and hosted by Cloudron, which is a huge value and a reasonable service to charge for.
• Services - Businesses are highly motivated to keep things running, so anything from managed migrations to on-call support are something they'll pay for.
• Sponsorships - I regularly tell people Cloudron is the easiest way to host Nextcloud. There is a sponsorship opportunity from the application side. Cloudron is vastly superior to many NAS applications, and I could see hardware partnerships as another source of revenue. Cloud hosting providers would likewise benefit from builds tested and easily deployed on their infrastructure
• User Donations - This is the most obvious, but there are people who pay for free things. Where Cloudron is providing a service people rely upon to do a lot, a well communicated message that donations keep the Cloudron team able to roll out updates, add new features, and fix bugs can work.

I'm sure others have better ideas, and a couple of may have been attempted in a limited fashion, but I could see a combination of these closing the gap on the modest $15/mo/server rate being charged now.

[marcusquinn]

@timconsidine Microsoft enterprise products can sometimes be source-available. Dynamics NAV is one example I worked with that is.

[adison]

again, what does microsoft have to do with any of this?
if that is the case, we can just move this post to "off topic" at this point and change the name to "make microsofts products all available source available".
this is "make cloudron fully open source", nothing to do with microsoft products.

[adison]

keep the topic at bay.

[timconsidine]

@marcusquinn but that's the point ... "sometimes" ... "can be" .... "enterprise"
Effectively source not available unless you pay us lots of money
Contrast situation with Cloudron

Of course there are some benefits to Cloudron being open-source, but there are also some risks, and basically we as users should not be so demanding about someone else's property. Otherwise it will be 'Atlas Shrugged' scenario.