Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?

[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.

[timconsidine]

@adison read your post

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

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

Maybe it's not what you meant, but it's what you wrote.
Don't blame me for misunderstandings arising.

[timconsidine]

Ignoring this topic now.

[necrevistonnezr]

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

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.

Or they pull a Hashicorp.

[adison]

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

p

what did hashicorp do? i mean, i use hashicorp vault and that works fine.

[fbartels]

@adison https://thenewstack.io/hashicorp-abandons-open-source-for-business-source-license/

[adison]

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

https://thenewstack.io/hashicorp-abandons-open-source-for-business-source-license/

uh what? if that is the case, how is vault still maintained?

[necrevistonnezr]

I have posted a few warnings about this - any commercial competitive offering to Hashicorp products is endangered.
Reliability and stability in licensing is a value by the way if you’re running a business and have proper budgeting.

I know a couple of businesses really struggling now: Vague license, absurd new license fees, and total dependence makes for a toxic cocktail.

[fbartels]

Especially around Terraform a lot of business has been built. I'm too lazy to check, but I think there are now two endorsed community forks of the last version before the license change.

[msbt]

@fbartels https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-announces-fork-of-terraform/ that's one, not sure what's the second

[fbartels]

@msbt opentofu was recently still opentf. Maybe that was because i thought there were two projects.

[ryangorley]

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

Or they pull a Hashicorp.

Yeah. I guess this led to the OpenTofu (aka OpenTF) fork that is now under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation.

Directus made a similar move over to a BSL license a few months ago. I was really sympathetic to BSL licensing in principle, but soured when in the specific case of Directus the product went from open source to any business that makes more than $5M in revenue must now pay them $500~$700/mo. to self host Directus. They don't actually publish that information. I've got clients operating very low-margin businesses who would find themselves in serious trouble. I don't imagine most people installing Directus on Cloudron understand what licensing cliff they're eventually going to walk off of.

Still, I'll take an open source product that could go this direction any day over a proprietary commercial product that can make such arbitrary changes without accountability or recourse.

[avatar1024]

I wonder if a possible solution would be for Cloudron to use Canonical's approach to snap where it's all open source but the Snap Store, with the snapd deamon having the Snap Store somehow hardcoded has the source for apps.

Not that I often use Canonical as an example, especially not on this, but it feels that this could be a half way house for Cloudron.

I also like the idea of open sourcing all of Cloudron but without update push from Cloudron repo and support (other than the forum and docs) for not not paying customer.

[adison]

@avatar1024i mean, i guess its an idea

[fbartels]

@avatar1024 said in Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?:

but without update push

If I remember correctly, this is how it was before the two apps limit existed. You could install, but all updates where from the cli. It was no fun.

[jdaviescoates]

I'm going off topic, but re:

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

Woke socialism

I find the the crazy culture wars we live in these strange times so bizarre when they lead to such terms being used in a derogatory way like this.

"Woke" just means "awake to the injustices of the world" or as Wikipedia puts it:

"alert to racial prejudice and discrimination".

and "socialism" basically just means "understands that concentrated private ownership - think about the ultra concentrated ownership of land, banks, media - isn't really good for anyone" (and e.g. The Spirit Level has shown very convincingly that inequality is bad for everyone, including the rich), or as Wikipedia puts it:

characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership....Social ownership can be public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee.

Note that it doesn't mean state ownership of everything (although, coupled with greatly modernised more participatory and deliberative democratic practices more suited to the 21st century - of which thankfully there are many good examples of all over the world - wrt to natural monopolies like water and rail etc, that would often make lots of sense)

And now in the UK we have the Conservative Government tweeting utterly bizarre things like this (which thankfully nearly everyone - including loads of actual scientists - is taking the piss out of):

https://twitter.com/Conservatives/status/1709207218027934071/quotes