Why not make Cloudron fully open source again?

[LoudLemur]

I think Cloudron should be Free as in Freedom.

I have a few boring things to say, which I will add at the end, but this is what I think:

1. Business Model
   Creating a financially viable business model for a Free Software project has been a longstanding problem. In all the discussions I have seen, the most promising way a Free project can achieve this is by the project team being the best provider of code improvements. They can achieve this by for example staying current with the needs and requests of users and responding in a timely fashion with quality code.

A crowd-funding, goal / stretch-goal format for making improvements would hopefully sustain continual work on the project. CodeWeavers have been successful with a system where paying users gained the perk of being eligible to vote on the direction the coding focus should take. It is worth looking at how they manage it:
https://www.codeweavers.com/

Data visibility is very helpful for a system like that, where you can see a roadmap and options along the way, the flow of developer time, the use of resources etc. Apache eCharts could help, for example.

Another source of funding would be to have a "Corporation Suggested Contribution" in the download area. This could be scaled and set according to the size of the corporation, for example. If the relevant page were pitched in terms of corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, and had some sort of "establishing a relationship with the developers" perks, that might be enough to enable corporate IT departments to authorize the payment, perhaps in a tax deductible way.

Another path Cloudron might follow would be to take a policy that code would be made Free later, for example, during the third year after it was initially introduced.

Open Source?
Isn't Cloudron 'Open Source' already? Does it not satisfy Freedom 1, publishing the source code in a human readable way? Does Cloudron not follow an Open Source development model, where people can contribute code to, for example, add support for an additional application?

https://www.cloudron.io/opensource.html

There are some non-Free packages which Cloudron supports, and I believe these should be flagged as such, so that people can filter them. By Free Software Foundation standards, including non-Free packages is enough to categorize Cloudron as non-Free, in the same way that Debian GNU/Linux has been categorized as non-Free, due to its support for proprietary firmware.

[jdaviescoates]

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

Open Source?
Isn't Cloudron 'Open Source' already?

No.

The source is available and is developed in the open as you allude to, but it doesn't meet the definition of open source as per https://opensource.org/osd/

(nor the definition of free software as per https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html )

But, anyways, on the business model side of things, I personally don't see any reason why Cloudron would have to change anything if they were to fully open source their code / use a free software licence again.

Cloudron already has a successful business model! Basically: charging for timely updates and support.

To repeat some of the stuff I said in the OP

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

@girish said in Cloudron no longer AGPL? (my emphasis added):

The technical reason is that the code base has subscription, appstore and sign up logic. It's unclear what the license should be if it requires the cloudron.io service to work. The non-technical reason is that we were spending too much time explaining why we call ourselves opensource and charge for it. To put an end to such conversations (many of them very hurtful), we just stopped calling ourselves opensource as as early as 2017. I don't know of an easy solution to this.

And in one of the threads on Mastodon, a Cloudron dev said (again, my emphasis added):

Cloudron is attempting to enable people with lesser technical knowledge to get apps running and most importantly updated, backed up and secured"

and:

most of our work goes into reliable, reproducible app updates

And later on in the same thread Cloudron devs go on to describe their desire to create:

a sustainable product with support

And:

We believe more into source available for trust and validation reasons bundled with a business model which is sustainable to ensure continuity for users and one which does not rely on external investment or other means to pay for dev. We have seen sandstorm failing, everyone looses out.
My personal opinion: Ideally we all have the luxury to develop all this for free, but sadly at least I don't. And we have tried patreon style.

So, to summarise, and correct me if I'm wrong @girish and @nebulon, but it would appear to me that the primary reason given for why Cloudron is not fully open source is simply because:

the business model is to sell subscriptions in order to fund ongoing development, updates and support.

Assuming I'm not wrong(?), this really confuses me, because I don't understand why Cloudron being fully open source would stop Cloudron from selling subscriptions for updates and support?

Indeed, selling subscriptions for updates and support is pretty much exactly the same business model as the first one-billion dollar (now nearly $4B) open-source company in the world, and one of the most successful open source companies of all time: RedHat:

Red Hat sells subscriptions for the support, training, and integration services that help customers in using their open-source software products. Customers pay one set price for unlimited access to services such as Red Hat Network (makes updates, patches, and bug fixes of packages included within Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to subscribers) and up to 24/7 support.

This was also one of the points raised on Mastodon:

"Choosing a FOSS license does not impact your ability to have a subscription service."

It was also made previously on this forum too:

@gabrielcossette said in Cloudron no longer AGPL?:

It should be pretty simple for customers to understand, they are paying for a service of maintenance and support (indirectly funding the development of the core product). That is no different than let's say a WordPress maintenance service to have plugins/themes kept up-to-date by a company.

So, to rephrase my first question to @girish and @nebulon

What exactly is it about Cloudron and/or the AGPL that leads you to the conclusion that if Cloudron were fully AGPL licensed you would be unable to continue with your sustainable business model of selling subscriptions for updates and support?

I'm not really too bothered to be honest, but I've never actually seen any answer to that question, even though @nebulon was the first to respond with:

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

Thanks for your elaborate post, we will answer in more detail

I'd still like Cloudron to be fully open source again as

1. an insurance policy, in case something bad happens to Cloudron,
2. because it'd be very good for marketing, and
3. because I think some people who don't subscribe nor contribute due it's it current licence might begin to do so, and finally
4. because I don't think (m)any people would stop subscribing, that more would start, and because I'm yet hear any arguments about how it would damage the existing business model.

But in the meantime, I'm very happy for @staff to continue making Cloudron even better than it is rather than spending time answer my question

(i.e. What exactly is it about Cloudron and/or the AGPL that leads you to the conclusion that if Cloudron were fully AGPL licensed you would be unable to continue with your sustainable business model of selling subscriptions for updates and support?)

And it's already been said before, but perhaps one way to alleviate any fears @girish & @nebulon may have about copycat businesses setting up and undercutting their pricing (which is the only potentially real threat I can think of as it's happened to other open source projects) would be to adopt what people like https://wpmudev.com/ and https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/ do i.e. charge for timely updates (which in effect is what Cloudron already does), and only release public open source updates after 6 months (as others have pointed out, 3 years would be way too long)

[scooke]

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

why Cloudron being fully open source would stop Cloudron from selling subscriptions for updates and support?

This forum provides a hint why: Few would pay, but still come looking for help. So, the way around that is to firewall this forum. They could then possibly leave this forum as-is for whoever wants to run it openly, but then you'd end up with the mess that is the Yunohost "help" forum. Give it some time, and the good name of Cloudron gets tarnished, people stay away, contributions drop...

one of the most successful open source companies of all time: RedHat

Which is also, if my browsing tells me anything, one of the most deeply hated companies of all time! And it's an enterprise behemoth, not for folks like you and I. It'd be sad if Cloudron went that route.

Your contributions are always appreciated @jdaviescoates , let me add. I just think the number of the people who you think don't subscribe or contribute due to Cloudron's current licence (and thus who would pay if the licence changes) simply does not outweigh the masses who would flock to the type of OS you prefer and then clamor for Support, not get it, complain, and torpedo Cloudron's rep. Cloudron really has found a good balance (from what I can tell).

[bmann]

“Classic Open Source” needs to change because it’s been taken over by corporate free loading. I’m very much in support of Cloudron’s “source available” approach.

I actually totally agree with a “subscriber walled forum”. Communicating in forums uses scarce people time. Copying source code takes no time. Which is why I advocate for permissive source but gated “community” access.

And of course — licenses can evolve. For instance, the Big Time License is free to use for companies less than 20 people and/or less than $1MUSD in revenue. It’s not an open source license as defined by the OSI, but it’s a great “fair” license.

But no charge for code is still separate from subscription/ service fees!

[marcusquinn]

@bmann The forum has significant SEO value for generating awareness, I think that the openness of the community adds value, since anything that grows the user base, benefits all users as the development grows with it.

[bmann]

@marcusquinn my main point was that there is zero marginal cost to copying bits of code and there are infinite copies of the source code, and that all the expensive time is eg responding to Gitlab issues from non-paying subscribers, which uses scarce people time who only have so many hours in the day.

Whether it’s an effective conversion tool to paying subscribers is a separate issue.

[LoudLemur]

I am not keen on the idea of pay-walling the forum. One funny idea would be to have Cloudron staff block / ignore everybody on the forum by default, and only unblock people with a current subscription.

[marcusquinn]

@bmann there's always opportunity-cost in anything. Worked in technology for 30 years, and its a constant triage between what you can do technically, and what you can do realistically.

Given such a significant amount of people's and enterprises software is closed-source, I don't know that the choice would hinder sales, because for every decider that finds that a blocker for them, there will be another that makes decisions based on other criteria, that might very well be better because of the time invested in features that might not have otherwise been.

I'm a fan of reliability, open-source is one way to help with that, but it's not the only metric. I think that the current model is sufficiently transparent, and suits the size of the team. Given reliability as been more than good enough for me for many years, I think that there's many other things still on the roadmap that are more valuable. Maybe some times things will change, but I don't know that bending wills to suit some, wouldn't come at a cost to others, otherwise it would have already been done.

[ruihildt]

I currently believe the real reason for not changing the license is very simple: if it's not broken, don't fix it.

And when you think like this, then Cloudron is working as intended:

• provides stable income for @girish and @nebulon
• self-hosting apps (mostly free software) becomes a solved problem
• platforms continuously gets updated and improved
• customers are happy, even if some like me and @jdaviescoates are not happy with the license, yet continue to use it.

The only problem that was set to be solved and currently isn't is the idea of providing financial support to upstream apps.

And I can't blame anyone for thinking like this, outside of ideological reasons and values.

[marcusquinn]

@ruihildt Great take on it.

As an aside: There's other ways to contribute towards open-source, than with code or money.

Just using it and reporting issues and feature suggestions is also free labour, that closed-source projects would have to pay for, same for security-testing.

The way I see it is, I pay for things with my time, attention, faith, and opportunity-cost, and risk-taking. If I was making money from something, then I also pay with money.

There's many ways to be a free user and benefit a project, this whole community is also a great example of that symbiotic relationship.