Cloudron Forum

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

@gabrielcossette If you can't afford Cloudron, you probably have bigger problems.

Maybe I didn't word it correctly, but that's not what I meant. I wanted to express that Cloudron terms and pricing could change in the future, in a way that could not be appropriate anymore for some users. And as the platform is not open source, you have no choice than migrating to a different platform.

It's all about risk management.
Personally, I find it too risky to host all my digital infrastructure on a platform that doesn't provide a good exit strategy.

[...] open-source comes with a lot of admin overhead for discussion and rights-management.

As long as you manage expectations, you can do open source and not burn you out.

You could state: "Hey, feel free to use the code, ask questions and make contributions, but as our team has limited resources (for now), we can't make any promise regarding support. Also, if you are interested in reliable support, check out our commercial offer. "

There are many advantages to open source, but if I could point the most important to me in this case, it would be this one already mentioned by @ryangorley:

• Long-Term Assurance. The choice to self-host one's own infrastructure can be stressful. It becomes less stressful when you know that the software your using is open source and will be viable as long as there is a community willing to keep it going. This is one reason open source users become such loud advocates. They want that thriving community to live on forever, in a way they can't necessarily ensure a company will.

Whether I'm contributing apps or fixes as a:

• User (because I use Cloudron for my personal needs)
• Company (because I deploy Cloudron to my customers)
• App Author (because I want my app to be available in Cloudron)

I don't want my investment ( + ) to go to waste if Cloudron UG (the company), in the future:

• decides to change its terms in a certain way that don't fit my needs (or that I simply can't afford money-wise)
• is bought out by a company that has a different approach/view
• simply goes under

And to top it off, I would have to abruptly migrate all my apps to a different platform, costing me even more + .

But I still wish the best to the Cloudron team, which is doing an amazing job!

Hi,

I'm very sad to hear that Cloudron core code has become proprietary software. Like @ryangorley, I've always been promoting Cloudron as a great well-supported open source self-hosting option.

I too want you guys to succeed but I fail to see a valid reason to turn Cloudron into proprietary software if it is still being developed in the open.

My thoughts on the reasons you gave:

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.

I-am-not-a-lawyer but I'm pretty sure that you can still be under an open source license. I mean, the situation is not "ideal" as an user can't easily self-host without relying on the cloudron.io external service, but anyone is free to create a fork and reimplement these functions. Also, I don't know if it's the case anymore but we used to be able to install cloudron Docker packages built manually without cloudron.io. So in a way, Cloudron was self-hostable, just without the user friendly App Store.

The non-technical reason is that we were spending too much time explaining why we call ourselves opensource and charge for it.

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.

Worse case, if you really want to give proprietary software to some customers, why not dual-license? Contributions would be made under both AGPL and your proprietary license. This way, it's still open source and potential contributors would be a lot more inclined to become involved.

Anyway, I wish that a compromise can be found where Cloudron still remain a great open source self-hosting option!

Hi,

For Cloudron to be really useful to Web developers, I believe it needs to offer a way to manage all databases and files (Docker volumes, i.e. /app/data) on the server. For example, WordPress developers like to edit theme files directly through SFTP or a Web File Manager.

I know the LAMP app supports SFTP and phpMyAdmin but it is restricted only to this app (not able to manage the WordPress app for example).

The ideal way would be to integrate these features directly in the admin dashboard (like the Terminal), with the added important advantage of 2FA integration (missing in LAMP app).

Good candidates are phpMyAdmin (DB), https://pydio.com (Web File Manager) and SFTP server with TOTP module... but the two first are PHP applications so not compatible with the current Node.js based dashboard so I'm not too sure how we could work this out. I've seen some ways to apparently run PHP through Node.js but more investigation would be needed.

I'm ready to help if there is interest. Happy to hear your thoughts, thanks!