We have been talking about two separate things, and I reckon they are getting conflated. To be more clear, one is about the "Closed SaaS" vs "Free Software SaaS", the other is "outsourcing vs doing in-house".
My argument is more against the former than the latter. And it's not just about cost. It's about lock-in. It's about shitty customer support that takes 11 days to respond to a ticket. It's about building your systems on the "no-brainer cloud provider" that leaves you empty handed on the semi-yearly outage, and all you can do is pray to be resolved it quickly and console yourself that your competitors are offline just like you.
The point on the second issue was not just "they could do it in-house and cheaper". It is also "they are paying this much money and they are still in a weak position, where they have no control about some critical piece of the organization. I would understand if someone takes this route as a temporary measure while better processes are being developed and putting in place, but if this paying $1M/year is accepted as the "natural way of things" of things, it seems like management is saying "we are incapable of doing it ourselves, and we are too lazy to even care. Let's just hope that the money keeps coming, and if doesn't we just lay some people off".
I realized about a decade ago that I don’t actually care about the code being open source as much. It’s the data and file formats that need to be open.
That way I have a path to migrate to a different product. That’s the true lock in for me.
Never noticed any difference or cared between gitlab being “open source” vs GitHub being closed source. As long as it’s an unaltered git repo and there are apis for my data.
If you use Github only for its repo hosting capabilities, sure. But there is CI, issue tracking, discussion history, the OAuth server and everything else that is built around the repo hosting and is used to lock people into the platform.
My argument is more against the former than the latter. And it's not just about cost. It's about lock-in. It's about shitty customer support that takes 11 days to respond to a ticket. It's about building your systems on the "no-brainer cloud provider" that leaves you empty handed on the semi-yearly outage, and all you can do is pray to be resolved it quickly and console yourself that your competitors are offline just like you.
The point on the second issue was not just "they could do it in-house and cheaper". It is also "they are paying this much money and they are still in a weak position, where they have no control about some critical piece of the organization. I would understand if someone takes this route as a temporary measure while better processes are being developed and putting in place, but if this paying $1M/year is accepted as the "natural way of things" of things, it seems like management is saying "we are incapable of doing it ourselves, and we are too lazy to even care. Let's just hope that the money keeps coming, and if doesn't we just lay some people off".