>For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing.
I agree with this, and that the makers of P likely enjoy a big (and genuine) advantage in being considered the authority in all matters P. But for a competitor (me, in your example), spending time with your existing, working code is much less time and effort than writing brand new code, and that difference in my effort levels is the disadvantage, for you, of going Open Source vs. closed-source.
>SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy
I wasn't aware that SQLite was a profitable enterprise. I have to admit that this is a very strong example for your case, given the competition in this area from other FOSS software (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
The real potential competitors are current staff. The risk is not that -I- want to invest all the time and energy, its that a small group of existing experts aka your current staff, decide to do it.
There's also possibly a small % of users who end up knowing enough to end up doing "mostly supporting others". They can end up becoming competitors as well.
So yes, this model can work, as its currently doing for you (and others). But it certainly is a lot harder to build, and keep such a business going.
Being an employee of such a business is great. You still get a paycheck every month, so the model is irrelevant. Owning such a business though is precarious - basically the staff can walk anytime, and effectively take all the customers with them.
> basically the staff can walk anytime, and effectively take all the customers with them.
I suppose something like the ownCloud / Nextcloud breakup could happen.
You need a big enough set of employees with all the skills required (product & customer relations) such that these employees will be collectively more efficient than who remains to be willing to leave at the same time and still want to work on the same thing, and an important set of customers to be willing to switch to the new business.
Given how we like each others and how nice it is to work there, I believe the company would need to fuck things up big time for this to happen. What caused this at ownCloud is a political change (from true FLOSS to open core, maybe other things) and it took a co-founder + a big bunch of core contributors to leave.
I would say, if this is the biggest risk, the company is probably okay :-)
I agree with you on the fact that it is probably hard to achieve this though.
And still, ownCloud is still alive. I don't know how relevant they are and why people would choose them over Nextcloud, I'm somewhat amazed they are still there.
>For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing.
I agree with this, and that the makers of P likely enjoy a big (and genuine) advantage in being considered the authority in all matters P. But for a competitor (me, in your example), spending time with your existing, working code is much less time and effort than writing brand new code, and that difference in my effort levels is the disadvantage, for you, of going Open Source vs. closed-source.
>SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy
I wasn't aware that SQLite was a profitable enterprise. I have to admit that this is a very strong example for your case, given the competition in this area from other FOSS software (PostgreSQL, MySQL).