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Comment by mankash666 | Hacker News Reader

GitLab or ANY company has no obligation to give away it's work under liberal OSS terms. GitLab is NOT a charity, the hypocritical expectation of OSS while still expecting silicon-valley style exorbitant compensation for being an employee is clearly at odds, companies can only afford such salaries if they eke out handsome profits. Ergo, if you expect a good salary for your work, prepare to pay for good products.

RedHat is the ONLY company managing a reasonable revenue stream while being fully open source. If you like/love GitLab/GitHub, you'll want them to thrive financially, and there's no clearer path to financial stability than charging for close source software, as proven by decades of enterprise and consumer facing companies.

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To illustrate: I used to use Gitorious back when, because it was fully open source. Its founders couldn't keep the lights on/weren't motivated to continue working on it any more. Instead of waiting for it to shut down, GitLab acquired it and (of course) facilitated easy migration from Gitorious to GitLab if so desired.

In other words: GitLab's strategy allows it to open source as much as possible, while also actually developing and maintaining the project. At least for now, it's one of the most successful projects to do so.

> If you like/love GitLab/GitHub, you'll want the companies behind them to thrive financially, to continue offering their products to you at reasonable prices for the immense value they offer to your workflow

I don't like/love GitLab or GitHub in an emotional sense. They're good tools, but they're tools.

Bitkeeper was also a very good tool, offering immense value compared to any of the other options there, and the effective death of Bitkeeper and the existence of Git was an incredibly good thing for both the world as a whole and my personal workflow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper

> RedHat is the ONLY company managing a reasonable revenue stream while being fully open source

For their size. There are other open source projects that are actually profitable. They're just not billion dollar companies. e.g. ghost.org

Ghost is NOT a for-profit company, you can't compare them to companies whose mission is profit. Unless you're implying the pursuit of profit to be unacceptable, this is an apples to oranges comparison

> you can't compare them to companies whose mission is profit.

Why not? They're a non-profit, sure, but that doesn't make them a charity. Like Redhat, they also don't have an obligation to give anything away for free. They just have an obligation to make sure at the end of the day, there's no money left over in the form of profit.

And yet, they manage to not only generate revenue on an open source project, they make enough to keep the company afloat.

That's not to say their model would work for gitlab or github. Ghost works because they're small. But the point I'm trying to make is there is a model demonstrated by Ghost and others that allows for small fully open source project to support itself, while not relying on a closed core.

I don't see the logic here. Ghost's mission is to stay independent and afloat, and GitHub/Gitlab's to make the most money they can. These are indeed different and oftentimes opposing mission statements. The fact they all make software is co-incidental.

My thesis stands - as a for-profit entity intent on maximizing profits and net-worth, empirically open source hasn't provided a vehicle to achieve those goals. At best, it allows a company to stay afloat, but it doesn't in any way guarantee maximizing net worth and profit of a company.

So, every-time you pith open-source as a viable alternative, you're confusing the mission statement. It isn't to stay afloat, it is to maximize wealth

> My thesis stands - as a for-profit entity intent..

No, you've changed your original position, which was "RedHat is the ONLY company managing a reasonable revenue stream while being fully open source." You capitalized "ONLY" to emphasize it. I challenged that statement, and you've conceded with this carve out: "At best, it allows a company to stay afloat, but it doesn't in any way guarantee maximizing net worth and profit of a company." which is a statement I agree with.

So while you say your original thesis stands, we've somehow arrived at a point where we both agree. Open source for a profit-seeking company hasn't delivered. But you can still make a company with open source -- it's just not going to be able to maximize revenue like a closed-source competitor could. But I think that goes to show people write code for more reasons than profit.

Just to say I have just switched from Red Hat to SUSE, and the latter is not a charity either.

I'd argue that our company, WSO2, which is now the 7th largest OSS company is doing well. We will push $50M in sales this year, EBIT positive, cash flow positive. Growing 60% yoy. All of our software is Apache licensed.

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