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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

"Open core" is just plain ol' proprietary software. Mac OS X is "open core" in the very literal sense that kernel and core are synonyms. It's really no big innovation to be selling secret sauce on top of free software; Android is also "open core" as is Matlab. Nowadays literally almost all proprietary software has bits of weakly-licensed free software in it such as curl or React.

I've never been very impressed by GitLab's claims of openness. The only difference seems to be that you can get most of the useful things of GitLab as free software whereas Darwin, Linux, or LAPACK+FFTW are not the most attractive parts of macOS, Android, or Matlab.

Call me when you manage to make a business without forcing any kind of EULA whatsoever on your customers. That will be the real innovation.

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I strongly disagree.

GitLab is open core because I can run and use the software in a meaningful way under open source licenses.

MacOs is substantially different because I cannot take their open source kernel and run a functioning version of MacOs

Well, you used to be able to do that with macOS, but I think they stopped that from happening in the last few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#Open...

Gitlab may one day also decide that their core is too large and too useful to let everyone play with it too.

Also, you're not strongly disagreeing with me. I said the same thing, the only difference is that you can get most (but not all) of the useful things from whatever GitLab currently considers its core to be.

Google took the same approach with Android, releasing non-OSS versions of their OSS apps, and not updating the OSS ones anymore.

One important difference between macOS and GitLab is that there are people running GitLab's free-software edition (e.g.,. https://salsa.debian.net/ ), and I know of I think nobody who's running Darwin.

Android leans towards the GitLab side because there are meaningful third-party distributions of Android.

Matlab is an interesting case because there are extremely popular libraries using its open-core components - essentially the entire scientific Python ecosystem depends on them, so while e.g. Jupyter Notebook doesn't ship LAPACK or FFTW itself, a huge number of its users pip install scipy, and many install PyFFTW. And from where I sit, the scientific Python ecosystem appears to be eating Matlab's lunch.

I don't know if "open core" is the right term to distinguish these cases, but there is an interesting distinction - third parties meaningfully using the free subset, third parties not meaningfully using it, and third parties using a competitor product based on the free subset.

The company I work for used Darwin in place of CentOS up until some time in 2015 for a good number of years. Do not recommend. At all. The case insensitive file system didn't help though in terms of running things it seemed okay but I have a feeling it wasn't really that great. Darwin seems like a good idea on paper but I don't feel like it's all that usable.

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