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Comment by tabbott | Hacker News Reader

My personal test for whether an open source company encourages self-hosting is whether any plans/pricing page advertises "Self hosting" in a parallel/equal way to how they advertise commercial offerings.

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Having their free self hosting plan linked on their pricing page [1] is more than enough, ridiculous to expect companies should the devote the same valuable realestate promoting their free offering as their commercial products which sponsors development.

[1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing

If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$ from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't have their pricing and growth strategy put together.

Here we go again. No, not every single decision (short-term or strategic) in a company is optimized only for $$$ at the expense of anything else. Nor should it, nor does that need to go against the interests of shareholders, nor is there any law mandating so.

Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get away with it and make more money by doing so.

I have to disagree. Nowadays, limited liability companies are literally an optimization mechanism for turning profits.

Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes in slave-like conditions.

GP is implying that companies that don't are by definition performing poorly by missing out on the margin.

In short: My argument is that it is possible (and should be expected) to be be ethically responsible without being fiscally irresponsible. This should be obvious.

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