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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

Elephant in the room: People looking for open-source solutions are not looking to spend money, it's usually the opposite. If you want to build a business around open-source you should keep in mind, that your users are not your customers. What individual software developers want is different what enterprises want to pay for. Focus on the latter

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It's the freemium model, which has always required a sufficient conversion rate from free to paid to work.

That doesn't mean you should ignore what your free/OSS users want though. Today's hobbyist OSS user may be hired at a big company tomorrow and introduce everyone there to your product.

Last week, I talked to a VC, who's invested in a pretty popular open-source startup. They have huge issues converting oss users > paying businesses

Sure, it's a common problem with freemium. When freemium products fail, it's often for that reason. But there are also countless examples of freemium/open-core products succeeding.

That sounds like a business/value problem not necessarily an open source problem. People won't pay for something if the free /OSS version meets all of their needs. That's why an "open-core" business model works so well. Open core also allows you specifically target businesses with specific features.

What other problem would they have? A close-source companies biggest issue is converting non-paying to paying customers yeah?

"People looking for open-source solutions are not looking to spend money, it's usually the opposite."

I don't think that's true. In previous positions where I've had significant influence on budget spend I've still favored open source solutions because they make more sense from a risk point of view: should the vendor fail, the product has a solid chance of continuing to be useful.

It depends. I'd rather go with a venture-baked open-source solution rather than something made by one person in his free time

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here except some people/companies have different priorities -- and if that's the case then there's room for both VC backed startups and smaller open-source projects.

I used to believe in the fancies of the communities I was apart of I thought they represented reality. Everyone talked up small iPhones, Linux on the Desktop, People paying/donating for FOSS, etc. But actually my community really just reflected a small sliver of reality. Even at that, more than a few folks were just talking about topics they wish were true, or they wish that they had done.

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