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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

Can I just say I was shocked to see a "Pricing" page on something called "openX." Then, on the pricing page, there was no price... so, now I'm just confused. I'm also trying to understand what this 15k functions post is all about, since you'd need an enterprise license to use that many. Whatever that means.

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Open core and support packages are very established business models.

The OP has also hacked away on OpenFaas in the open for years, giving us a portable alternative to lambda. That seems to have a pretty big value prop considering how lambda ends up being fairly expensive at scale.

Though I don’t know their motivation for hiding pricing, I suspect every enterprise level deployment (for instance into an ISP) is pretty bespoke.

I had a bad experience with the project's authors pricing (not openfaas), lost respect for Alex after that.

What do you mean? What type of issues ?

scam like, over priced, under delivered, seriously

> Open core and support packages are very established business models.

and “bespoke” pricing for such models is also pretty common. doesn’t mean we have to like it.

> That seems to have a pretty big value prop considering how lambda ends up being fairly expensive at scale.

Portable is valuable, yes, but at what price ? Does anyone know what the price is ? If it’s customer-specific it’s impossible to say that this proposition is generally competitive with lambda.

Open core / commercially support products need to have published pricing for at least a standardised offering IMHO. If I need to get on a call with a salesperson to find that out (so I can do the back-of-the-envelope calculation that says whether or not this thing will cost in) it isn’t happening…

> The OP has also hacked away on OpenFaas in the open for years, giving us a portable alternative to lambda. That seems to have a pretty big value prop considering how lambda ends up being fairly expensive at scale.

A free, MIT license is limited to 30 functions. That's enough to basically play with it, but you probably can't do anything serious. That leaves purchasing a license mandatory, but if you're pre-revenue, boot-strapping a business, that is impractical, if not impossible. Thus you pretty much have to go the vendor-locked-in lambda way; even if you already have the hardware (and expertise) to run this thing.

It is worth noting that azure functions can be run self-hosted, entirely for free.

> A free, MIT license is limited to 30 functions.

I don't understand: if they used MIT license, what's to stop me from increasing this purely arbitrary limit?

Do you really want to spend the money on legal fees to find out?

I'm not sure if you are serious of joking but the terms of MIT license are very clear. So unless they add a clause to it that the modification of this limit is forbidden (which would automatically make it a OSI-non compatible license), anybody can do what they like with it and redistribute the result as long as you abide by the terms of the license which are actually very simple.

Personally I've never had a use case for OpenFaaS but if I did, it would probably be one of the first things after installing.

You can dual license software. And you can even revoke a license per customer (otherwise SaaS wouldn’t work). They can say “you only get this license IF X” and if you don’t have X, you get that license. So, if you can somehow qualify for the MIT license and relicense it, you can then redistribute it to someone who does not qualify for the original license. However, if that entity is you or a company you work for, they could argue that you never should have gotten the MIT license in the first place and take you to court over it. Now, not only are you probably on the hook for fraud, but also theft of copyrighted material with an “intent to distribute.”

So, yeah. It’d be an interesting case, but hopefully I can just eat popcorn on the sidelines. I don’t want to be the one fighting that battle.

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