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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

> some subtle missing documentation or some subtle bugs or some subtle missing important features

Unless you're implying that Supabase are for some reason deliberately releasing separate defective software to the open source community... to... convince users that using their commercial services is a good reliable option??? I can't really figure out how or why any business would go to the effort of doing this. It seems patently easier to be a legit open source company.

Assuming you're not implying the above & I've just misinterpreted... everything else in your comment paints Supabase in an eminently positive light.

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They might not release a separate version for OSS, but I've seen this pattern in some "OSS" companies. They allow the OSS version to lag behind in terms on bug fixes and security updates. Some things are hard to achieve without paid support. These days it's not unbelievable that they are doing it on purpose. After all, we've seen some vocal OSS companies go proprietary after gaining some traction. The lesson is that you absolutely cannot trust corporations to uphold OSS ethos once they get a reasonable amount of traction.

> The lesson is that you absolutely cannot trust corporations to uphold OSS ethos

I'm absolutely with you here but I think this is a matter of least worst situations: I still think an OSS corporation trumps a non-OSS corporation regardless.

> These days it's not unbelievable that they are doing it on purpose.

I think there's a bit of a leap between a company - at a management level - deciding to "go open-source" for mainly marketing/branding/image reasons & that same company actively endeavoring to make their open-source product deliberately worse.

It's still likely (& common) that profit incentive will lead to paid plans receiving more investment & QA than open-source offerings. But again, this is a least worst outcome imo. A semi-abandoned corporate OSS project isn't very different from a semi-abandoned personal individual OSS project - maybe even better as there will typically be less social reluctance to build a community fork.

Thought experiment: You sell a hosted solution and also release your software as open source.

Daily, you are bombarded with decisions for how to allocate resources. In each of those, do you lean towards the option that makes it easier to self host rather than spending those resources on other things?

This is exactly my point.

There are systemic reasons for these systems to be underresourced - there's absolutely no need for theories about deliberately crippling OSS offerings.

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