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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Opa is neat, but the two license options of AGPL or "talk to us for a price" basically ensure it will never achieve anything close to mainstream usage.

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Agreed. This 'but we wanna make millions with a dual license as that 0.000001% of open source products do' attitude is definitely the largest barrier for this. And it's incredibly short sighted; just open up (L)GPL and do services + support. All big companies WILL buy support as that's what they do. AGPL is crap and will stop your growth; you have an uphill battle already, so don't do stupid things like that.

  All big companies WILL buy support as that's what they do.

No they won't. MIT license lets them use the software for free. Why woukd anyone pay anything if it can be used freely?

Because big companies are marred by red tape and bureaucratic policies which require them to spend money on support rather than figuring it out themselves.

Most projects eventually encounter thorny issues. If your only recourse is to let someone smart go into a deep dive while everyone waits, a lot of bad things can happen. You might not even have anyone with the wits and drive to fix it, or you might get a terrible hack that becomes a maintenance black hole. Meanwhile, your schedule becomes a question mark, naysayers against the technology form cliques, etc.

Small teams of motivated people can make just about anything work. For everyone else, support makes project schedules more predictable and can avert certain painful scenarios.

Edit: the below isn't a very good answer to the issue; I will leave that anyway. But it boils down to that in order to divert responsibility in a big company, you have to show you did all you could and to do that all you could, you need to show you paid money to 'the head ninja'. This could be MS/Oracle/IBM: very safe. When using Open Source, you need to show as well that you did all you could when it fails (if it succeeds, the company wants to be in the news using open source to 'cut costs') and so you pay people who can support it (the original devs) large amounts of money to support you. TL;DR It's covering your ass.

Previous reply;

You haven't worked with big companies before then; they pay for support (and licenses if needed). It's how it works as it is a liability thing; if you pay for something it's better than free as free doesn't exist. And that's kind of true; for free open source you need highly skilled employees to maintain it while you can also buy support from the company who actually built it. TL;DR big companies buy your support if they use your open source.

I think the phrase says buy support. That's not the software, that's, "we need it to do XYZ and QPR, since you know how it works can you help us ?"

Vaadin is on apache license and still makes money on support.

https://vaadin.com/license

https://vaadin.com/pro

Eh, they don't need to just let everyone use it for free. I would say: put it under an open-source (LGPL, for example) license, but charge people for the downloads (including for updates). Nobody likes using software that never updates nowadays, so with low update-prices you could get reasonable amounts of revenue-per-user over time.

If I came across software that was LGPL but charged for downloads, I would very quickly google to find someone who provided updates for free. And if that free distribution channel didn't exist, I would create it.

Thanks for your comment. You raise insightful questions and we are aware that our current licensing must change. Expect to read about this soon!

Can you please tell me why you changed you syntax to JS-like syntax? The previous syntax was good enough, at least from my point of view.

I don't work on or speak for the Opa team, but I assume they adopted JS-like syntax for the same reason Dart did -- familiarity is important when it comes to language adoption.

Regardless of whether or not you think this is a good thing or whether programmers worry too much about superficial syntax issues, this is a practical issue you have to worry about if doing PL design for the real world.

Changing syntax for marketing reasons seems bad from my point of view, I like pythonish syntaxes, like in haml, CoffeScript etc. So changing to JS was a back step.

yeah really didn't like the switch to js

Opa reminds me of Curl, MIT's "Lisp with curly braces" programming language for web development. MIT spun out Curl as a company in 1998. Their business model was to charge customers per-byte served!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_%28programming_language%2...

Hope they do the same as meteor... They were dual license, one GPL, one commercial. But a lot of people rejected to use it. So they changed to MIT.

http://blog.lassus.se/2012/04/meteor-meets-nogpl.html

thanks for pointing out its AGPL.. i was going to mention it as an additional alternative in the switch from PHP to one of Java/Node.js/Python/Ruby.

but AGPL for a language is a deal breaker. i accept AGPL for an application, but not for our language (we will make sites for our clients that dont want their stuff open source, and we dont want to be back in license-hell)

on tip for opa: pick a license that is common for languages.

besides the license i think the language looks _very_ useful (more compile time checks, pretty syntax, same user created data types on both client and server).

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