We have no moat, and neither does open source

scottgoci.com

6 pointseggbrain7 comments

I've never associated open source with attempts at moat making, it's like, counter ethos. Moats are a business mindset, which this author and project comes with.

An enterprise gets license scanning as a feature within a larger product, several examples already exist

This is fair -- my title was a play on Google's "We have no moat, and neither does Open AI" (see: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat...), but moat gets a bit muddied when we are talking about open source.

In this sense, I applied the "moat" more to mean "best at what it does / what the library tries to accomplish".

I'm familar with the piece and use it myself to argue why we should not be so fast to sovereign wealth these companies facing commodification, and transferring the financial risks onto the public, like Too Big To Fail, the Ai edition

There have been plenty of open source projects that view themselves as natural monopolies and treat the existence of alternatives as something akin to high treason. They never admit this of course.

Are those open core SaaS or is there a truly open source project I am not thinking of?

This mindset goes all the way back to GNU being mad about Linux.

ah yes, that pre-dates my programming life

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