Disclaimer: My company basically has this model for AI. We work heavily with consulting companies and have a licensing structure relative to the number of cpu/gpu cores you use.
We have found this to be a great way to charge. There's a clear value prop for the customer when they see what they get (usually compliance features, security,..). Also for both sides, there's some basic reassurances: The company won't disappear because they make money, and the vendor has incentives to do what they say they do.
A more mainstream company I think HN knows more of that does this is gitlab.
I'm definitely not a "save the world" type founder. I run a for profit entity focused on commercializing technology that captures a large market opportunity.
Our product is open core for marketing, recruiting, and distribution purposes.
Because we're open source, I get to write books, run classes, and speak at technology conferences all over the world as way of doing sales and marketing. Turns out it works.
As a side benefit, we also get a small share of the market that use us in academic research.
As a comparison: The major cloud vendors all "run" and market open source frameworks in AI to get more people to spend money on their compute clouds (same reason they give away credits).
Widely used open source projects usually have commercial backing somewhere in the chain.
My biased opinion I would love to learn counter points about:
These utopian platforms can't work. They might be a great way to make a short term living.
It feels like there wouldn't be incentives for maintenance or support under this kind of model for individual developers. My biggest reason for this is the support volume.
Once you get to a certain scale, that "small repo developer" has a risk of getting overwhelmed. Pretty soon they hire someone. Then it's not about just code anymore. Granted, you can share the work among several contributors eventually, but at scale, this becomes fragile at some point.
This is a big reason why these things end up being companies.
We have found this to be a great way to charge. There's a clear value prop for the customer when they see what they get (usually compliance features, security,..). Also for both sides, there's some basic reassurances: The company won't disappear because they make money, and the vendor has incentives to do what they say they do.
A more mainstream company I think HN knows more of that does this is gitlab.
I'm definitely not a "save the world" type founder. I run a for profit entity focused on commercializing technology that captures a large market opportunity.
Our product is open core for marketing, recruiting, and distribution purposes.
Because we're open source, I get to write books, run classes, and speak at technology conferences all over the world as way of doing sales and marketing. Turns out it works.
As a side benefit, we also get a small share of the market that use us in academic research.
As a comparison: The major cloud vendors all "run" and market open source frameworks in AI to get more people to spend money on their compute clouds (same reason they give away credits).
Widely used open source projects usually have commercial backing somewhere in the chain.
My biased opinion I would love to learn counter points about: These utopian platforms can't work. They might be a great way to make a short term living. It feels like there wouldn't be incentives for maintenance or support under this kind of model for individual developers. My biggest reason for this is the support volume. Once you get to a certain scale, that "small repo developer" has a risk of getting overwhelmed. Pretty soon they hire someone. Then it's not about just code anymore. Granted, you can share the work among several contributors eventually, but at scale, this becomes fragile at some point.
This is a big reason why these things end up being companies.