Business makes better open source
Preamble: I worked at Discourse for 4 years, ultimately as VP of Community. I left amicably earlier this year. If you want to work with a great open source business, Discourse is an excellent choice.
In the meta-community for the Discourse forum platform it’s not uncommon to have “Discourse vs X” discussions. When a comparison is being made to another commercialized application there might be some points scored on either side. But when Discourse is compared to an alternative open source project that does not have a business built up around it, the comparison becomes very one-sided in favor of Discourse, no matter how slick the challenger may be.
After having replied to several such requests for comparisons, I eventually came up with a catch-all response. This was originally written two years ago as a forum reply. I’m re-posting it here along with some edits for more general applicability.
My answer to Discourse vs X (i.e. any good hobbyist open source competitor) is always this:
X is a beautifully designed piece of software. X and Discourse have taken many design inspirations from one another so they function very similarly. The biggest difference between the two projects isn’t the code or the features, but rather how each project is run.
* Discourse has more than 10x-20x as many developers as X, plus a whole support crew. X has two core developers, and neither of them are working on X full-time.
* Discourse has a growing ecosystem of specialized contractors who can take on jobs like installing, maintenance, theming, plugin development and more.
* Discourse has been v1.x stable for many years now. As of this writing, X has yet to go out of Beta.
* Discourse has a steady release cadence. Release management is a costly and highly underappreciated job that is very hard to commit to in perpetuity. But with just a single paying customer, release management becomes a given and everyone benefits.
* Thanks to big customers and a HackerOne page funded by Discourse.org, Discourse constantly undergoes first-rate security reviews.
* Although X did attempt to offer premium hosting for a while, they backed out of it. I don’t know the specifics, but I’m guessing they learned it’s really hard. In fact, it’s straight up impossible unless you build a company around it. A team of hobbyists can not run a reliable hosting service.
What I’m getting at is that there’s more to an open source project than the product. Discourse has built a sustainable business around its open source core. It’d take a cataclysmic event to bring us to a halt at this point. With X on the other hand, if just one of the two core developers has to take an extended leave because of switching jobs / moving / relationship / burnout / what-have-you, the project takes a massive hit.
Business application isn’t just a major feature for an open source project, it’s such a key differentiator that any open source project without it ends up in a wholly different category, namely the hobbyist category. For smaller libraries it’s less of an issue, but here too there’s a growing demand for projects that can sell a modicum of assurances, as evidenced by the rise of Tidelift.
Savvy companies looking for open source software to use don’t care about product features beyond the essentials. What they’re really on the lookout for is a project with long-term stability. In the words of Jessica Schilling (User experience lead at Protocol Labs) in talking about how they evaluated different open source documentation platforms:
Sustainability was table stakes in our evaluation
In closing, I’ll speak with my open source curator’s hat on:
I don’t need you to have a business up and running to be up for consideration, but if you have concrete plans for the future, please talk about them front and center. And if those plans revolve around “this is how I intend to get myself and my collaborators paid”, that’ll put you in the running for commercial users that can very directly help that plan come to fruition.
So where can you learn how to plan for sustainability? Up until the last year or so I wouldn’t have known where to point, but nowadays there’s a handful of outstanding resources out there, all of which ought to become mainstream in the larger open source discussion.
- https://indieopensource.com/
- https://sfosc.org/
- https://coss.media/
- https://blog.opentechstrategies.com/category/open-source-at-large/
Happy reading! I love chatting about business and sustainability in open source so feel free to reach out to me: contact@erlend.sh
