The problem with trying to sell developer tooling is that developers have no purchasing authority
Salesperson needs to spend $1,000? No big deal.
Finance needs to spend $100,000? No big deal.
Engineer wants to buy a $50 book? They need forms signed from their VP in triplicate.
Some of the most successful tech companies, like Salesforce, Slack and Tableau, have an entire strategy of AVOIDING the IT department and going straight to business units that make money.
That's how you can have a wildly successful product like Terraform or Redis, that literally millions of developers use, but doesn't make sense as a viable, profitable business.
There used to be this plan of making the product open source, and then hoping that once millions of developers adopted it, they'd pay you. This has a few problems:
Usually they just don't pay you.
Even if they do pay you, now you have consulting/support revenue, which has significantly lower margins than product (you have to pay someone to provide support). Also investors are allergic to consulting.
Someone else can just run away with the entire project and leave you with nothing.
@dfeldman your third point is basically Docker: I note how everything is containerized today but their attempts to make money were basically met by people switching to Podman, et al.
@acdha@dfeldman Yeah, I was sympathetic to their point of view and need to make some money, but also I will crawl over broken glass to avoid having to submit expense reports… 😉
But yeah, the idea that startups building on open source can defer the "how to make money" problem to 10 years into the future is likely a phenomenon of the past. Or at least until the next big tech boom where we'll have forgotten all the lessons from the last one.
@anderseknert@edmistond@dfeldman to be clear, I don't begrudge Docker making money – I just think they've captured a pretty small fraction of the value from transforming how people develop and deploy apps. If those estimates are good that's probably still missing 2 orders of magnitude for the value to the industry.
@acdha@edmistond@dfeldman sure! And I doubt even a percentage of the value Linux has brought the industry is captured by any commercial actor… and so on. It’s what it is.
@anderseknert@edmistond@dfeldman oh, sure, but Linux wasn’t controlled by one company. I want Docker to be stable making payroll, etc., nowhere near the prospect of something like PE acquisition and extraction.
@dfeldman I don't know enough about Redis to comment, but Hashicorp certainly had an opportunity to build a profitable business around Terraform. They just didn't seem to get that even with millions of developers around, your product still has to be good. Their competitors OTOH absolutely did get that, and built better products using a fraction of the resources (and recognition) Hashi had.
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