There's an interesting trend of open source clones of popular products. Most recent one that comes to mind is Athens [0] which is an open source clone of Roam Research.
The business model is always that people who really want it for free can self host, and people who don't want to deal with the hassle will pay for hosting. Seems like a reasonable strategy to me.
Agree with your comment. What we've found is that most people don't actually want to self-host, even technical users who can. But they all want the optionality to self-host, which you don't have with most SaaS's like Notion or Roam. This is doubley important for "second brains", apps where you brain dump your closest thoughts.
As Balaji has said, given the choice, "you'd always pick open source over a comparable proprietary equivalent."
I work at a university, we are legally not allowed to host a lot of our data outside of our country. While I'd love to use tools like Airtable & Roam we can't. As those vendors aren't interested in hosting in a small backwater country like Australia </sarcasm> an open source alternative I can host myself is amazing.
But I'd gladly pay more to have someone else manage hosting...
> an interesting trend of open source clones of popular products
Well, it's a "trend" as old as dirt, really. The "Linux desktop" was, for years, little more than a series of clones of closed-source Windows apps. Arguably even the original GNU programs started as clones of existing Unix tools. It's unsurprising that this would later happen for web-based services too.
> The business model is always that people who really want it for free can self host, and people who don't want to deal with the hassle will pay for hosting.
Again, pretty old news - Wordpress is almost 20 years old at this point.
The problem of this setup, though, is that the commercial version will typically set the roadmap and priorities, while the open version will end up lagging.
I think it's a smart way to make money with open-source projects. Charge for hosting and premium add-ons. For me Gatsby comes to mind. The framework will always be free but they have a build, CI and hosting platform that makes it easy. And i don't mind paying money for.
The number of times where I would be HAPPY to work on a project for free to fix an issue or add a feature I want - I couldn't count.
Instead, it's always reaching out to support and "Thanks for your feature request - it's not currently on our road map, but I've added it to our list."
I've noticed this as well and I really think there's a market for a simple self-hosted cloud server. Many people aren't comfortable with managing a server and all the tech aspects that come with it. What I envision is a bring-your-own server solution that provides recommended specs (or buy from the company as a funding source) and similar to the app store you can download containerized app, let's say from docker, with 0 technical knowledge. Just a nice UI and all the functionality automated so the user doesn't have to do anything but click a button and maybe a settings page for really basic stuff. There can be an open library that just links to docker hub or whatever other platform as well as a curated library. It should all be encrypted and secure by default. It should all serve on localhost with an option screen to specify UI or hookup your own domain to access remotely. Again, UX is key here to abstract everything away from the user and make it stupid simple to use. From what I've seen, people would love to host their own services but either don't have the technical know-how or don't want to deal with managing their own server or AWS or whatever other droplet solution.
Google cloud marketplace allows you to launch all kinds of open source solutions with a click. This includes the setup for databases.
Though it's not a place that a non technical user would think to go, and I expect it's not really as simple as it promises. The devil is always in the details.
Sort of but not really. On thinking about it some more for the average user, you'd really want to sell a ready-to-go unit so they don't even have to deal with the initial computer setup and platform download/install because I know that's still way more than a lot of people would want to do or feel comfortable doing. They want something that they own, with good privacy, that just works, and is maintenance free.
I imagine this company selling a visually appealing unit similar to how xbox and playstation aim to be more of an elegant accent piece than a clunky electronic box. This way when the user gets the product they just open, plug it in, create an account and password, wait for it to initialize, and then you're good to go and can start immediately downloading apps. Then just download an accompanying app on your phone/desktop/computer and connect to your own personal cloud where you own all your software and data. Could even sell upgradeable units for a premium that have an easy access panel to just swap or plug in additional RAM or SSD modules.
Such a system would be considerably preferable over cloud for things like backup of your phone files and photos (bandwidth), direct sharing of voluminous files (bandwith, no need to wait for upload to complete), videoconferencing (latency)
Sounds a bit like what synology is offering. The only problem is maintenance of that. You now have millions of boxes that will fail randomly for various reasons (bug, bit flipping, hardware error). And now you have a furious user that can't restore from a broken backup and doesnt know how to repair (if even possible)...
Blow is a great programmer but his criticism makes no sense to me. "It's elitist and undemocratic that someone gets to decide whether they want to ship you code". what??
he was criticizing the idea of pull requests. You could spend a lot of time adding code and submit a pull request and the maintainer of the project gets to decide whether they want your code or not. If they don’t, then you just wasted all your time.
I think it's great that it's happening. Sure (for example) Baserow will never be as awesome as Airtable... but for users with extremely small use cases, hobbyists, or tiny startups - it works out. They aren't the niche Airtable wants and they can't afford it either.
There is also Obsidian, which does not compete with Roam Research directly on all features (but comes pretty close), but is locally hosted. Great option for those seeking privacy of their notes and thoughts.
The thing I love about Obsidian is it's just a directory of markdown files. Still totally useful if Obsidian disappeared tomorrow.
I also just setup a cron job to daily check for changes, and if there are git commit and git push and now I can access my notes from any device with a browser.
AWS is a few layers below that service. You can't tell AWS "give me a domain with baserow installed". Or at least not without going through the layers of describing how it's mapped to actual compute resources and how is deployed.
It requires a lot of work and very low level configuration to go beyond the infrastructure elements. Databases? - sure. Managed apps? - here's a book on vpcs, subnets, and eni attachments in AWS.
The business model is always that people who really want it for free can self host, and people who don't want to deal with the hassle will pay for hosting. Seems like a reasonable strategy to me.
[0] https://github.com/athensresearch/athens