2 months ago
- In typical business relationships, paid customers are prioritized over free users, but open core reverses this by offering 'longevity' to free users while leaving paying customers with abandonware.
- Under open core, free users can fork and maintain the core if the project is abandoned, but customers cannot legally modify proprietary bits after subscription ends.
- Promises by open core projects to open source proprietary bits are not codified in the license, making them unreliable for customers.
- The author relicensed from ELv2 to FCL (a fair source license) to fix the 'longevity' issue, ensuring both customers and users have a fail-safe via DOSP (Deferred Open Source Publication).
- Fair source (fair core) guarantees that after 2 years of abandonment or a bad direction, both core and proprietary bits become fully open source, providing longevity for customers.
- From a customer's perspective, the choice is between longevity (fair source) and abandonware (open core).