Community Edition

[thibaultleouay]

Description

Let's figure out what to include in our community edition 🔥

[tankerkiller125]

I'm going to be "that guy". If I'm hosting something myself, I should have full unfettered access to all the features of the software. I don't understand why so many open-source companies find this to be a hard or show stopping thing. And frankly restricting what the open-source version can do just to push sales of enterprise plans and what not is a really good way to piss people off.

The selling point of the hosted product is the wide range of ping locations, reliability, etc. as someone who does a lot of self-hosting both for personal and work reasons, this is frankly a product I would never self-host in a business, the risk is too high of it failing when we need it most to work (which is why I'm currently working to convince management to get a subscription).

I also want to note, your core product is already AGPL (side note, your packages need their package.json updated), if you restrict what's in a "Community" edition, to try to stop competitors or whatever from using your code, it's not really going to do much. They can always just fork your core product and then spend the time to re-implement all your paid hidden enterprise features without you, and maybe even just make it entirely open-source which would actually eclipse your project.

IMO, "Community Editions" that restrict features to people self-hosting is a lose - lose situation. The community loses features they might want to self-host for themselves, which in turn leads to a negative view/opinion of the company, which in turn leads to people looking for other solutions when it's time to find something for business/work. Because hey, those proprietary guys have always been proprietary, and while I might not like that too much, at least they aren't leaving a sour taste of "It's open-source!" when it's really not.

I firmly believe that open-source companies and even simple individual contributors should be allowed and even encouraged to make money from their work. But restricting features isn't the right way to do it IMO.

[kolaente]

I firmly believe that open-source companies and even simple individual contributors should be allowed and even encouraged to make money from their work. But restricting features isn't the right way to do it IMO.

What would be a good way to make money then, in your opinion? Restricting features for money is the most straightforward way to get people to pay for your software.

(not affiliated with openstatus, but I'm interested in this for my own things as well)

[thibaultleouay]

FYI this is how I see and try to define the community edition:

#322 (comment)

[tankerkiller125]

@thibaultleouay Thanks for the clarification, it looks much more promising than what I originally assumed.

@kolaente When it comes to software like this AGPL is already a strong protection against competitors reusing the code for their own profit. Simply existing with a hosted version is a strong way to make money specifically with this kind of application. A business doesn't want to deal with the liability of hosting a status page and said status page going down in the middle of a larger outage. The hosted version caters to those business needs.

A competitor to this project (who is also open-source) for example has their entire product, including all enterprise features, and services available for self-hosting (not the easiest to do, but still), and they make their money from hosting for businesses, and those who just don't want to host this kind of thing themselves.

Open Source projects that hide things behind paid features that are only available via cloud, or via special licensing for self-hosted versions leaves me never wanting to touch said projects, and actively wanting to avoid them. And I certainly don't bring them up as potential solutions at work.

[thibaultleouay]

@thibaultleouay Thanks for the clarification, it looks much more promising than what I originally assumed.

A competitor to this project (who is also open-source) for example has their entire product, including all enterprise features, and services available for self-hosting (not the easiest to do, but still), and they make their money from hosting for businesses, and those who just don't want to host this kind of thing themselves.

Who are you thinking of?

@tankerkiller125 this is the way we want to fund hosting OpenStatus for the company.

But providing a better community edition will also help us improve our core product with new ideas and bring new users to the platform.

[tankerkiller125]

I'm thinking of OneUptime (which is much more than just uptime monitoring and status pages to be clear, and is very heavy to host).

I can get behind the simple to host slightly watered down community edition that removes some limited features that make sense (such as the multi-status page thing as most people wouldn't need/want that for self-hosted, so long as multiple-projects is still an option IMO). I do think that if the community edition is basically "We stripped the SaaS payment portal, some minor features that don't make sense, and removed 3rd party dependencies" then it's a solid community edition.

My main complaint comes from projects that release a community edition, and then strip things like SSO, multi-project, etc. support. I know SSO doesn't seem like a big selfhosted thing, but if you check on r/selfhosted on reddit you'll find a ton of people running Authentik, KeyCloak, Zitadel, etc. for SSO (because SSO = Wife approval)

[Rodaviva29]

Hey @thibaultleouay, do we have any update on Community Version?

I thought I sent my list of things that should be included in Community Self-Hosted Edition, lol, but here it is:

• Monitors - Frequency (Configurable - Unlimited), Number of monitors (Unlimited), Data retention (Configurable - Unlimited), Synthetic API Checks (Unlimited), Status Pages (Unlimited - Maintenance status, Toggle numbers visibility, Subscribers, Custom domain, Password protection), Alerts (Slack, Discord, Email, Webhook, ntfy.sh, SMS), Collaboration (Team members - Unlimited and Audit log).

I think that's the essential, we as we talked don't need marketing website, and other stuff that is right now to self-host.

[thibaultleouay]

Hey @Rodaviva29

It's still a work in progress :) at the meantime we added some visualization to our vercel edge checker

https://www.openstatus.dev/blog/openstatus-light-viewer