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The reason why we chose Feathersjs is because of its lightweight, amazing elegance ...and awesome management of the founder. He is enormously responsive and knowledgeable. Of the 100 or so open-source frameworks and libs I used in my life, he stands out. If possible, I would be grateful if this could stay the same... Splitting the code in open-source/commercial is recipe for disaster. And paid support = non-support if not paid for leads to nowhere in my opinion. Too quickly questions remain dangling because they should have been asked to pay, and so on... If commercialization needs to be, and continuity might require it one day, I rather see it in the form of some commercial hosting /SAAS of added value that is outside the scope of the core as well as the add-ons. For example, a recent discussion about 2FA could develop into commercial service. Optionally some MongoDB backend hosting could be beneficial, etc.. If done properly by the founders, this would surely be taken on and I see an enormous bright future for Feathers))). |
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i did not mean a closed source sort of commercialization , only the support part , if you have noticed recently feathers has a discussion part where non bugs are re-routed there , the Qs can range from novice to master in complexity, the contributors might rely on the community to answer most of them , it is a fact that not all get answered perfectly or not at all |
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Ok, I'm going to add my quick thoughts on sustainability here after all 😄 Here is the thing that has become fairly clear (but non-open-source developers might not be aware of as much): Open Source as it is right now is not sustainable. There is of course much more to say about this but you just have to look around to see that the space is basically being monopolized by:
@tvld I agree hosting would be a good option. Interesting that you mention using MongoDB because it is one of the open source projects that did in fact commercialize their license with their standard license not allowing other hosting services to use it. They were (rightfully so) afraid that Amazon just comes around, turns it into a service and crushes them. My questions here are: When isn't the question of having to pay dangling around? There is always some kind of cost to using open source, no? And why is the question of paying for things such a bad thing? |
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In general, I think that "paying for things" is in principle a good thing. It can increase the chance of continuity and level of QoS. It also would provide a well-deserved reward for the core staff who invested so many free hours/years...
And there we might have found the best opportunity for scalable money-making. Because suddenly the database should not be offline anymore, 2FA is required, load balancing, and so on. Basically, the moment any project is a hit, the backend framework becomes the heart, lifeblood and the whole company might depend on it to work reliable, fast, and safe. And there is the money ! |
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This is a very relevant discussion which I also have some more news to share with soon. I also was about to write a long post about open source sustainability (or lack thereof) but then decided that it is not really relevant here. As for the rate, if you are saying 150 - 200 USD/hr is too much then I don't think there is much more discuss. It's a pretty standard consulting rate for North America and given that everybody is already using thousands of hours of my work and experience for free probably on the low end. I can definitely say that people I helped in an hour said it saved them at least a day or more of their own time. I am also quite certain you won't get real quality support for less with any the other platforms you mentioned. |
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@daffl I have great admiration for the high level of responsiveness you give on all the forums and so on. It makes you stand out. By commercialization of support questions, I fear you might lose this openness, free-thinking, and direct community interaction, but I migth be wrong. Are you sure you really want to deviate from the strategic development dreams and freedom of choice that brought you here in the first place? You might risk trading your freedom for triviality... |
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... 2. All in all, from a strategic point of view as SAAS is infinitely scalable, I think the core team should get their reward and return of investment by scale. And let's face it, scalability is not supported in tiers of service per hour. We know that Feathers users will need professionalization as soon as they hit some kind of homerun, on their own or for a big-pocket client. And there lies the opportunity, I think So, my suggestion, for what it is worth: keep all the same as is. Keep your freedom, throw in your support here and there. Learn, play... But then additionally offer a strong and scalable commercial basis for all the viable projects that blossom from the community. Maybe we could think of services such as:
I do not mention simple database hosting and stuff. I would not offer things in paid plan that simple starters will do themselves for free, such as with a simple Docker run. Let others do that 'boring' stuff. You stand out so make sure also the new people will recognize you as such...; The answer is forward, not backwards... well these are my two cents in this discussion... ;-))) |
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@tvld I'm not sure if going on the Saas route is really what users need, at least the big ones. |
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This is a good discussion, I appreciate everybody's thoughts. I think both avenues have advantages and disadvantages. I've been doing paid support and consulting for a while now and would like to try and grow it a bit more. It is something companies often explicitly ask for, because things often can't be shared in a public forum, to have a more direct line of communication or to get training specifically for their teams and use cases. It is also a great way to get insights into common problems and makes for a positive feedback loop where many improvements have been included that way in the open source stack over the years. SaaS is interesting because it would incentivize working on things that would just be too complex to handle as an open source project. Authentication is a great example, where the sale of Auth0 for 6.5 billion (!) dollars gives rough idea of the size and complexity of the problem space. I also don't believe that K8s is the end of technology and a solution for everything and even less so what's being sold to us as "serverless" which is basically just complex proprietary (hosted) technology stacks. All of those are to more than 95% dominated by three platforms - AWS, Google Cloud and Azure which also happen to be owned by the three most valuable companies in the world. Whenever there is such a massive monopolization there is always an opportunity to do something different and maybe even better ("The Master Switch" by Tim Wu an interesting read related to that). I think instead of throwing the towel because you can never compete, it's worth looking at their blind spots. Personally where I see opportunity here would be:
Either way, this will definitely be an interesting year because some ideas are cooking 🍵 Worst case, none of those things work out and it's time for me to move on to opening a pretzel bakery and beer garden on one of the gulf islands here on the west coast 🥨 🍻 |
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My Friend, you can never have a free thinking if your mind is busy trying to secure your family where ever you might settle OECD or not , life is tough and it is getting tougher and tougher, unless some one get Shell to dig an oil well in his backyard with a guaranteed paycheck every month |
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i would like to share samples of some commercially supported platforms to help grasp a feeling of what is happening in this market from other tech stacks there is also https://abp.io/ open source with commercial license https://commercial.abp.io/pricing , not a good SLA in my opinion and they are pricier but it can give a good feel of what the commercially supported platforms are doing i saw a node based framework with this type of support scheme but i forgot which one it was this is cuba platform https://www.haulmont.com/services/cuba-platform-services/support/ i may also urge to construct an official training or boarding service on-demand /1-to-1 , i saw coding garden but they were introductory oriented a well thought startup whether bootstrapped or financed know for sure that you have to spend money to make money, unless they are super JS gurus who can stand up on their own. |
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it seems the contributors are busy building , i would like to suggest commercializing Feathersjs for better adoption by organizations in a form of a yearly subscription like Telerik, Syncfusion, Devexpres,... the yearly subscription is affordable to most Startups, and small businesses , yet it offers a great gate for support where all Questions and support requests get answered
asking for help in an hourly bases for USD 100-200 /hour is affordable to bigger enterprises i am not one of those
the sponsorship scheme outcome of 1 -2 hours per month of support is not worth it
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