People keep pointing fingers at large cloud vendors as being the root of the problem here, and I hard disagree. I’ve been on both sides of this for more than a decade and helped run a large marketplace full of devtool SaaS products. Here’s my non-exhaustive list of problems that got us to this point:

- Developers as a target market being exceptionally hard to market/sell to and incredibly price sensitive. You have to give away huge amounts of value upfront and hope you can make up the difference later.

- Layer in, depending on your perspective, some healthy concern about needing to have ownership of the core parts of your stack or cynicism about trusting a third-party with your things.

- free + source available becomes the conventional wisdom about how to overcome these issues and reach your audience. I’m the process this also gets conflated with “OSS” because we didn’t know better/that was the precedent.

- a whole generation of people are encouraged to default to an incredibly permissive OSS for all their projects. It’s actually super cool and a lot of novel ideas emerge as a result.

- some of these become wildly popular. The inventors/maintainers think they should probably build a business around this.

- They go raise a VC round on the back of their OSS success. Now there’s a lot of pressure to generate VC outcomes.

- They start by selling consulting/enterprise support/etc because RedHat was the role model for how to build a successful OSS business.

- they realise that is actually super hard and unlikely to actually drive the VC outcome they need.

- they pivot into a SaaS/cloud model instead. The growth and margin potential looks like it stacks up better given the outcomes they’re after.

- they eventually discover that simply running the software for you isn’t as lucrative as they thought. For a start, thinking you’re the best at running it purely because you invented it is pure hubris. That’s true at the start, but it doesn’t take much scale for the nuanced expertise of running one specific piece of software is overshadowed by the complexities of running and connecting thousands of anything.

- so… right at the point when you’re beginning to be weighed down by being a victim of your own success, is the same point where the various other vendors who are good at scale are getting pushed to address an opportunity. They’ve customers lining up saying “hey, we want to use X. But we don’t want to run it ourselves, but we want it inside our VPC. With all of the IAM and other controls we’ve come to expect with everything else”. And so the vendors respond.

- The creators change the license in a scramble to buy more time while they work out what’s actually wrong with their business model.

The problem is people trying to sell and OSS product. You’ve already given it away! The thing people pay for needs to be a _completely different_ but complementary product. If that product is “we’ll run software” then don’t be surprised if you find yourself competing with other companies who have more experience in running software (sidebar: I think Instaclustr is a fascinating example of what it would look like to actually lean into this. Don’t run just one piece of software well, carve out a niche at being the best of running any OSS data layer). Even RedHat had a different product: the support.

But the answer has always been that you need a paid enterprise product that has a _feature set_ that you haven’t already given away. Maybe you access that via a cloud service. Maybe it’s an in prem run it yourself thing. Maybe it’s actual humans putting their hands on the keys.