this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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That's not a terrible idea as long as it's significantly cheaper than the closed alternatives. I think the biggest issue would be that orgs that pay would expect a certain level of service that a community project might not be able to deliver on.
Most of the small to mid size companies that I have worked for would choose a larger more established system that costs more even if it offers less over a self-hosted one that they had to pay some sort of fee for.
Is like this weird idea in the business world that if you're using Foss systems that it must be completely free, and that the reason why you are using it is because you are broke or cheap.
That's kind of what I was getting at. Medium to large organizations usually require a certain level of reliability that closed software companies usually guarantee with dedicated support staff and SLAs. An open source project developed by the community with no dedicated support is risky from that perspective.
If someone with the technical know-how and ability to maintain those systems offered support (red hat for example) for a lower price, many small and medium sized companies would get on board. That could also just look like a company hiring a small team to implement and maintain their own systems while contributing back to the community project.
It's just a much harder sell to non-technical leaders. They just want uptime guarantees and fixed costs.
My guess is that if you're going to start a MSP you can do that with Foss and probably have a lot of success as long as you've got the sales chops to get the contracts.
Then you can funnel some of your customers money to foss well also increasing awareness and adoption of the better free and open source software programs
some foss projects actually do this and have support staff!
i think libreoffice did this in the past. so does proxmox.