>Although very very few companies used our open-source version to avoid paying us, we did see it cause a lot of annoyance for devs who were asked by their management to try cloning our product or to research our codebase to give their procurement team ammunition to negotiate down our price. This honestly was just a waste of everyone's time.
Trying to spin that it was "for the devs" is really stretching the bounds of incredulity. We get it, its fine, you have investors to answer to, but come on don't pee on our shoes and tell us its raining.
Actually this one I get completely. There’s plenty of places or managers with dev orgs that will check if they can install something complex in house with open source. Nothing wrong with it. But it’s usually a huge waste of time.
Is it? I think at this point my company has probably saved millions of dollars by not paying for subscriptions, but hosting everything in-house. The price point of a lot of these services makes perfect sense when you are small, but paying 1M/year in subscription fees when you can host the same thing for 10k/year is just bonkers. I appreciate that someone has to pay for it for them to continue making the product, but there’s a point where it makes more sense for me to spend a year setting it up (and really only costs two weeks).
Well that obviously doesn’t apply to Sourcegraph because their self-host offering requires paying a subscription. You can’t use any form of Sourcegraph on private code, (at least not without all the important features being nobbled) without paying a subscription. So there’s no saving to be made from self-hosting sourcegraph
> So there’s no saving to be made from self-hosting sourcegraph
That may have been true in the time before LLMs, but I'd argue that any sourcecode exfiltration nowadays runs the very real risk of "oh, sure, we won't use your code for training our model ... wink, wink"
There's enough open source code available that the hassle of other code probably isn't worth it. LLMs aren't insightful enough to benefit from any differences you'd see between open and closed source code corpii.
That math only works out nearly that cleanly if you avoid pricing out the engineer time for it.
If you’re paying $1M/year in fees, I would be shocked if you don’t have a whole team to support the open source version. Oncall, system upgrades, the usual stream of tickets about things not working right and people wanting to integrate, etc.
I do believe it can be cheaper to self-host, but I really doubt the difference in cost is 2 orders of magnitude. I’d be surprised if it was a single order of magnitude. I would wager it’s less than the sellers profit margins because of economies of scale; I would guess in the range of 10%-20%.
My experience was with things like openstack and kubernetes. The org decided to do “cloud” in house first with openstack and then kubernetes - and run critical services on them that had very strict performance SLA.
The amount of time needed to do the whole thing wasn’t worth it. Sure I enjoyed tinkering with the kernel and drivers and k8s. Also diving into known cgroups and namespaces worked etc. However, from a time to market/stability perspective the solution was nowhere comparable to what public cloud providers offer.
Yeah - the subscription costs more.
My experience has been that when things get big and hiring gets tense in house solutions just add stress on the devs maintaining it. At least with public cloud services - it’s clearer - if the budget doesn’t exist don’t run it.
I will add that I don’t use sourcegraph nor am I connected with them in anyway. So I’m not batting for their go private strategy. Just commenting on this one point.
Why? Getting operational experience with the product that you might then pay a lot for seems very important. Especially if you end up liking the product/service but not the pricing changes that might then happen, so doing some exploratory fact finding for a backup plan doesn't seem to be waste of time.
For example when we used Jira on-prem and it was snappy and we were happy ... and it was a rather important point of difference compared to the slow shitocumulus version.
Also, when people are using GitHub issues to ask questions the problem is usually a lack of clear documentation. (And if spending time to link FAQ answers to potential customers is a waste of time ... then maybe it's not surprising that Sourcegraph CEO is doing damage control on HN instead of focusing on focusing or whatever.)
This seems weirdly hostile. He laid out a bunch of points but you’re grabbing on to this one to make it seem like he’s using classic corporate-speak. Do you find it so unrealistic that the CEO of Sourcegraph has heard from devs that their managers asked them to try to clone or investigate the product before buying? That seems pretty likely
It's both hostile and, worse, boring. I know it sucks to be intrinsically less interesting than someone you disagree with passionately, but it is the case here that the CEO of the company explaining their policy shift is much more interesting than your rebuttals, which seem superficial and rote by comparison.
Someday somebody is going to be intrinsically more interesting about, like, supporting DNSSEC than me (maybe Geoff Huston will sign on and start commenting), and I'm going to want to claw my eyes out. I have empathy for where you're coming from. But can you please stop trying to shout this person down?
If we ignore the final sentence of his reason, then you might have a point. But given his reason ends with:
> This honestly was just a waste of everyone's time.
Makes it pretty clear that the benefits to Sourcegraph (I.e. not wasting time negotiating with companies acting in bad faith), was a large part of this rationale.
Besides, if you had ever tried using the OSS version of Sourcegraph, you would realise that OSS Sourcegraph is a shadow of its enterprise version. Trust me, Sourcegraph didn’t loose any sales to people running OSS Sourcegraph, and anyone who’s willing to rip out the licensing system, so they can use the enterprise features without paying, obviously isn’t going to become a paying customer either.
He took the time to write out a detailed explanation of why they made a decision they did. Giving us more transparency than 99% of CEOs or companies. There is a whiff of spin there, but come on compare it to every other product decision ever made and we're getting so much more transparency.
Behavior like this means the next time a CEO will be marginally less motivated to do this. You're shitting in the commons.
Yeah while I'm sure the developers that were asked to just grab the code and make it work wasn't their favorite job, I think the bigger one is further down - Github developers being tasked with reverse-engineering an open source product to create a closed source clone.
I would've respected GH more if they just used Sourcegraph and instead spent those developers on improving the open source product itself. But, I suspect that Github / Microsoft would then need a locked down license that e.g. Sourcegraph would forever remain open source, or that GH gets free licenses if they ever went closed source, or whatever.
>Yeah while I'm sure the developers that were asked to just grab the code and make it work wasn't their favorite job, I think the bigger one is further down - Github developers being tasked with reverse-engineering an open source product to create a closed source clone.
They don't want Github to clone their product. They weren't doing it for the Github devs.
Trying to spin that it was "for the devs" is really stretching the bounds of incredulity. We get it, its fine, you have investors to answer to, but come on don't pee on our shoes and tell us its raining.