Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source
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Some day, we can dream, SS will have created a standard model for how to manage systems. And open source competitors will follow. And maybe SS will get open sourced after it has managed to get enough monetization to keep the ball rolling. But it can't boot strap that way. Open sourcing it would literally be the same as shutting it down. Not that it isn't a great idea to have mentioned, and it's awesome that the idea is good enough that people have the passion to fight for that.
But from a purely business and economic perspective, it needs the monetization options that not closed source, but service only, brings to the table. Not unlike Amazon Cloud, which uses lots of open source but is itself closed source service-only as an offering. Without that, the core development just doesn't have any real chance, nor does the operational side of things. No one is going to invest what it takes to make and run a system of that nature, at this time, in an open setting or even in a software one. Too much investment with too much risk, the big fear being that anyone with VC money will take the source and run a large scale operations of it overnight leaving nothing for the software team because 100% of the monetization is in the operations, not in the software.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
@stacksofplates said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
I didn't state that GitHub is open or closed, I don't know. I just know it is MS and GitLab is not
I never said you stated anything about GitHub. You clearly said "Gitlab is open source software that you can download yourself, examine the code, contribute to, and you can also use their free, hosted service that runs the same code". This clearly shows you care about the fact that the service is also open source. And that's why you chose it over GitHub.
Right. But I don't see how it applies here. GitLab is very different software, in a very different market. If SS was available closed source and something almost identical as open source, and I was an end user, then that source licensing (and not being MS) would be really important.
But that's not the case. It doesn't exist in any form, let alone in two forms. Would GitHub have been able to create its market if it had used GitLab's model up front? Maybe, maybe not. But good chance on the "not". Most markets need a closed source product to open the market. Open source tends to follow (and then innovate because closed source vendors tend to stagnate.)
Your point is valid, in its context. But you have to look at it from "how would GitLab have financed developing the ecosystem if GitHub hadn't done that for them" back before GitHub existed?
Except there are competitors. There's hosted KACE, Atera is hosted, I'm sure if I looked for even a few minutes I could find a host more.
The market and type of software is a weak argument. It means nothing that it's a "different type of software." If anything I want the software that is managing my systems to be auditable (audit able?, idk) to ensure security.
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Counter Argument: If SS was open source, support contracts for companies wanting to run it on their own would be an option to monetize similar to what GitLab does.
So yes, it's not zero ability to monetize in a software mode. But it is minimal. SS is a large investment product and while it would also be quite complex for someone to run on their own, it would also require large scale support to support it as a software product rather than as a service. It would potentially make a little money there, but also require a ton of expensive support people to cover the needs. Extremely difficult to make profitable, even with tons of customers.
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@stacksofplates said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
Except there are competitors. There's hosted KACE, Atera is hosted, I'm sure if I looked for even a few minutes I could find a host more.
None of those are competitors that I'm aware of. They are great options for the OP, who is looking for RMM, which they are. But SS isn't really RMM, but in the Venn diagram, they have a lot of overlap. The SS idea is rather different from those. If it isn't really different, it's not all that valuable, IMHO. Not that they aren't valuable, I just mean that they already do traditional RMM well and SS wouldn't want to go after the traditional RMM market.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
@stacksofplates said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
Except there are competitors. There's hosted KACE, Atera is hosted, I'm sure if I looked for even a few minutes I could find a host more.
None of those are competitors that I'm aware of. They are great options for the OP, who is looking for RMM, which they are. But SS isn't really RMM, but in the Venn diagram, they have a lot of overlap. The SS idea is rather different from those. If it isn't really different, it's not all that valuable, IMHO. Not that they aren't valuable, I just mean that they already do traditional RMM well and SS wouldn't want to go after the traditional RMM market.
KACE does exactly what SS does. We used it at my last company as a Windows config management system. It gave us reports on software (even Linux systems) and allowed the Windows team to manage all of their systems. We didn't use it for the Linux stuff because we were using Ansible, but it also did Linux as well.
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I don't have any direct experience with Atera, but from what I've seen it's at least very similar.
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The idea behind SS, and I'll fork this thread in a few minutes, is completely to be ground breaking and disruptive. If (when) it gets the full steam ahead nod the only reason that it is being done at all is to do stuff that no one else is doing. It's not meant to improve on an existing model or product category. RMM is the easiest category to point to as being similar, so the comparison is easy to make. And I'll not argue that SS should eventually cover all RMM functionality, but intends to do so in a totally different way than, AFAIK, any RMM maker does it or plans to do it.
If we were making a competitor to any existing RMM, I'd 100% agree that open source is the way to do that. I'd also say that there is likely no real market for it and the project should not get the green light.
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@stacksofplates said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
KACE does exactly what SS does.
It's been a long time since I used KACE first hand. But looking at their site, either they are totally misrepresenting what they make (in a way that wouldn't make sense by underplaying what they can do) or I think the idea and goals of SS have been missed.
Most of the details of SS game plan were only divulged off camera at MangoCon 2. What makes it special has never been talked about publicly. Not that it's a huge secret, but it's not at a stage where we talk about it on ML because firms with deep pockets could use the design ideas to get market.
But from looking at KACE, they don't promote their product as being very similar to SS other than they overlap in "doing IT tasks" in the general sense.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
@stacksofplates said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
KACE does exactly what SS does.
It's been a long time since I used KACE first hand. But looking at their site, either they are totally misrepresenting what they make (in a way that wouldn't make sense by underplaying what they can do) or I think the idea and goals of SS have been missed.
Most of the details of SS game plan were only divulged off camera at MangoCon 2. What makes it special has never been talked about publicly. Not that it's a huge secret, but it's not at a stage where we talk about it on ML because firms with deep pockets could use the design ideas to get market.
But from looking at KACE, they don't promote their product as being very similar to SS other than they overlap in "doing IT tasks" in the general sense.
Well having used both, the initial SS and KACE they were very similar.
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@stacksofplates said in Looking for free RMM kind, or at least with H/W and S/W inventory software with agent.:
Well having used both, the initial SS
Well, that was a tech preview without any of the cool functionality in it yet. So I can totally see why it would give that impression. That was a framework being set up with some hopefully usable components to use for testing and demonstration.
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@scottalanmiller said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
It's been kicked around but adds a ton of complication to any monetization strategy.
You can't monetize something that doesn't exist!
Also, I thought the plans were to provide a SaaS? You don't need to sell the software if you monetize the service. What's the monetization strategy?
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@Obsolesce said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@scottalanmiller said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
It's been kicked around but adds a ton of complication to any monetization strategy.
You can't monetize something that doesn't exist!
Also, I thought the plans were to provide a SaaS? You don't need to sell the software if you monetize the service. What's the monetization strategy?
Yes this is how many open source projects are monetizing. They just offer a SaaS version of their product
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@Obsolesce said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@scottalanmiller said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
It's been kicked around but adds a ton of complication to any monetization strategy.
You can't monetize something that doesn't exist!
That is true as well. Open Source will dramatically reduce your development costs as you have interested parties actually contributing to project
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@IRJ said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@Obsolesce said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@scottalanmiller said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
It's been kicked around but adds a ton of complication to any monetization strategy.
You can't monetize something that doesn't exist!
Also, I thought the plans were to provide a SaaS? You don't need to sell the software if you monetize the service. What's the monetization strategy?
Yes this is how many open source projects are monetizing. They just offer a SaaS version of their product
Yeah look at things like OpenShift or Terraform Cloud. Especially Terraform Cloud, there isn't really a competitor for Terraform and the same with any of Hashicorp's tools.
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@IRJ said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@Obsolesce said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@scottalanmiller said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
It's been kicked around but adds a ton of complication to any monetization strategy.
You can't monetize something that doesn't exist!
That is true as well. Open Source will dramatically reduce your development costs as you have interested parties actually contributing to project
You could also do the open core model, which a lot of FOSS software does. Have the core functionality, maybe RMM specific stuff, be open source but all the "game changing" things be behind a pay wall.
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@coliver said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@IRJ said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@Obsolesce said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@scottalanmiller said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
It's been kicked around but adds a ton of complication to any monetization strategy.
You can't monetize something that doesn't exist!
That is true as well. Open Source will dramatically reduce your development costs as you have interested parties actually contributing to project
You could also do the open core model, which a lot of FOSS software does. Have the core functionality, maybe RMM specific stuff, be open source but all the "game changing" things be behind a pay wall.
Wazuh Cloud is a cool offering. It gives you a 30 day trial on their cloud so you get used to it.
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@Obsolesce said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
You can't monetize something that doesn't exist!
Obviously a pretty valid point.
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@Obsolesce said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
Also, I thought the plans were to provide a SaaS? You don't need to sell the software if you monetize the service. What's the monetization strategy?
SaaS monetization is the strategy. No need to sell software, hence my point in not making any "software" at all. It's purely a service.
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@IRJ said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@Obsolesce said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@scottalanmiller said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
It's been kicked around but adds a ton of complication to any monetization strategy.
You can't monetize something that doesn't exist!
That is true as well. Open Source will dramatically reduce your development costs as you have interested parties actually contributing to project
Open source will potentially do that, it could also make it higher. It's not as clear cut as that. The first struggle would be attracting open source developers interesting in contributing who produce more than they cost in additional communications and direction needed.
If there were an existing body of open source people clamouring to do this who wanted to get involved, we'd be having a very different discussion. But the assumption is that the interest, at least up front, is extremely small and would undermine the existing interest without generating anything new.
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@coliver said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@IRJ said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@Obsolesce said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
@scottalanmiller said in Should SodiumSuite Be Open Source:
It's been kicked around but adds a ton of complication to any monetization strategy.
You can't monetize something that doesn't exist!
That is true as well. Open Source will dramatically reduce your development costs as you have interested parties actually contributing to project
You could also do the open core model, which a lot of FOSS software does. Have the core functionality, maybe RMM specific stuff, be open source but all the "game changing" things be behind a pay wall.
If we can identify, and separate, those functionalities, this has the best potential to work. There are certainly "boilerplate" components that we need, but aren't game changing in any way. It still carries risk that opening it could garner no additional assistance while making internal development slower, though. But it has potential if there were good people looking to work on specific components.
