Risks of sale solutions based on Open source for small projects

 

Challenges to push custom changes to main source code

Core developers mightn’t approve including your changes to main branch. They may have their own rules and vision of product development, or your changes may be not corresponding to the main project goals. So, you need to maintain your custom branch by yourself. Then your changes will not be included to upstream and when new version will be released it will not contain your patches. You will need to patch all new versions again.

Complexity of custom branch maintain

Since bug fixes and securities patches are made in upstream only, you will need regularly merge changes from main branch to custom. Main code developing will become incompatible with custom changes and create conflicts in a code which hard to resolve.

Totally separate from main code developing is too complicated. Core developers’ community could include large number of code contributors which may be much bigger than a local team. Also core development probably have significant funding from affiliated companies or venture funds.

Stay on old version fork without possibilities to actively develop due to lack of local resources will lead to that custom code become worthless while main project rapidly increase functionality.

Other risks:

1. License changes to prohibit some usage, e.g. SaaS

AWS pushes MongoDB compatible alternative as licences change - Link

“Selling a product which adds only an insubstantial value to the software – such as changing the product name, changing some API or function names, or just making the Commons Clause licensed product available via software as a service (SaaS), is restricted.”

“… selling a product whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from their functionality is prohibited.”

“… if what you sell is basically the functionality of the module packaged as a cloud service or on-premise software, Commons Clause does not allow it.”

MongoDB now released under the Server Side Public License - Link

“… one new section that sets out an explicit condition for offering the licensed software as a service”

Redis Licensing Overview - Redis Source Available License (RSAL) - Link

“The only restriction is that the application cannot be a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine or an ML/DL/AI serving engine.”

2. Company was sold and source code closed

Apple Acquires Durable Database Company FoundationDB - Link

“A notice on the FoundationDB site notes that it’s no longer offering downloads of its database software.”

3. GooglePlay/AppStore bans mobile application for download

Google Play bans open source Matrix client Element, citing “abusive content” [Updated] - Link

4. Development is frozen, security patches not applied

5. Code deleted or broken by developers

How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript - Link

“Code pulled from NPM – which everyone was using”

Open source developer corrupts widely-used libraries, affecting tons of projects - Link

“He pushed corrupt updates that trigger an infinite loop”