In a similar way it’s possible to quibble over the definition of the word democracy.
If the ability of women to vote is considered essential for democracy, then the world’s oldest democracy is New Zealand and not the US.
But rather than going by dictated definitions, if we go by popular perceptions of the words, then Nalanda is a university and US became a democracy before New Zealand.
Nalanda was multi-subject and other than theology, they also taught medicine, mathematics, astronomy, meta physics, grammar, etc. That sounds like a university to me.
You can always try to create definitions to suit your preferred narrative. But Nalanda was multi-subject beyond teaching religion.
MIT license builds the trust to use it and contribute to it, or at least use it freely.
But that also enables someone to use your software as a starting point for their own competing SaaS solution.
Which is what encourages companies to at some point of time shift to a BSL license, as you might also at some point of time.
The goal is of course to build Enterprise features which are hard to replicate for others, but these imply more complex engineering challenges are being solved.
That could be plugins to integrate into other Enterprise tools like Snowflake or Salesforce for e.g.
Another interesting observation is that in next 4-5 years we could expect a robust open source MIT licensed stack for pretty much everything.
But it only feels like that, because we will start to have quantum computing and then all software will need to get rebuilt.
We saw some evidence that companies will prefer to work with the original developers for their own product's hosting, but I'll keep working on improving my understanding to the open source ecosystem. Very interesting thoughts.
When I evaluate software, I see having multiple vendors offering to support/host the software as a good thing. After selecting a piece of software I then begin to evaluate vendor offerings. The vendor being deeply involved in the project- such as being the original creator or otherwise being a major contributor, is a huge plus.
Having 100% of a small pie is often worse than having a good percent of a larger pie. Fostering a large Open Source ecosystem increases the size of the pie- even if you have to share some of it.
Of course, any business is a lot of work, whether your software is Open Source or proprietary. Open Source is a great strategy, but it doesn't guarantee success.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, we are seeing this pattern indeed. I agree that it doesn't guarantee success, we're inspired by open source apps that compete in being better software rather than only privileged as open source.
Cloudflare has non-transparent pricing, unlike AWS, which will charge you for every thing with detailed usage tracking.
When ever there is non-transparent pricing, it's scary to try and use an infrastructure related service.
The sales teams can't go around saying that you are not a profitable customer, and they can't argue with the marketing team to be more honest about pricing on the pricing page.
So, end result, let's bump of these small free loaders. Large enterprise deals is what gets us the bonus anyways.
I like fly.io pricing in that sense. And I am sure there might be others offering a more transparent pricing, otherwise like me still stuck on AWS.
My perspective looking at them and other options for a bandwidth-heavy, largely non-HTML load a couple years ago:
1) All but the top self-serve plan ($200 at the time) wasn't worth anything for a business past the "finding a market" stage. No SLA at all under that level (at least, at the time)
2) The $200 plan, though, is actually a hell of a bargain. You get a lot for it. If your load is almost all HTML/CSS/JS and some light-ish worker use. And (allegedly, see #5) your bandwidth use isn't crazy high.
3) They basically don't care about serving any need between the top self-serve plan and a ~$5,000-to-start Enterprise plan. If you don't fit in the top self-serve but are under that level...
4) Surprisingly, given their reputation at the lower levels of service, in the Enterprise tier, they weren't competitive on bandwidth. If the main thing you need to do is sling bits, you can do that quite a bit cheaper elsewhere. Overall, they seem to want customers who need lots of their services, not just any one component. If you don't need their various corporate VPN type products and a bunch of other stuff, they're a bad fit.
5) We were told by a competitor that OP's experience is common and is often perceived by customers (their perception, mind you) as a bait and switch (see also: that huge gap between self-service and enterprise, in which they offer no options). Now, the competitor has some self-interest there, but even the non-sales guys on the call instantly kinda smirked and shook their heads when I mentioned CloudFlare.
6) We were told incorrect things by CloudFlare's sales folks. If we'd followed their advice, we might be OP.
It seems like the $200/mo plan and below are subsidized by their marketing budget, and the various ToS terms are there to give them discretion over whether those users are worth it or not: either low-cost users who are using too many resources, or users who they think they can charge more.
I investigated Cloudflare and the $200/mo plan seemed to good to be true so I contacted sales who verified that yes, it was too good to be true and my usage of the $200/mo plan would violate their ToS. They initially quoted $5k/mo over the phone, and then came back with a formal quote with a number much higher than that.
My take is that Cloudflare's product is so good that they can get away with any kind of sales practices they want. It's like shooting fish in a barrel: just analyze customers on the $200/mo tier and find the ones that look like they could spend way more. It's not even wrong in concept: sales upselling is SOP, and the low-cost tiers provide a lot of value to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they're offering. But the combination of the two sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
AWS doesn't have transparent pricing either, but in a different way. Yes, you can use more and more bandwidth and know exactly what you'll get charged, but once you get to Cloudflare Enterprise levels of bandwidth the AWS sticker prices would be astronomical and everyone negotiates non-transparent lower rates.
This is the big issue. There is always tension in these “free” setups.
I get more worried when the giveaways / marketing is VC funded - they often end at some point or pressure inside to dial back etc.
“We have free egress to Oceania!” - no, you don’t. You are subsidizing that.
Given what aws charges and how they charge for almost everything- no reason to be any pressure to move me to another plan. AWS free tiers are relatively minuscule
Is it, though? I guess we must clarify an industry, of course. But if we're talking about software engineering - the balance had surely changed, but I don't think it had tipped over, and especially for a "much greater than" (">>") sign.
If supply would start to outweigh demand, salaries would naturally plummet down. As far as I've heard talking to friends (for personal reasons, I've been not exploring any opportunities, being busy with some other matters, so I haven't really kept an eye on this), last year they rose up.
