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Rethinking Open Source Licenses: Empowering Startups with Omnistrate

The open-source community has long been driven by principles of collaboration and innovation. However, the evolution of cloud computing and the rise of SaaS have introduced new complexities in licensing and monetization. In the popular article on Fermyon's blog, the importance of rethinking open-source licenses to align with modern distribution models is highlighted. This is where Omnistrate steps in, transforming the way startups can leverage open-source software.

Why OSS Creators need to start with SaaS

Many OSS projects are supported by a crew of volunteers trying to solve a simple problem in the world around them. And most OSS projects don’t judge their true success with monetary metrics.

With that said, when an OSS project becomes a breakout success, if the OSS creators don’t bring a scalable commercial offer to market, someone else will.

At Omnistrate, we recognize the importance of balancing the principles of open source with the need for sustainability. We believe that creators should have the freedom to choose how they license their software while still being able to monetize their efforts. That's why we're introducing a new approach to bringing OSS Apps to the cloud.

Restoring the Promise of Open Source with Omnistrate

In the early days, open source software (OSS) thrived on principles of freedom, collaboration, and innovation. However, as the cloud era dawned, the landscape shifted. Some of the cloud providers began to monetize OSS without necessarily contributing back to its creators. This raised concerns among open source inventors who felt their work was being exploited for profit.

Understanding SaaS billing models

When you are offering Software as a Service there are multiple options available on how to charge customers for the usage of your service. A couple popular models are Subscription Based and Usage Based.

Startup challenges and how to improve your odds by 10x

Starting a business is tough, and it's no secret that many startups don't make it. Every founder faces big challenges like finding customers who love their product, making enough money to keep going, and convincing investors to believe in their vision.

Introducing Omnistrate Platform

As we contemplated building the SaaS platform, we divided the requirements into 5 packages. If you are building a SaaS from scratch, you will likely need all the layers.

We also understand that some of you may have already started but are actively looking to accelerate your SaaS journey and scale with your current team better. Hence, we have divided the platform into 5 packages to make it easy to integrate and enable/disable specific pieces:

What is SaaS Control Plane?

I was among the authors at AWS who pioneered the first SaaS control plane back in 2009, laying the groundwork for many SaaS offerings both within and beyond AWS. Crafting the SaaS control plane, we delved deep into fundamental questions:

Why we built Omnistrate?

We witness the proliferation of SaaS solutions daily — from AI applications like Private ChatGPT and infrastructure services like Snowflake, to content management systems such as WordPress, and HR management systems like Workday. The spectrum extends to customer support tools like Zendesk, customer engagement platforms like Salesforce, and collaboration solutions like Zoom, Slack, and Google Workspace. SaaS has become the prevailing distribution model in today’s software landscape and is poised to define the future of software delivery.

Where did the Cloud model go wrong?

In our last post, we talked about the emergence of the Cloud and we feel this is where the Cloud model went wrong.

As the Cloud grew, Cloud providers figured out a way to monetize open-source technologies by starting hosting them in the cloud. The challenge with this model is that open-source technology providers are left with all the hard work to build and maintain their projects but not with much benefits.

Emergence/Future of Open-source and Cloud

Before 2005, most of the technology was open source and enterprises were consuming open source to accomplish their business goals and the trend seems to continue to grow. Take the operating system as an example. The use and popularity of Linux have been growing day by day. Another good example is the database industry where MySQL and Postgres are rapidly growing over time as opposed to Oracle or Microsoft’s SQL Server.

The open-source trend was not surprising as proprietary technology leads to lock-ins and as these enterprises grow, their reliance on these foundational pieces continues to grow over time. This makes it really difficult and costly for these enterprises to switch to new technology, locking them into the closed-source technology and leaving them vulnerable to hefty prices or punitive charges as they scale. This drove many enterprises to come together and join hands to collectively build different open-source components.