Open source commitment? #3099
artfulrobot
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Slightly concerning that this has not had a response. |
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Verified alternatives, anyone?! |
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I've been a vocal supporter of Plausible since I found out about it 18 months ago or so because I believe in open source, privacy first software, and owning your data. I've recently implemented a self-hosted site for a client who can't afford your hosted fees - fair enough lots of businesses can, but my clients often operate on a shoestring. It took a lot of persuasion to get them to leave GA and I was pleased to have finally convinced them.
But since then a few things have been making me question the commitment to open source / business model. I'd love to be proved wrong, which is why I'm asking about it here.
Fair enough, I understand there must be some work required in doing releases for the self hosted version. Though other projects use the opposite model of let the community battle test this for us before we roll it out ourselves! It seems you're doing yourselves out of free, diverse testing?
On https://plausible.io/open-source-website-analytics#what-is-open-source-web-analytics you say (emphasis mine):
So it's not exactly the same product?
You don't provide any way (as I understand?) for people to download their data from your SAAS product. Stats are only any use when they're consistent over long periods. So this represents a significant degree of vendor lockin; keep the SAAS product subscription up or lose all your stats. This is exactly the sort of thing that I warn about and normally use as a selling point for open source vs proprietary products.
I'm not very good at interpreting these figures, but it seems to me that the development is 80% by user hq1, and github lists 100 contributors ever. I know you're a small team, but comparing the shape of the pulse graph and the contributor counts to other FLOSS projects (e.g. Matamo: 337 contributors; Umami: a younger product has nearly double: 191) it stands out. Perhaps it's because of the less-than-common tech stack in use.
Fathom began life as an open source analytics product, too. They gathered interest and customers. Then they ditched the open source version and went proprietary. The cheery chappies laugh their way through explaining why in a podcast but it seemed to me that this was always going to happen because they saw open source as something they were "giving away for free", rather than a core part of building a good product together with others. It seems they couldn't sell their own product as a SAAS because other people could sell it better than they could (someone self hosting is inevitably "selling" it- someone's paying to maintain and host it).
I'm an open source developer myself, I understand the funding challenges, and of course there are many different models. Unlike many other OSS projects I probably can't contribute in development here due to not being familiar with the languages; but I can be a promoter of it, can discuss and perhaps test new features and improvements.
I'd love to hear more about Plausible's model and plans as currently I'm spooked and back to looking at alternatives.
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