VizHub is Open Source
Edit July 2021: This post describes https://github.com/datavis-tech/vizhub-legacy from 2019. The VizHub open core initiative was shelved for 2 years, then reinstantiated as a complete rewrite of VizHub in Juy 2021. The new open core codebase can be found here: https://github.com/vizhub-open-core/vizhub-open-core
(begin content from 2019)
100% Open Source. MIT Licensed. Check it out!
https://github.com/datavis-tech/vizhub
Give it a star!
The dream of VizHub is larger than I can realize as a solo coder. Having invested over 200 hours into its development, I feel like my time alone is not going to be enough for implementing all the features and directions I’d like to take the project. The mission of the VizHub project is to create, grow and sustain a successful platform and collaborative community to support learning, teaching, and practicing data visualization and creative coding on the Web. How can this be achieved?
VizHub was originally closed source, with plans to build it into a for-profit SaaS product with a similar business model to that of GitHub. I realized that in order to build the product properly, and give it the attention it deserves, I would need to onboard more developers to work on it. In order to onboard more developers, I would need to pay them. In order to pay them, I’d need to have the money!
Raising venture capital would be one way to get enough money to support more developers for VizHub. In order to get venture capital, I’d need to put together a pitch, present it to venture capitalists, and hope for their investment. All this would take time and money, and may fail. If it succeeds, I’d be in deep with these venture capitalists and beholden to wrath of “the board”. I’d probably need to uproot and move to San Francisco, rent office space, play CEO and burn out working 60 hour weeks under pressure to turn a profit so the company can one day be sold to the likes of Microsoft. At least, that’s what I imagine it would be like.
Why Open Source?
I’ve always been a huge fan of Open Source. I can clearly see the benefits of having a project be Open Source. There’s no barrier for use. When people do start using it, they build a dependency. When people are dependent on the project, they are more interested in improvements. People who depend on the project would probably be willing to contribute improvements to the code, which is only possible if the project is Open Source.
The Open Source case for Web Apps (as opposed to libraries) seems pretty strong to me as a strategy for onboarding more users. Why? Mainly because there’s no hesitation from the specter of vendor lock-in. Users and organizations can self-host the tool behind their firewall or on their own server without fear. As one person puts it (from Observable Forum: Business model and future plans?):
I just can’t get invested in another hosted service, no matter how cool (and — this is very cool) — and risk it disappearing once we’ve become dependent on it. I can host my own Jupyter stuff — but it doesn’t appear self-hosting is an option here, at least currently.
Then I began to wonder — can VizHub be Open Source and still be successful one day as a business?
Open Source Business Models
I started studying different business models around Open Source. As one case study, I looked at Discourse. Their business model is “the product is 100% Open Source and you can self-host, but you can pay us for hosting an instance for you”. Their code is GPL licensed. Great idea! I’m not sure this would be a great fit for VizHub though, because it’s not like people would want a separate public VizHub instances for various different projects. There should be only one central public VizHub instance, in which a community can flourish and the “network effect” can take hole (sort of like GitHub).
Then I started looking deeply at GitLab. Their business model is “open core”, which goes something like this: “The community edition of the product is 100% Open Source and you can self-host, but you can pay us for an enhanced closed source version (enterprise edition) to self-host, or you could pay to use our hosted enterprise edition instance with various paid tiers (traditional SaaS business model).” The GitLab community edition code is MIT licensed, which enables GitLab to maintain a proprietary variant that wraps around the community edition. The GitLab Pricing Page is a sight to behold. Their Strategy Page is a good read as well.
I think the GitLab business model can work well for sustaining VizHub (and my company Datavis Tech INC) in the long term (2020 and beyond). But in the short term (2019), my gut feeling is that the primary focus should be on: creating a great Open Source core product and growing the user community. I don’t expect to make any money by selling VizHub as an “Enterprise Edition” product, or even start development on the closed source part, until it reaches 1,000 users. Until then I plan to put all my spare time effort into the Open Source product.
I may be able to make money by using VizHub, rather than selling VizHub. Anyway as a freelance developer/consultant I write code for clients now, mainly using GitHub private repositories. I would love to create visualization projects for clients inside of VizHub. That would be so cool!
Another way I could make money by using VizHub is offering personalized tutoring/mentorship programs where I and the student pair program remotely in real-time over VizHub. My point is that these activities would be completely orthogonal to any future “enterprise edition” of VizHub, and would not conflict with building out the Open Source product.
Selling support for folks who self-host is another option.
Lasting Value
I want VizHub to be something of lasting value. This software should last for 50 years. I know this sounds ridiculous for software, but it’s arguably achievable. A few Web App projects come to mind that have achieved a sustainable state and appear they will last for many years into the future, Namely Discourse (started 2013), GitLab (started 2011), and WordPress (started 2003). I’d like to study what makes these projects sustainable and try to set up similar conditions around VizHub.
Overall I just have a gut feeling that VizHub needs a collaborative community around it in order to succeed and grow. It needs more users to harden it with bug reports, and it needs more developers to squash those bugs and develop new features. Making it Open Source, as opposed to raising venture capital, is something I could do now to kickstart growth, so I decided to do it.
The potential for what VizHub can become as Open Source outreaches its potential as a money-making-oriented proprietary platform. VizHub needs to be Open Source to grow to its full potential.
That’s why VizHub is Open Source.
