This article wasn't really so much about it's headline, but someone in the same industry saying "we are not also in bad shape".
I suspect to answer the actual headline "The Real Reason Open Source Startups Fail", is pretty much why all companies may fail - PLUS the possibility that their paid component is not sufficiently compelling or that while their open source piece is compelling, they have trouble competing iwth their open source component or are becoming too services heavy, which can cut into margins.
It seems the article tries to claim Nebula wasn't "operatioanlly excellent", which is something a competitor would naturally say, but Nebula was trying to make a proprietary "appliance" approach to wrapping OpenStack (apologies if I've mistranslated this) - which I think might have just been too weird.
And that's a reason any company can crash - the product idea was perhaps not something the market wanted.
OpenStack, increasingly, is one of those things large companies are interested in, and if you have a large team of people to wrangle OpenStack, you likely need more flexibility, and want to put the components together yourself.
So were they making OpenStack for the little guy? Probably not, and OpenStack for the little guy is a bit of an oxymoron. It's pretty hands on. I can see where they'd have problems, and I also think it's likely is that there aren't a lot of OpenStack customers - but there are some very very large ones, so it's a huge fight to get someone to pay you - and not someone else - for something.
But most of the time, there's nothing particularly interesting in OSS business models except finding the right line of how much you are going to give away. In fact, I'd say you have an advantage out of the gate in getting people to be interested in what you do, that makes some parts easier.
I still think SaaS models (.com's, websites), etc, may be more easier though, to avoid the need to maintain that balance. But can you do that in systems software? Not so much, with a few exceptions for hosted monitoring.
Anyway, it's possible to build a good product company on OSS bits - and a services company can be something a lot of companies don't want to build. You just have to find the right line, but I think this was really about product/market fit, and not about open source business model failure, per se.
I suspect to answer the actual headline "The Real Reason Open Source Startups Fail", is pretty much why all companies may fail - PLUS the possibility that their paid component is not sufficiently compelling or that while their open source piece is compelling, they have trouble competing iwth their open source component or are becoming too services heavy, which can cut into margins.
It seems the article tries to claim Nebula wasn't "operatioanlly excellent", which is something a competitor would naturally say, but Nebula was trying to make a proprietary "appliance" approach to wrapping OpenStack (apologies if I've mistranslated this) - which I think might have just been too weird.
And that's a reason any company can crash - the product idea was perhaps not something the market wanted.
OpenStack, increasingly, is one of those things large companies are interested in, and if you have a large team of people to wrangle OpenStack, you likely need more flexibility, and want to put the components together yourself.
So were they making OpenStack for the little guy? Probably not, and OpenStack for the little guy is a bit of an oxymoron. It's pretty hands on. I can see where they'd have problems, and I also think it's likely is that there aren't a lot of OpenStack customers - but there are some very very large ones, so it's a huge fight to get someone to pay you - and not someone else - for something.
But most of the time, there's nothing particularly interesting in OSS business models except finding the right line of how much you are going to give away. In fact, I'd say you have an advantage out of the gate in getting people to be interested in what you do, that makes some parts easier.
I still think SaaS models (.com's, websites), etc, may be more easier though, to avoid the need to maintain that balance. But can you do that in systems software? Not so much, with a few exceptions for hosted monitoring.
Anyway, it's possible to build a good product company on OSS bits - and a services company can be something a lot of companies don't want to build. You just have to find the right line, but I think this was really about product/market fit, and not about open source business model failure, per se.