Months ago I put an open licence on a compliance product and told people it was strategy. It might have been. I want the argument written down while I can still check whether I believed it or just liked how it sounded.
The argument: software used to be expensive to make and cheap to copy, which is why renting it made sense. That's stopped being true for most known work. Workflows, mappings, evidence stores, dashboards, the whole catalogue of serious operational software has been built enough times that the pattern is public. Building it isn't the scarce part now. Specifying the problem correctly is, and so is keeping a record that's actually true, and being able to walk out with it.
So whatever the invoice says, what you're buying is title to the description of how your organisation works.
Every business already gets this about its books. You hire an accountant. You don't hand the accountant the only copy of the ledger and agree that if you stop paying, the ledger gets deleted. Software got thirty years off from that conversation because the code and the record arrived together and the code was the expensive half. It isn't the expensive half now. A model with a documented schema will regenerate the interface in an afternoon, badly at first and then fine. Nothing regenerates six years of dated evidence and who signed off in March.
Compliance is the sharpest version of this because compliance is memory. The deliverable is a record of what you knew, when you knew it, and what you did about it. A record that ends when a subscription ends was never compliance, it was a rental of the feeling.
The objection that actually matters is that nobody buys software to own it. They buy it to move risk off their own desk. A vendor is somewhere to point when it breaks, and self-hosting drags all of that back onto the buyer, who is specifically trying not to be the one holding it. "But you own your data" doesn't touch that. My answer is that custody and accountability come apart, that you can pay someone to run the thing and stand next to you in the audit while the deed stays yours. No procurement department has agreed with me in writing yet.
The part I keep circling is that I don't like open source. It takes away the thing you would normally sell. No licence to invoice, no seat count, nothing quietly billing while I sleep. Whatever money there is has to come from being in the room with someone, and I picked that on purpose, which is a strange thing to have picked when I'd clearly rather have the other one.
The defence is that it's the long play. It might be. It's also the exact shape of answer that lets me keep building and put off asking anyone for money, and from in here those two look identical. A licence forces a price conversation in week one. Open source lets me work for another six months and file the delay under strategy.
Checkable, at least. If in two years the closed suites have grown and self-hosted GRC is still a rounding error, I spent the time doing aesthetics in business vocabulary.
— Simon