alt Hacker NewsIt's a good reminder, because in the auth landscape I wish I had just picked up Keycloak and stuck with it. Commercial auth is a bad value proposition and not the kind of infrastructure where you want to have acquisition churn happening often.
The self-hosted space is another headache. I wasted so much time trying to make smaller self-hosted auth solutions work, since Keycloak has a reputation for being heavyweight.
I looked into the Ory stack extensively trying to actually use it as advertised for self-hosted / open-source auth. It's aggressively gimped and its SSO features are emphatically _not_ open-source and are gated behind licensing, with no way to find out until you're actually running it.
It's also just unfinished. Their "stack" is a lot of cobbled-together Go mixed with incompletely rebranded acquisitions like SAML Jackson (now "Polis"), which they managed to gut so completely it went from a best-in-class OSS library to unusable.
Probably the first time reading that the Ory stack is unfinished! Sorry you had a frustrating time, but there's 10 years of development and many happy customers + adopters who see it differently! Polis / Boxy still works as before, we didn't gut or take away anything.
Open source development needs to be paid by someone - most of the time people complaining about paying for software are working themselves (for money!) in some company making huge bucks, or looking up to "successful (as in money) tech leaders".
For Ory, B2B login is a good value differentiator, because it's required by companies selling to other companies meaning they can spend some money on licenses to further develop software.
Ory powers the largest technology providers, and super small solo projects. It's robust, stable, Apache2 licensed. It's the best CIAM tech out there that's free (!!).
In the end, everyone is entitled to their opinion but the "open source can't make money" train is honestly a bottom tier opinion and I'm tired of reading it on HN, probably written by people making $100K+ a year for writing software and using open source daily (without paying a dime).
It's like the people complaining that Wikipedia is collecting too many donations, while they cheer on Apple or Anthropic or whoever raking in billions of dollars.
Somehow, only if it's open source / non profit it's bad to make money. If it's proprietary nobody gives a damn. Says a lot about society.