[HN Gopher] Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's found...
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Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations
Author : geerlingguy
Score : 179 points
Date : 2021-01-28 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| williesleg wrote:
| H1B cracks.
| relaunched wrote:
| I see FOSS as more of a marketing tool for profit-motivated
| entities / founders. It's the modern, marketing equivalent of a
| limited, free trial for software. But, ultimately, if your
| company is owned by shareholders, their motives are your
| motivations. When the money matters more, this is what you get.
|
| FOSS is all about idealism. It's hard to retain your idealism
| when someone is waiving $1+ billion dollars in your face with one
| hand and holding a loaded gun to your head with the other.
| nytgop77 wrote:
| Not only idealism. There is plenty of "I scratch my itch" kind
| of thing. (sharing can be done for self markeeting purposes,
| bragging rights)
| znpy wrote:
| meh, elastic should have gone with the affero gpl since the
| beginning imho. something like a dual license: you want the free
| stuff? here's the affero gpl license. you don't want the affero
| gpl license? contact sales and a custom license for the current
| version will be arranged.
|
| RIP elasticsearch, I guess.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think a windfall tax on FAANGs would get us 80% of the way
| there - with governments around the world appropriating a
| suitable levy and then pouring that levy back into "grassroots
| OSS". The _how_ part is a bit troublesome - it should have a VC
| style flavour (effectively setting up hundreds of software
| foundations with old school grey beards helping the selection
| process) and providing summer of code style grants to just get
| things off the ground.
|
| Governments (imo) should be almost exclusive users of OSS - and
| if the code they want is not put there, seed it.
|
| I am not fond of governments do it all for us, But it is hard to
| imagine how else to extract money from corporations resting their
| profits on the commons.
| krspykrm wrote:
| Corporate sponsorship of open source is entirely dependent on top
| talent caring about open source and thus being more willing to
| tolerate working for EvilMegacorp if major pieces of the
| infrastructure they work on are open.
|
| When top talent just accepts the big money contract regardless,
| corporations see little incentive to sponsor open source.
| Software development is the only industry that has large portions
| of infrastructure free and open for anyone to use, and this is
| due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a
| generation or so ago.
|
| It's up to us to carry that torch, or we will become like every
| other industry.
| na85 wrote:
| I don't pretend to be an industry expert but things seem
| different now, in this day of Everything-as-a-Service and
| subscriptions-as-primary-revenue-streams, from when Free
| Software first became A Thing.
|
| It's just so easy these days for a corporate parasite like
| Amazon or Sony to rip off your hard work (ElasticSearch, BSD)
| and contribute essentially nothing back.
|
| The SSPL seems like a perfectly rational response to this
| newly-emerged phenomenon.
| SXX wrote:
| I have serious question to you and everyone who try to
| advocate for SSPL. Don't you understand that this license has
| clause for SaaS providers that impossible to comply with?
|
| Even if Amazon wanted to open source every single line of
| their own AWS code under AGPLv3 or APLv2 it's still not
| enough: the license require everything to be published under
| SSPL in very fuzzy terms that can even apply to OS kernel.
|
| Even copyleft licenses always had a goal to increase amount
| of copyleft code, but SSPL only goal is to completely ban
| 3rd-party SaaS from using said software.
| adamc wrote:
| I'm skeptical that this is a big factor. I think companies
| support open source where it aligns with their own strategic
| incentives.
|
| Oldie but goodie:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| That's been my experience as well, and the same applies to
| groups that own/maintain certain projects, like drools/RHDM.
| The project/technology owner/maintainer is aligned with corp
| based on customer size/needs, and that alignment is a
| function of how much the customers are paying.
|
| If and when a large customer drops out, the entire corp and
| open source structures can change because the monetization
| changes. On the plus side, if there's a broad customer base,
| this is less likely to happen.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| When will this not be the case? Most companies use a lot of
| open source, in order to ship quickly. I suppose the thesis
| of main link is, that's no less so the case -- but here we
| are, building UIs with Vue/React/Angular/etc. Tons and tons
| of open source tech to enable shipping more quickly.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| People who write open source do it for analogous reasons,
| except the "strategic incentives" are often personal. Those
| reasons can change quickly when shiny new things appear.
| There's a wealth of abandoned OSS projects that illustrate
| this point.
|
| Anyone working on Mesos these days?
| hctaw wrote:
| Which values would those be? Everything used to be proprietary.
| It's the younger generation that _expects_ things to be open
| source.
| ericb wrote:
| > and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of
| the industry a generation or so ago.
|
| Is it? I think it has more to do with companies realizing that
| [1]commoditizing their complements is a sound strategy, and [2]
| using open source as a growth strategy.
|
| When you get to the "harvesting" stage or the "entrenched
| monopoly stage", the FOSS license doesn't make sense if you
| were using it merely as a growth strategy.
|
| [1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement
|
| [2] https://www.gwern.net/Complement#open-source-as-a-
| strategic-...
| sounds wrote:
| Many of the companies that appear to be "harvesting" their
| entrenched customers have not switched away from a FOSS
| license.
|
| Examples:
|
| * Apple
|
| * Amazon
|
| * Facebook
|
| * Google
|
| * Microsoft
|
| * Netflix
|
| * Red Hat
| ericb wrote:
| The open source from your list largely falls under #1. They
| didn't open source their primary product, but rather their
| complements. That is sustainable, whereas #2 is not when a
| permissive license is involved.
|
| Strategy #1 is self-interested and doesn't require any real
| zealotry and survives the harvesting stage just fine.
|
| Open sourcing your core product with a permissive license
| is generally going to be at odds with business goals at
| some point, and if you're in business, often the thing to
| give is the license.
| [deleted]
| mcguire wrote:
| Commoditizing software was never a strategy, at least until a
| very recent stage. Open source software projects commoditized
| software either by being vastly more successful and out-
| competing their alternatives (gcc[1]), or by being a
| singularly better value proposition than their alternatives
| (linux[2]). The companies which have "commoditized their
| complements", used "open source as a growth strategy", or
| "become entrenched monopolies" have always had a rather
| sketchy relationship with open source software, which is why
| they have preferred to avoid an actual free software
| license.[3]
|
| [1] Back in the good ol' days, everybody made C/C++
| compilers. OS vendors made compilers highly tuned for their
| hardware and software; others, like embedded vendors, made
| compilers tightly integrated with their tooling. Then gcc
| showed up _everywhere,_ and started producing optimized code
| better than the tuned products. By the time LLVM appeared
| (2003?), its only real competition was gcc and a fork of gcc.
|
| [2] Originally, Unix vendors had incremental improvements
| over their competitors in specific areas (IBM: SMIT/JFS,
| SiliG: graphics, etc.). Initially, Linux was a joke. Then it
| became as stable as the vendor OSs and the hardware it ran on
| was cheaper. Then it ran on any hardware. It may never have
| achieved feature-advantages over the competition, but taken
| as an entire package, the competition couldn't provide
| anywhere near enough value.
|
| [3] IBM's a funny case, especially with Red Hat. IBM hasn't
| had a functioning software (or hardware?) product for at
| least 30 years.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| You're just describing the process of how all that software
| became commoditized. Software the everybody needs to use is
| simply a commodity now, and that's why the more generically
| useful something is, the more open source support it's
| going to have. Companies (usually) don't want to build
| their own infrastructure, the want to spend their money
| investing in their value adds, because that's where they
| get their RoI. A company could build their own web server,
| operating system, compiler, database... But their customer
| are unlikely to see any benefit from that, which is why
| they find themselves with an incentive to improve open
| source software. That's the reason big open source projects
| attract large corporate sponsorship, not to satiate the
| ideological motives of "top talent".
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| meh. There is nothing new under the sun. There have been several
| identical losses in FOSS. The bigger they are the better when
| this happens because there is enough volume and momentum to force
| a new FOSS branch. If it is a "tiny" FOSS piece, there are not
| enough champions to fight.
|
| > So AWS was directly competing with Elastic, but * _not taking
| the same responsibility for the open source project or investing
| in it as heavily as Elastic was*_.
|
| Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes. They chose to branch,
| and contribute it back. Several of the fixes and improvements are
| from AWS. Did the author want an IBM/CentOS takeover? Or, deny
| AWS to use Elastic but pretend to be FOSS?
| aynyc wrote:
| > Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes.
|
| I don't understand this part. AWS doesn't have anything
| internally that would compete against ELK. Unless you are
| taking about AWS buying ELK flat out. But then Azure and GCP
| can fork ELK and keep selling the service. Is my assumption
| incorrect?
| bdcravens wrote:
| Yes: AWS has launched many "native" offerings to compete with
| the market's open source product, only to give in to demand
| and launch a managed version of the open source product
| (CloudSearch/ElasticSearch, ECS/Kubernetes, SQS/ActiveMQ,
| DynamoDB/MongoDB, etc)
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Before a couple years ago (when elastic started digging deeper
| into the paid addon realm), I don't think they could've forked
| and been able to keep enough compatibility / community around
| their fork to make it as useful and compatible with everything
| Elasticsearch did.
|
| But today, I think they have a 50/50 shot of the Amazon-forked
| ES version becoming the de-facto standard, and Elastic's fading
| into obscurity.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| These are two completely different issues and situations. The
| only thing they have in common is that theyre open source
| projects controlled by for-profit entities. The moment
| cooperation is no longer in their best interest they will stop.
|
| In elastics case they were between a rock and a hard place. The
| world changed around that project and they got sherlocked. It
| happens. AWS has done it so many times its shocking they didnt
| anticipate it in the first place. Being venture backed sours the
| batch a lot faster.
|
| The CentOS issue is unique. The maintainers gave control to the
| company that owned the _licensed_ distribution of the software.
| Did they get a whole promise in return? Of course theyll cut
| support for it. Even in IBMs own portfolio its a conflict on a
| balance sheet alone. But its not the fault of enterprise open
| source. Open source works in this situation: there _will_ be a
| fork just like centos was a fork of redhat.
| zokier wrote:
| > In elastics case they were between a rock and a hard place.
|
| More like rock and a very soft place cushioned by wads of cash.
| Elastic so far has been doing very well fincially. And this
| isn't some new development from AWS side that Elastic needed to
| react upon, AWS have been offering ES for over 5 years.
| zelon88 wrote:
| I completely disagree that cracks are showing and I think you
| used two very weak examples in CentOS and Elastic.
|
| These were and always have been losing bets. Elastic has always
| bemoaned being open source, so everyone should have seen that
| coming. And CentOS died when they were bought by RHEL. Anyone who
| put their weight into these programs after those red flags went
| up were taking a risk.
|
| And that's exactly why OSS is not cracking. Not even close. So
| CentOS and Elastic aren't open source anymore. Who cares. "But my
| workflow! How will I do xxx or yyy now?"
|
| Do what you did before CentOS and Elastic. Find an open source
| alternative. If there aren't any and it's important enough make
| your own. The world will go on people.
|
| Just like Gitlab jacking the price. They want you to assume that
| your choices are to either pay more or go without source control.
| It's up to you to be smart enough to say "I'll just find another
| source management solution that fits my budget."
| hodgesrm wrote:
| To your point, there are already two alternatives for CentOS
| users:
|
| * AlmaLinux: https://almalinux.org/
|
| * Rocky Linux: https://rockylinux.org/
|
| This looks like business as usual in open source.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Neither of which have ISOs yet.
| dralley wrote:
| >So CentOS and Elastic aren't open source anymore.
|
| CentOS is still open source. Nothing is happening to the
| sources themselves. It's the work of taking those sources,
| stripping trademarks, building artifacts and distributing them
| as a near identical-clone of RHEL which is ending. Or at least,
| Red Hat doing that work at their own expense is ending.
|
| "Rocky" and "Alma" linux are picking up that work themselves,
| nothing prevents that from happening.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I think the problem boils down to 'product' vs 'project.' Elastic
| search is very much a product, it's owned by a company, not a
| foundation.
|
| FOSS developers should contribute to projects and not products.
| Non-copyleft licenses seem to just be code for corporations to
| build upon, providing them free labor while getting little in
| return. At least with the GPL, you are getting a promise that
| they will make available their sources. Consider carefully your
| expectations when you license your software.
|
| An example where a project/product hybrid somewhat works is web
| browsers. Generally speaking, there are several competitors
| trying to achieve something similar, and there are some attempts
| (however nebulous) to create standards bodies. The Elastic Search
| community could have done something similar and formed a
| standards body around some sort of specification.
| Jkvngt wrote:
| Dual-licensing with a "free" tier for non-commercial use and a
| paid tier for corporate users could solve this. In fact in the
| future, I believe many companies will do this with software and
| not just SAAS behind a cloud where this model is dominating
| today.
| zby wrote:
| I don't know about Open Source - but Free Software is about users
| having the right to understand and modify the software that they
| use. This is my understanding of 'the printer story':
| https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201....
| With hosted solutions the software runs on the supplier servers -
| so if the user wants to modify it he has to resign from the
| hosted solution (or maybe negotiate a special case - this does
| not seem very realistic). This is a fundamental limitation. If
| the software is Open Source the user still can copy it, modify
| and run it on their own servers (or on some other cloud supplier
| who would agree to the change) - but it is a lot of hassle (and
| hassle is important - after all with enough work you can always
| decompile a binary so it is only the hassle that differentiates
| source code from binary). Maybe if there was enough competition
| between cloud providers - then this could work - but I think the
| economy is against it.
| adamc wrote:
| There is a fundamental problem, in that open source makes it easy
| to take and not give. It has many advantages, but that means that
| it is hard to give it high quality support and development (which
| generally requires paying people) if you cannot monetize
| something about the software -- be it support, or hosting, or
| selling some close-source product that depends on it.
|
| If the licensing terms let someone _else_ monetize your
| investment to the detriment of your own revenues, that 's a
| problem. Even if you would be satisfied with break-even, you have
| to pay your own developers.
|
| Amazon may be "within their rights", but the pattern is
| unsustainable as-is.
| gspr wrote:
| > There is a fundamental problem, in that open source makes it
| easy to take and not give.
|
| The GPL licenses address this problem. It's just a shame that
| the trend nowadays is towards BSD-like licenses.
| adamc wrote:
| It does address the problem. However, it also scares away
| users and fractures the market.
| pmontra wrote:
| I never understood what is there to be scared about.
|
| People buy Microsoft Word knowing they won't be able to
| change it, because it's closed source. However it sells
| well.
|
| Do people use LibreOffice because it's Mozilla licensed and
| not GPL? Do all those people that don't dream about
| modifying Word really want to add secret proprietary
| features to LibreOffice?
|
| Similarly, Oracle (the database) vs MariaDB (GPL) vs
| PostgreSQL (its own license, basically MIT / BSD.) There
| are definitely people that patch databases but I wonder how
| many people here decided to use one and not the other
| because they thought "what happens if I ever want to add
| something to MariaDB and nobody else must get it?"
| adamc wrote:
| No, where is scares them is at the copyleft level, when
| they are writing software. You're quite right that it
| probably doesn't scare many when they are just using it
| as an appliance (e.g., a database).
| nimbius wrote:
| A rather alarmist preface frankly.
|
| >redhat killed cantos
|
| Primarily a profit driven motive. Open source doesn't always mean
| free as in beer.
|
| >elastic killed elasticsearch
|
| For companies like amazon who are fundamentally incompatibl with
| truly open source yes, this is a killing blow. For everyone else
| its just a change in ToS.
|
| In 2021 what's changing is many companies and devs are getting
| rightly upset about multinationals ripping off their code without
| so much as an attribution. These companies are saying that not
| only is your code not worth money, it isn't even worth the
| exposure on your resume.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Doesn't Jeff work for Red Hat?
| a13n wrote:
| > But the Fedora community has publicly stated that "to consider
| the SSPL to be 'Free' or 'Open Source' causes a shadow to be cast
| across all other licenses in the FOSS ecosystem."
|
| My takeaway from all this isn't that "enterprise open source" is
| no longer a viable business model. It's that if you want to start
| an enterprise open source company, start with SSPL.
|
| It works great as an open source license. People and businesses
| can use, modify, and redistribute the product for free. The only
| thing they can't do is package the product and sell/host it as a
| service.
|
| This is extremely reasonable. AWS shouldn't be able to take the
| technology that your team built, without
| asking/paying/contributing, and quickly turn it into a $100m+
| business.
|
| Sure "true" open source champions will balk at the license. But
| at the end of the day, the technology only flourishes because of
| the business built around it (eg. Elastic around Elasticsearch).
| SSPL goes a long way to protect your business, and therefore the
| underlying technology, from big tech.
|
| What would Elasticsearch be without Elastic? What would MongoDB
| be without MongoDB Inc?
| SXX wrote:
| Where Elasticsearch would be without Apache Lucene? Too bad
| Lucene doesn't use SSPL because it's would be so nice to not
| let company like Elastic to make billions of dollars on it. /s
|
| Don't want someone to profit from your code? Just use EULA and
| call it a day.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The premise is wrong. The consolidation of computing to a few
| mega platforms or companies is the big issue open source is where
| you are seeing the symptoms.
|
| Elastic is just another app/database platform. Open source is a
| side issue with Amazon... the real problem is that ultimately,
| their ability to exist as a platform is ultimately in the hands
| of a few companies.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I disagree. Not to say that the consolidation is a good thing,
| but it's not the core problem.
|
| If I spend a year of my life and savings to write a new
| database, how do I make money? Can I make money and open source
| my work? How?
|
| There isn't an easy answer. Open Source isn't always the right
| answer, and a whole lot of naive software developers are
| learning this the hard way.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's always been a challenge; usually the model is to sell
| features or certification if you go open source. Alot of
| people buy RHEL for FIPS 140-2 validation, for example.
|
| Even in closed source, some of these business models are dumb
| with or without open source being in the mix. Think about
| companies like Citrix or VMWare who are essentially selling
| their customer book to Microsoft and to a lesser extent
| Amazon for virtual desktops, and to Microsoft, Amazon and
| Google in the server space. ISVs used to compete with each
| other to sell their stuff to run customer desktops or
| datacenters. There was no aggregation of their runtimes Now
| for most of the market they are competing with each other to
| rent their software on big platforms, which may opt to
| strangle them at any time.
|
| On the open source side, people who need FIPS still buy RHEL.
| Frugal people who need FIPS buy Oracle. RHEL is still open
| source, and the cheapskates who rely on CentOS can still do
| so, they just don't get to ride on RHEL's engineering work
| backporting new fixes to old software. Elastic never had a
| sticky business model.
| [deleted]
| outsomnia wrote:
| > Maybe blindly adopting permissive open source licenses to
| invite more corporate ownership isn't the right answer.
|
| What's the question exactly? Sustainable FOSS development?
|
| Earning nothing while working on a FOSS project that has no way
| to ever make a developer salary because it can't be used by the
| people with the money, due to the copyleft license does not seem
| to be the "right answer" either.
| tw04 wrote:
| I'd argue short term there is no good answer. Long term I think
| the story changes quickly. I still can't shake the idea that we
| as a human race are going to have to adopt a universal basic
| income of some sort. As we automate more and more things we're
| eventually going to get to the point that there are not enough
| jobs for humans to do unless we intentionally stop automating
| some industries.
|
| Assuming we can find a way to get to a UBI, programming becomes
| just another art. If you already have your basic needs met
| (housing/food/education/transportation) and have the choice to
| either pursue an art, or pursue a career making more money,
| people will have options. I have no doubt there are a lot of
| people that will value the freedom to decide what they want to
| do every day of their life over making more money in the rat
| race, and some of them will spend that time
| programming/donating their time to FOSS projects.
|
| Between now and then, your guess is as good as mine.
| sidlls wrote:
| I'm not sure permitting enterprises to pick and choose which
| developers on an open source project get paid (as by hiring
| them or funding a salaried foundation staff) is a good answer
| to this problem.
|
| In fact I'm pretty sure it has contributed to the rise of the
| celebrity/"influencer" dev who uses open source as a vehicle
| for self promotion rather than a means to improve software.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I don't see anything bad with the "celebrity" devs using
| open-source for their own "selfish" purposes. For the most
| part they _do_ improve software, and help coding get more
| popular. Their work can help those devs go independent in
| some shape or form (or the least, it helps them get their
| next job more easily or put them in a stronger negotiating
| position).
|
| The fact that they do a far bit of self-promotion should not
| be hold against them, in the end we are all working to
| achieve something in life, and for some, a necessary
| ingredient is some self-promotion through open-source.
| sidlls wrote:
| I'm gonna say something controversial: the vast, vast
| majority of open source software is garbage. Partly that is
| due to the rise of developers just writing slop to promote
| themselves with. The existence of "Celebrity" devs isn't
| necessarily a problem, but the culture that has evolved
| over the last few years seems more focused on the celebrity
| part than the dev part.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It seems like in some sense, there's no right answer.
|
| The hard thing here is truly free / open source software relies
| on generosity. And the more generosity, the more sustainable it
| is (on behalf of the developer(s), the corporations using it,
| etc.).
|
| Generosity is not a winning strategy in corporate board rooms,
| though.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Sometimes generosity isn't needed. If a project (including
| the language it's written in) is simple* enough, casual users
| can add features they want for themselves.
|
| But for complex projects those barriers will probably always
| be quite high.
|
| * "Simple" is a slippery concept. I find hacking Haskell
| easier than hacking Python, because the type signatures and
| other features make it much easier to see what's going on
| with a minimum of investigative work. But difficulty is a big
| part of Haskell's reputation, and ease a big part of
| Python's.
| coldpie wrote:
| > The hard thing here is truly free / open source software
| relies on generosity.
|
| (I make a living working on an open source project.) I don't
| agree. The view of the value of software is just different.
| The software itself is valueless. This is true of all
| software: bits are free to copy. What is valuable is the work
| put into making it. In other words, you get paid for making
| something, not for having made something. If a company wants
| some feature implemented in some piece of OSS, they can go
| find a dev to pay to do it, and contribute it back to the
| world. There's no generosity there, it's just an accurate
| reflection of where value is actually generated in the
| software world, instead of the broken view that proprietary
| software tries to force.
|
| Where it starts to get tricky is kind of a tragedy of the
| commons situation: if you wait long enough, then maybe
| someone else will pay to implement the feature, but if
| everyone does this, then the feature will never exist.
| jsdwarf wrote:
| Agree. In the end commercial and open source software
| aren't that different: the more dollars you put into it,
| the more say you have on the roadmap.
| [deleted]
| Proven wrote:
| > One way is to become more restrictive in licensing, choosing
| only copyleft licenses that were originally created to offer more
| protections to individuals than corporations.
|
| I would disagree with how you made that characterization.
| Licenses apply equally to everyone, and corporations are made of
| individuals.
|
| If you meant end users vs. service providers, that's what Elastic
| did and to end users their new license looks more permissive than
| GPL 3.0. Yes it does have "a major restriction", but it doesn't
| force individual users and even those who redistribute Elastic
| software to release their modifications, whereas GPL 3.0 would
| have that effect.
|
| To me - a user - the new Elasticsearch license is more permissive
| (because before some Elasticsearch add-ons were restricted) and I
| can live with that. Amazon - thanks to a more permissive license
| that Elasticsearch used to release under - can still do their
| thing. Good luck to them. If that license wasn't permissive they
| wouldn't be able to do this. And the Fedora community and other
| busybodies ... I don't care what they say :-)
| jitendrac wrote:
| I disagree with it, OSS ecosystem heavily rely on individual
| contributions at first. Both Elastic and CentOS cases are
| successful just because they are opensource, otherwise there
| would way little buzz around it, I strongly believe they would
| not have been successful if they were not licensed under
| Opensource license.
| jka wrote:
| Open source governance seems to be a key question here; in other
| words, how does a corporation communicate with their community of
| customers and users, and how are decisions about the software
| made as a result of those discussions?
| EdwinLarkin wrote:
| The only reason corporate embraced open source is that it saw it
| as a way to drive the small and medium sized businesses out of
| the market.
|
| Why pay for an editor when the good guy Microsoft gives it to you
| for free?
|
| People have been delusional about FOSS for way too long.
| indymike wrote:
| This isn't what happened at all. No one went "Mwah-ha-ha-ha
| let's put it to the small businesses." What happened is free
| and pretty good beat more expensive. Microsoft has lost a huge
| amount of server license revenue to open source.
|
| The open source I've written - be it a program or a patch was
| always open sourced because I wanted to make my program
| available to others because I thought it might be useful.
| antixuser wrote:
| @EdwinLarkin: "The only reason corporate embraced open source
| is that it saw it as a way to drive the small and medium sized
| businesses out of the market. Why pay for an editor when the
| good guy Microsoft gives it to you for free? People have been
| delusional about FOSS for way too long."
|
| Is that you billg ;]
|
| https://www.debian.org/ https://getfedora.org/
| https://antixlinux.com/ .. systemD free :]
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think one conclusion is that venture capital backed open source
| companies are a oxymoron.
|
| Open source will never be able to give the huge returns that VC
| firms expect.
|
| However, open source can provide the basis for what is often
| derided as a "lifestyle business" that provides a sometimes very
| good income to a small group of people that are passionate about
| a project. SQLite comes to mind as an example.
|
| Elastic is definitely bringing enough revenue for the "lifestyle"
| business without changing their license, however it is not enough
| for VC.
|
| Be very wary of open source backed by VC.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Red Hat got VC money and went public working on open source
| software. Perhaps the exception that proves the rule of the
| difficulty, but not an oxymoron.
| zokier wrote:
| Red Hat IPOed over 20 years ago in the middle of one of the
| most spectacular bubbles we've seen. The world is very
| different now.
|
| On top of that, yes I'd argue Red Hat is an outlier and
| exception whose success is as much result of good luck and
| timing than anything else.
| c0l0 wrote:
| If anything will ever kill established "Enterprise Open Source"
| or Open Core business models, it's because of cloud service
| consumers and cloud platform customers that prefer the seamless
| and often convenient integration of FOSS services and
| technologies their preferred cloud platform (be it Azure, AWS,
| GCP, or whatever other player that reaches a sufficient size to
| be able to) provides.
|
| That happens to the direct financial detriment of the companies
| that actually created these free tools, while (perhaps naively)
| hoping to be able to sell services based on them to enterprise
| customers themselves. And it's going to be a real pity and for
| the FOSS community when it happens.
|
| Software may be eating the world, but managed software platforms
| are eating (free) software.
| vrtx0 wrote:
| Projects that change from Apache or GPL-like licenses to SSPL are
| still open source. This doesn't mean you have to release your
| source code if you use these projects -- only if you start
| selling a _hosted platform_ that offers the software as a
| service. Every company I've seen do this was been backed into a
| corner by Amazon, who almost never contributes to these projects.
| This is nothing more than Amazon trying to kill these projects by
| causing fragmentation.
|
| *Yes, I've read the OSI link AWS-fans always refer to.
| SXX wrote:
| Have you read SSPL? It's literally apply restriction to SaaS
| that impossible to comply with.
|
| Also it's not some "everyone, but Amazon license". Terms they
| use are very fuzzy and can easily apply to more than just SaaS
| companies.
|
| If Elastic wanted to stay open source they would use BSL:
| proprietary for N years and then code became GPL / APLv2.
|
| Anti-SaaS clause of SSPL is here: > The
| "System Libraries" of an executable work include anything,
| other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the
| normal form of packaging a Major Component, but which is not
| part of that Major Component, and (b) serves only to enable use
| of the work with that Major Component, or to implement a
| Standard Interface for which an implementation is available to
| the public in source code form. A "Major Component", in this
| context, means a major essential component (kernel, window
| system, and so on) of the specific operating system (if any) on
| which the executable work runs, or a compiler used to produce
| the work, or an object code interpreter used to run it.
| > The "Corresponding Source" for a work in object code form
| means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for
| an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work,
| including scripts to control those activities. However, it does
| not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose
| tools or generally available free programs which are used
| unmodified in performing those activities but which are not
| part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes
| interface definition files associated with source files for the
| work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically
| linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to
| require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow
| between those subprograms and other parts of the work.
|
| https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license
| ohazi wrote:
| A lot of software that was once innovative is now mature.
|
| 20 years ago, the bar for what you could sell was really low,
| because there just wasn't a lot of software available, full stop.
| If you had something that was even _a little bit_ useful,
| _somebody_ would probably want it. People who bought software
| from you once were also eager to pay you for updates, because
| annual improvements could be dramatic.
|
| So what happened?
|
| Features that were once unique selling points of one commercial
| application were copied by other vendors and by open-source
| implementations. Clever techniques were studied carefully and are
| now well understood. Smart people looking for a challenge would
| study every publicly available implementation of some algorithm
| and then come up with one that beat them all.
|
| But why did the rate of software improvement seem to slow down?
| Don't we have more people working on software than ever before?
| Don't they have better building blocks than ever before?
|
| Consider that everything that has ever been published as open
| source remains in the public commons forever. This body of work
| grows without bound. Both improvements and regressions
| continuously show up, but (eventually) the improvements are
| identified and the regressions are cast aside. So this pile of
| software theoretically _improves_ without bound as well.
|
| Yes, we have more people writing software than ever before, and
| yes, they have better building blocks than ever before. But
| they're not competing with other software developers and other
| companies -- they're competing with _every piece of software ever
| written by anyone_. So it shouldn 't be surprising or
| controversial that the bar for marketable software is going to
| keep getting higher forever.
|
| These licensing shenanigans and the steady march towards
| "Everything as a Service" is a result of companies pivoting from
| attempting to innovate to rent seeking.
| stereolambda wrote:
| _> But maybe they 're onto something. Maybe blindly adopting
| permissive open source licenses to invite more corporate
| ownership isn't the right answer._
|
| I do think this is the answer. Try to use LGPL, GPL or AGPL as
| appropriate.
|
| I also agree with some people that there's an issue with framing
| the question as defending the right of developers to get paid for
| open source. This was never much of a thing by default. People
| have been trying to build FOSS companies, with varying success.
| But I would guess most end user-facing things, like GNU, Linux,
| VLC etc. were built by academics or hobbyists, or foundations.
| _Commercial_ FOSS tries to sell infrastructure to enterprises. It
| 's not things you and I would use if we weren't IT professionals.
|
| (Linux is a peculiar beast here. The kernel is largely developed
| by big corps, but playing by the copyleft rules, because it's
| such a fundamental infrastructure. Big distros like Ubuntu and
| Fedora are the middle ground where they can be freely used by
| individual people, but are a side effect of Canonical and Red
| Hat's development processes.)
|
| The correct framing of FOSS is benefit of the users and the
| society at large. We use .?GPL to ensure that the software that
| people use is inspectable, and modifiable if the vendor does
| something bad. Thus we serve people's, and our own, interests in
| the long term. We reduce the area where companies can damage the
| public for profit, when hiding behind closed source, unchangeable
| dark patterns, "hai we ban you there is no appeals" etc. etc.
| That the essential software can be had free of charge in practice
| is also a nice thing... to some extent.
|
| The answer to the problem of compensating the developers was
| never much directly solved by FOSS. (Of course, you can try to
| use it to _also_ get hired, to sell hosting or support.) This is
| a social /political/economic problem. Trying to solve it with
| licensing (a.k.a. copyright law hacking) is and understandable
| effort, but very likely a dead end.
|
| EDIT: I see under the sibling comments that the OP is more
| specifically concerned about the fundamental and "invisible"
| projects like sudo. I can't add much on that, but I do think
| there's value in getting (some) signaling and (some) bargaining
| power by choosing copyleft. Especially if there would be
| solidarity and consensus among developers in doing this.
| gcblkjaidfj wrote:
| You are completely right. But the answer to this is always the
| same: off-topic Stallman ad hominem
|
| > Linux is a peculiar beast here. The kernel is largely
| developed by big corps, but playing by the copyleft rules,
| because it's such a fundamental infrastructure.
|
| Not quite. linux is the success of the past! but already
| corrupted by "tainted" kernel...
|
| linux adopted GPL, which was *unthinkable* by corporate back
| then. But because devs didn't cave in to "permissive license
| fallacy", they had to eat it up.
|
| The thing is, GPL is severely outdated. It does nothing to
| force Google, Amazon to open source their code that they profit
| from because of an OSS base work. GPL, with tainted kernel,
| merely force them to open source irrelevant parts of Android.
| The drivers and spyware-DRM can all remain proprietary. And
| does *absolutely nothing* to their bread and butter, which is
| hosted services on top of OSS software.
|
| until we stick to GPLv3 like linux stuck with GPL, opensource
| is point less.
| stereolambda wrote:
| _> Not quite. linux is the success of the past! but already
| corrupted by "tainted" kernel..._
|
| _> linux adopted GPL, which was unthinkable by corporate
| back then. But because devs didn 't cave in to "permissive
| license fallacy", they had to eat it up._
|
| True, I didn't expand on that to be more concise. Linux is a
| grandfathered treasure. Though there's an argument the
| corporations could use BSD like Apple, it's just more
| beneficial for the fragmented PC/Android ecosystem to
| maintain Linux sort of like an open ISO standard. Either way,
| this is not an easy story to replicate, unless something is
| essential on the level of Linux.
|
| I think with the way the situation develops, more and more
| people will be questioning permissive licenses as the no-
| brainer standard. I'm not saying there's no place for them,
| if you have a good business reason or something. Buy you
| don't have to _unconditionally_ donate your labor to entities
| with nation-state-GDP-sized coffers. Copyleft alone won 't
| solve the problems of the industry, but an expansion of its
| mindshare it would be a start.
| jabl wrote:
| > linux adopted GPL, which was _unthinkable_ by corporate
| back then. But because devs didn 't cave in to "permissive
| license fallacy", they had to eat it up.
|
| Linux using GPL wasn't such a big problem for the corps, as
| the Linux developers stated the syscall interface is the GPL
| boundary. So you can make user space code that runs on Linux
| without being affected by the GPL (see e.g. the Android "no
| GPL in userspace" rule). And even inside the kernel, there
| are loopholes to get around the GPL (e.g. the "tainted" thing
| you mentioned).
|
| Even if Linux were permissively licensed, the thing
| preventing splitting up into a zillion proprietary forks
| would, I think, be the ferocious development speed and lack
| of internal API guarantees.
|
| > until we stick to GPLv3 like linux stuck with GPL,
| opensource is point less.
|
| I don't see what GPLv3 would solve here. To close the
| "service provider loophole" you need the AGPLv3, or even
| something stronger. But given the more or less total lack of
| adoption of AGPL, I'm not hopeful here.
|
| I mean, it would be nice if copyleft would be the norm, but
| that goal seems to be slipping further and further away all
| the time. To the point that corps can start to shun copyleft
| code, pressurizing the remaining holdouts to switch to
| permissive licensed or become irrelevant.
| gcblkjaidfj wrote:
| > Linux using GPL wasn't such a big problem for the corps,
| as the Linux developers stated the syscall interface is the
| GPL boundary.
|
| That is fine for creating applications. It still required
| drivers and other things that expose syscalls to be open
| and GPLed.
|
| > Even if Linux were permissively licensed,
|
| The tainted kernel was the attack on the GPL itself i
| talked about. After tainted kernel, it is pretty much NOT-
| GPL, hence the devs gave in to a more permissive license
| while still calling it GPL. So the rest of the point is
| moot. Linux kernel DID adopt a permissive license, which is
| the reason we do not have proper open source android today.
|
| > But given the more or less total lack of adoption
|
| chicken and egg problem. But that is *exactly* the argument
| against GPL for the kernel in the past.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > But I would guess most end user-facing things, like GNU,
| Linux, VLC etc. were built by academics or hobbyists, or
| foundations.
|
| I think some of those things from the "golden age" were built
| by people working _on the clock_ , in salaried full-time
| positions, at companies that had businesses separate from that
| open source product, but which used the open source product for
| that business.
|
| They were getting paid to solve problems and get things done,
| and if they got it done with open source, that was fine, the
| company wasn't trying to make money off of the software that
| solved the problem.
|
| (Also by university faculty getting paid by the university).
| tyingq wrote:
| The trend where there's a split offering of a community open
| source product coupled with non-open source premium offerings is
| sometimes a crack as well. Especially when relatively essential
| features aren't in the community editions.
| linuxftw wrote:
| MySQL/MariaDB split went fine. People will build or fork the
| software they need.
| jsdwarf wrote:
| GitLab comes to my mind, where an issue can either be open or
| closed in the community edition. You literally have to pay for
| "work in progress".
| markbnj wrote:
| > First, how can we make sure developers who build open source
| software are compensated for their work in a just way?
|
| Honest question: isn't this a fundamental contradiction? If you
| are building a thing that by definition is given freely to anyone
| who wants to use it, how does compensation for that work become
| part of the formula? You can't be monetarily compensated for it,
| because you chose to give it away. There are other forms of
| compensation but that seems clearly not what we're talking about
| here. The author goes on to ask how you can build a business
| around open source? But isn't the answer that you can't? If its
| really open source then the software itself is not a business.
|
| That, to me, seems consistent with the original idea of open
| source: that it was the cool things you could build with code,
| not the code itself, that had value. None of the iconic success
| stories in tech over the last decade have sold code, have they?
| They've built things on FOSS code that never existed before, and
| most of them have contributed a lot of FOSS code back. But they
| haven't sold databases, reverse proxies, and key/value stores,
| right? I've paid six-figure annual licenses to Oracle. Is that
| the world we're trying to preserve here?
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > But they haven't sold databases, reverse proxies, and
| key/value stores, right? I've paid six-figure annual licenses
| to Oracle. Is that the world we're trying to preserve here?
|
| Maybe? Why can't you sell a database, reverse proxies, or
| key/value stores? What if I want to start a business around a
| database, reverse proxies, or key/value stores? How does that
| work with FOSS?
| bityard wrote:
| > Honest question: isn't this a fundamental contradiction?
|
| I'm glad someone brought this up. When a developer (or artist,
| or musician, or other creative person) gives away their work
| for free, that is fine by me. But when they later hold out
| their hat and say, "by the way, I worked really hard on that
| and I'm a nice person, would you mind paying for it now?"
| that's when I feel like I'm being manipulated. If you wanted
| money for it, you should have just said up front instead of
| tossing the guilt trip in at the end.
|
| I do appreciate Jeff's enthusiasm for technology and he's done
| some cool stuff. I would totally hire him for a consulting gig
| if I were in a position to do so. But he's part of this "give
| stuff away for free and beg for money later" culture that rubs
| me the wrong way.
| muricula wrote:
| Do you listen to National Public Radio in the US? They
| broadcast all of their content for free on FM radio, and then
| ask for donations a couple times a year. Does that feel
| manipulative to you? Genuine question, because to me that
| doesn't seem that different the developers holding out their
| hat after releasing an open source library.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I think the point is, how can we make it so the companies that
| build profitable products using open source code can support
| the developers who build those open source libraries?
|
| There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent
| example) supported by a team of developers in the single digits
| (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking in
| millions if not billions in annual revenue.
|
| Finding ways to give back and keep the developers motivated is
| important in the long term, unless you plan on rewriting all
| the software you depend on.
|
| Currently the two sustainable answers for that are:
|
| 1. Hope some company is generous in hiring said OSS developer
| and paying them a salary to continue working on that OSS work
| (ideally without too much pressure to modify it for that one
| company's use case).
|
| 2. Make that developer spend a lot of time doing marketing to
| generate donations/sponsorships to a level where the developer
| can pay for things like food, shelter, and insurance.
| btinker wrote:
| > There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent
| example) supported by a team of developers in the single
| digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking
| in millions if not billions in annual revenue.
|
| But the whole reason they are relied upon is them coming for
| free. If sudo users where expected to give something back it
| wouldn't have landed on millions of machines in the first
| place.
|
| FOSS coming for free means, of course, maintenance being
| dependent on the authors' whims. Not paying means not being
| owed anything.
|
| Yes, that's not sustainable. FOSS is a gift from the
| developers to the world. It's not a business model or a way
| to make a living (at best it's part of a strategy to make a
| living).
|
| It would be great if we all could gift something back be that
| help with maintaining or money.
|
| But we should be careful not to demand support. Everyone
| "whising up" and only relying on software they either
| maintain themselves or paid someone to maintain might look
| different than we imagine. Might just be people buying
| proprietary software rather than funding open source
| development.
| the_other wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate here (because I have weakly held
| opinions and no good answers of my own):
|
| > There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent
| example) supported by a team of developers in the single
| digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking
| in millions if not billions in annual revenue.
|
| But they gave it away for free. That would be the same
| whether there were big, small or zero companies using the
| software.
|
| I think probably the problem is framed wrong:
|
| - maybe giving software away free was a bad idea (I don't
| believe this; just putting it on the table for conversation)
|
| - maybe those giving away their software free should make
| better calls _for themselves_ about how they spend their time
|
| - maybe use different licensing
|
| - stop calling it free; instead call it "free a the point of
| consumption" and consciously build a model to support that at
| the outset (this is my current personal opinion, but I grew
| up in the Uk when it had a functional NHS so I'm biassed)
|
| - dig deep on what both "free as in beer" and "free as in
| speech" mean to you and how they relate and what you want to
| do about that
|
| Open source came out of a joyous utopianism that hasn't been
| backed up the wider societal changes needed to sustain it.
| This is understandable because that work is ridiculously hard
| (and I'm aware some people _are_ trying to make those
| changes. I just day-dream about it).
|
| Currently, most of the world works on capitalism, for better
| or worse. I'm not trying to defend or attack capitalism here,
| but when you work in a capitalist system and _all_ your other
| interests and life support systems use capitalism, you have
| to factor that into your thinking. Open source makes more
| sense in a post-scaricity society and we're not there yet.
| FOSS might even help us get there, and the problems we're
| seeing in the past 3-4 years might be the signs of things
| changing.
|
| I know this message sounds like victim blaming, and that's a
| real problem in some situations, but I don't think this is
| the situation here. Everyone working in tech is at a higher
| than average level of privilege than their immediate peers;
| working in FOSS is a choice you make from that position of
| privilege.
| mahmoudimus wrote:
| >I think the point is, how can we make it so the companies
| that build profitable products using open source code can
| support the developers who build those open source libraries?
|
| This. This is the conversation we need to have.
|
| However, I doubt that a public company on the USA stock
| exchanges -- which by definition is concerned with a
| Capitalist maximization of shareholder value, can rely on
| donations.
|
| They _need_ to be able to return venture capital money at a
| multiple. So, why did they take the cash in the first place?
| So that they can build a company to govern and employ the
| team members and build expertise to fund the R &D needed to
| build the product and support customers.
|
| It seems unfair to me that a company with deep resources
| chooses to fork and modify instead of investing in the
| company and owning a stake to help influence the roadmap
| and/or enter into a resale / partnership model for
| monetization.
|
| It's a tough scenario and it needs to be discussed.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Currently the two sustainable answers for that are_
|
| No, there aren't two, there are three; the third one is the
| one you slid by:
|
| _> rewriting all the software you depend on_
|
| If sudo bugs don't get fixed by the existing developer(s),
| companies that depend on sudo will just end up writing their
| own. I suspect that in most cases companies will see that as
| cheaper than having to pay an open source library developer,
| who is not an employee, to maintain an open source library
| that is not under the company's control. So if the open
| source developer isn't donating their work for free, the
| companies probably won't end up using it at all.
| mcguire wrote:
| In my nigh on 30 years of work, mostly using and writing open
| source, I have never been compensated _for writing software._ I
| have been compensated for solving problems. The fact that it
| involved writing software was irrelevant.
|
| I would argue that compensating developers for building
| software is the wrong way to look at it. IBM (and possibly Red
| Hat?) are mostly consulting companies---the development work
| they pay for is in support of their consulting.
| dralley wrote:
| >I would argue that compensating developers for building
| software is the wrong way to look at it. IBM (and possibly
| Red Hat?) are mostly consulting companies---the development
| work they pay for is in support of their consulting.
|
| Red Hat is not a consulting company. According to the Q1
| FY2020 financial statements, "Subscription revenue in the
| quarter was 87% of total revenue." which means consulting is
| somewhere in that leftover 13% (categorized as "services").
|
| What you perhaps mean, is that the number of kernel
| developers, gcc developers, glibc developers, (and so on)
| they have on staff is a benefit in terms of providing good
| support. In that sense, if a customer has an issue and need
| support, the "development work" does benefit the ability to
| provide that service. I wouldn't call that consulting though.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > isn't this a fundamental contradiction?
|
| It isn't. You can accept donations. You can charge for
| support/enhancement work, or for a managed service. You can
| also find a salaried job where your work is released under a
| Free and Open Source licence, such as Linux kernel development.
|
| You're right that it's famously difficult to monetise Free and
| Open Source software, but there are a few examples of it
| happening.
|
| > the original idea of open source: that it was the cool things
| you could build with code, not the code itself, that had value.
|
| Perhaps I'm missing your point here, but as far as I know,
| there's nothing in the Open Source or Free Software movements
| that ever viewed FOSS primarily as the basis for interesting
| proprietary software.
|
| > They've built things on FOSS code that never existed before,
| and most of them have contributed a lot of FOSS code back. But
| they haven't sold databases, reverse proxies, and key/value
| stores, right?
|
| Red Hat might be the clearest counterexample here. If I
| understand correctly, their charge for their official builds,
| which I suppose is a way of charging for support.
|
| You're right though that many of them go with a service model
| and don't publish the code. Amazon Aurora, for instance, or
| Google App Engine.
| markbnj wrote:
| > Perhaps I'm missing your point here, but as far as I know,
| there's nothing in the Open Source or Free Software movements
| that ever viewed FOSS primarily as the basis for interesting
| proprietary software.
|
| Proprietary doesn't factor into it. Maybe a clearer way to
| put the thing I am positing: the idea behind open source is
| that it is interesting end user apps that have value and
| change the world, not the software components from which
| those apps are built.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Ok, but Open Source principles and Free Software principles
| both apply equally to library code and to application code.
| markbnj wrote:
| True, but there are a lot more applications and use cases
| for an open-sourced redis than an open-sourced twitter.
| Let me try again: Twitter was built on an open source
| foundation, changed the way people communicate forever,
| and created a huge amount of liquid value. Without open
| source things like Twitter probably would not have come
| into existence. Twitter has in turn contributed a lot of
| important open source software back into the community.
| Elasticsearch or redis, by contrast, enabled many of
| these cool new things to exist, but by themselves those
| excellent software components changed very few lives. If
| you made redis and tossed it out in the world with a ta
| da! very few people would care. I always felt that open
| source was an explicit recognition that we care about and
| attach value to the big ideas that change the world, and
| that by making the building blocks freely available we
| caused more of those big ideas to come to fruition. Now
| that the big ideas are perhaps a little harder to find we
| seem to want to attach a price tag to the parts again.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > If you made redis and tossed it out in the world with a
| ta da! very few people would care.
|
| Right, it's the application/library distinction again.
| Developers might care a great deal, even if there's
| nothing interesting using it yet.
|
| > open source was an explicit recognition that we care
| about and attach value to the big ideas that change the
| world, and that by making the building blocks freely
| available we caused more of those big ideas to come to
| fruition.
|
| I suppose so, although the 'free' (as in price) component
| there can be separated out from Open Source. Freeware
| (software which is made available free of charge but
| which is not Free Software or Open Source) can also serve
| as a platform, but in practice often loses out to Free
| and Open Source alternatives. SkyOS is dead and gone, the
| Linux kernel continues to conquer the world.
|
| The Open Source position is that Open Source is the most
| effective way to develop software, and of course it's had
| tremendous success in 'infrastructure' software
| (libraries, frameworks, operating systems, programming
| languages).
|
| (This is quite different from the Free Software position,
| which holds that non-Free software is a problem in terms
| of power and control over users, quite aside from the
| question of how to most effectively develop software.)
|
| We should be careful not to go so far as to say that Open
| Source is about enabling interesting/profitable non-Open
| Source programs. Copyleft licences are explicitly hostile
| to this, but are recognised as Open Source licences.
| ddevault wrote:
| Open source is not a business model. You can make money in open
| source, but not by accident. You have to find a viable business
| which incorporates open source. One common approach is SaaS,
| where the software is open source and you provide value by
| selling hosted versions, with paid support, competing on the
| reliability and utility of your infrastructure, expertise of
| your support staff, and integrity of your business.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| >ne common approach is SaaS, where the software is open
| source and you provide value by selling hosted versions, with
| paid support, competing on the reliability and utility of
| your infrastructure, expertise of your support staff, and
| integrity of your business
|
| The big problem with this is that most of the large
| enterprises which are really spending the money for this, 99%
| of the time are going to pick Amazon or Microsoft or IBM for
| hosting/support over AwesomeOpenSourceLibrary LLC, especially
| since they likely already have contracts with those
| companies.
|
| From a practical point of view, if I have N open source
| libraries that I use in production, as a large company, it is
| better for me if I have Amazon support all N libraries, than
| having N different contracts with N different companies for
| support/hosting.
| ddevault wrote:
| It's not that hard to compete with AWS. AWS is
| scatterbrained and provides a really bad UX and as-is
| integrations where the "is" is not great. You might lose
| some business to them, but the cases we've seen lately
| aren't that: Elastic cleared almost half a billion dollars
| last year.
|
| What open source _does_ mean is surrendering your monopoly
| over what you build. Amazon may capture some of your value
| as a result, but that 's part of the deal. I wrote about it
| here:
|
| https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-
| your...
| Railsify wrote:
| When I see articles like this I think back to Neo4j, when we
| adopted the product the enterprise features were open source,
| which turned out to be a long con bait and switch, enterprise
| features are now closed. We rewrote our app using another DB and
| are closely watching more recent entries into the GraphDB space
| such as Agensgraph ( a new apache project) built atop postgres.
| staunch wrote:
| Cloud services like Amazon's AWS, Google's GCP, and Microsoft
| Azure are the proprietary operating systems of the modern day.
|
| Today, they're doing many of the bad-for-the-world things that
| Microsoft did with Windows in the 90s.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I'm not sure this model _ever_ worked. "form a company whose
| principle thing is creating open source licensed software." That
| is not the model that was used to create open source in the
| "golden age" (although that model may not work anymore either).
| carapace wrote:
| > Third, if I want to earn a living or build a company around
| open source, what are my options?
|
| Don't. The very idea that you should have to "earn a living" is
| now bogus and should be thrown out.
|
| I believe computers, software and technology in general should be
| used to bring about a post-historical Golden Age of peace and
| prosperity.[1] Programs especially are a kind of wealth that can
| be copied for effectively zero cost.
|
| So I would say that the urge to "earn a living or build a company
| around open source" is misguided. If you want to write software
| and give it away for free, that's awesome! My advice is either be
| comfortable being really poor, or be wealthy already. If you want
| to go from being poor to being wealthy by giving away copies of
| software, I don't know what to tell you, to me that seems like an
| oxymoron. It just seems like a weird idea.
|
| Instead, let's use the technology we already have to construct a
| new economy that provides a good quality of life for everyone
| automatically.
|
| [1] Otherwise, what's the goddamned point!?
| er4hn wrote:
| The problem with saying that "earning a living" is bogus is
| that it doesn't jibe well with the real world. Being poor is
| not a good mindset since it is tied to insecurities and
| uncertainty around food, shelter, and healthcare. Relying on
| the benevolence of the rich is likewise a plea to the morals of
| people who historically have not felt the need to behave in a
| way that fits your specific morals.
|
| The problem is how does one get to a point where the golden age
| arrives? FLOSS treats this as being incentivized by legal and
| social means, i.e. software licenses for use and education by
| orgs such as GNU. This doesn't always solve the issue (as
| recent events show) but it has been more effective to work
| within the system and push things forward than to take a stance
| and live on a hill for it.
|
| Politically, you can see similar events be carried out. China
| has an explicit governmental goal of eventually entering full
| Communism. I'm not going to debate if that is a _real_ goal of
| theirs, but they believed that it could be achieved and people
| could be given opportunities to achieve that by first opening
| up to world markets at large. This was after the Great Leap
| Forward plans failed. Judging by the difference between the GLF
| and China today it went well for them to operate within the
| system as well.
| draw_down wrote:
| > Elastic effectively killed Elasticsearch
|
| Good grief, what a way to put it. You could just as well say
| Amazon killed it. But of course we can't say that
| [deleted]
| louwrentius wrote:
| Given this new trend, how long will Ubuntu (Server) last...
| hnarn wrote:
| From my perspective, which admittedly is subjective and might be
| missing glaring examples to the opposite, open source has
| increasingly become a free marketing gimmick for startups looking
| to be bought out. I feel like this would explain why so many open
| source projects these day seem surprised when confronted with the
| expectations of being an open source project.
|
| All things being equal, a piece of software will become more
| popular if it's open source. If it's open source and worse than
| the proprietary alternative, it will still pick up steam, while a
| proprietary competitor would be largely ignored. In fact, I would
| claim that a proprietary competitor will even be ignored if it's
| just as good, and even if it's a bit better: because there is a
| cost of adoption of new technologies, being a bit better isn't
| enough.
|
| An example of something that wasn't open source but succeeded
| anyway is Splunk. As far as I know, they have never leveraged
| open source, but their selling point was so unique that they
| didn't need to. However, most ideas aren't that game changing.
| Most projects don't have the luxury of an idea that has an
| elevator pitch so attractive it will attract both investors and
| customers right away.
|
| By 2007, Splunk had raised US$ 40M. The initial release of
| Elasticsearch was in 2010. How would ES have been received if
| they went to market with a proprietary product? I think the
| reason why it was open sourced from the start is quite obvious:
| noone would have cared otherwise, or they would have been
| overshadowed by an open source alternative. There was a demand
| for new, flashy, modern log monitoring among those that didn't
| want to buy Splunk, so it didn't have to be as good.
|
| What seems to happen more frequently though is that cloud
| services pick up these open source alternatives, make money off
| them, and/or buy up the company holding the IP. They move in and
| "embrace, extend and extinguish", killing two birds with one
| stone: on the one hand they damage the primary free alternative,
| while at the same time improving it while owning the full rights
| to the improvements.
|
| I don't have an answer to what to "do" about this but it seems
| like an increasing trend ever since the cloud industry started
| swallowing up most of what IT is about. In a way I suppose it's
| unavoidable, and maybe we need to see the beauty in the inherent
| resilience of open source: even when it's bought off and killed,
| they can never kill the previously freely licensed code. The
| "idea" if you will can live on, and must live on if we're going
| to avoid a complete dystopia in the long run. So turn the
| frustration of your favorite project being killed off into
| action: realize that no code comes for free, behind every open
| source success is usually an unsung and unpaid hero, and if you
| can't pick up the torch yourself, at least throw a few bucks to
| those who do. What else is there?
| caniszczyk wrote:
| cracks? we are nothing in a boom time for enterprise open
| source... more companies are contributing than in the past and
| hiring engineers to work on open source, we have open source
| alternatives to every project you mentioned
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