[HN Gopher] Open source is not a business model (2018)
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Open source is not a business model (2018)
Author : JNRowe
Score : 123 points
Date : 2021-03-27 14:00 UTC (9 hours ago)
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| JoelJacobson wrote:
| Open Source = the "Atoms" in Our "Digital Periodic Table"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604020
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Unfortunately it is a marketing term now, or new age jargon crap
| like "dont be evil"
| dalbasal wrote:
| Kind of Meta: The meaning of "business model," in a
| software/startup context is somewhat quaint:
|
| "All it really meant was how you planned to make money."
|
| "Model" seems grandiose for a word that could be simplified to
| "income source." Comparisons to restaurants tend to be strained.
| Restaurant "business models" are not generally that complicated:
| People pay restaurants for food. Some deliver. The reason
| software people contemplate business models and restaurateurs
| don't is that "software," regardless of licensing, doesn't come
| with a standard business model. Every one is a snowflake.
|
| In software, "business model" is a wide range of possibilities.
| Most of them failing. Many quitely succeeding. A few explosively
| winning. Is AirBnB a software business model? Is Adwords? Even
| MSFT, which does literally exchange software for money... MSFT's
| "business model" is a complicated, impossible to replicate thing.
|
| The majority of software that's literally exchanged for money is
| done with some sort of services/support bundled in... and the
| customer is a business. _If I give it away then why do people buy
| it?_ " is not even a sensible question. What does that question
| mean for Google, Apple or Amazon? There are plenty of exceptions:
| Photoshop, MS office... but even these are becoming online
| services and the "business model" is less directly "software for
| cash."
|
| TLDR, software doesn't have a standard business model regardless.
| Weighted by revenue share, the vast majority of software revenue
| comes from advertising, luxury electronics, web services or some
| other "business model" that isn't contradicted by OS in any way.
| "Selling software" in a sandwich-4-cash comparable way is
| surprisingly rare, regardless of license.
| [deleted]
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > Every [software business] is a snowflake.
|
| As much as I appreciate this comment, it's less limited to
| software than you paint it to be. When you start digging into
| how businesses actually make money, you quickly realize it's
| rarely what it seems.
|
| Many gas stations that are wildly successful, such as Sheetz
| and Wawa, don't make their money selling gas, they make it
| selling food using gas as a commodity to get the customer in
| the door. Likewise, McDonald's doesn't really make its money
| selling food either, although this is a lot more complicated
| and heavily involves real estate and franchising.
|
| In other words, nothing is really as it seems when you peel
| back the veneer. Software just happens to be relatively new and
| is poorly understood by most people.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| 24 hour/365 production support is a requirement for large
| companies, sell that. Putting features behind a paywall doesn't
| work when the entire business can be forked and those features
| implemented for free. See AWS with Elasticsearch.
|
| There's a reason enterprises use MSSQL, Oracle, etc.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| If I understand this correctly, you're saying companies choose
| to license paid databases like Microsoft SQL or Oracle over
| open source SQL databases for support. What kind of support do
| companies need for a database? I can't figure out this error
| message my query generates or how can I update to the next
| version of your DB? Something along those lines?
| hvasilev wrote:
| if there is a sufficiently large issue with the product
| itself, the vendor is monetarily incentivised to fix it asap.
| I personally have no expectation of that for free / os
| software.
| silvestrov wrote:
| > sufficiently large issue
|
| My experience is that for 99% companies there is absolutely
| no way to be "sufficiently large" for Oracle to take notice
| of any bugs/problems with their SQL database.
|
| As you don't have the source, there is no way to get the
| problem fixed.
|
| With open source software you can go on the market and hire
| one of the developers or an independent contractor.
| ab_testing wrote:
| I think it depends on the type of Oracle product that you
| are implementing. Having implemented Oracle packaged
| products for a long time (ERP, OBIEE etc.), there are
| hundreds of known bugs in each of the modules. In fact,
| many times, new clients comb through the bug reports
| before implementing a new module to check if a listed
| feature has a bug.
| blihp wrote:
| Not with Enterprise software they aren't. The vendor
| contracts (as it's typically written on the vendors paper
| rather than the customers) have more than enough wiggle
| room to get out of virtually any scenario. It's only with
| smaller software companies where you may be able to
| negotiate these sorts of terms.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Honestly, it's more about CYA than anything.
|
| A sev 1 issue pretty much automatically means a ticket to all
| relevant vendors at large companies, and typically you'll
| have a dedicated SE and TAM that will join your war room. You
| don't want to be the guy whose idea it was to roll some DB
| you compiled from source off of github and now some critical
| functionality isn't working and it's on you to fix it. Even
| medium size businesses will pay quite a bit of money for
| support, just in case.
|
| Source: I've worked at a fortune 10 in IT. There, it wasn't
| uncommon to have your SEs from 2-3 different
| software/hardware vendors on the bridge while troubleshooting
| any production issues.
| thrashh wrote:
| You ever have those moments where you're just scrounged
| together a solution from reading a bunch of random tickets
| and forum posts and you've found this fix someone write that
| may work and now you're going to try it?
|
| I don't mind doing it but at the same I hate it because
| you're in uncharted territory. Support can help you be that
| second person in the room that has more familiarity with the
| problem than anyone on your team.
|
| Also I've used Postgres and MSSQL and MSSQL has more
| features. Postgres only got non-materialized CTEs I think
| like 10-15 years after MSSQL had them, for example.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you have a problem with an Oracle database you can have a
| support person on your place in a very short time, willing to
| share all the kinds of knowledge that Postgres developers
| publish on their site from the start (and nothing more, but
| they will answer your specific technical questions, what is
| good because with Oracle, you will have a lot of them).
|
| I still don't know what is the fuzz with SQL Server support.
| AFAIK, no Microsoft support will ever help you in any way.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| But you see, it doesn't matter if they don't actually help
| you. The bosses want to hear that you talked to the vendor,
| and it gives them an out and someone else to finger point
| at when issues happen.
|
| The fact that SV hasn't really caught onto this is part of
| the reason there's not a huge penetration of startup tech
| into huge companies.
| rmah wrote:
| Oracle and many other old-school enterprise software
| companies ARE Silicon Valley. SV caught onto this decades
| ago.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Fair, then the new crop seems to have forgotten it
| blihp wrote:
| It's more a combination of executive CYA and availability of
| resources (employees, contractors and vendors) who know the
| product. The actual support provided, even when you are a large
| customer, often leaves much to be desired. It's usually easier
| to get the vendor to implement obscure feature X than getting
| their (significant/useful/timely) help in putting out today's
| operational fire caused by their product.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Agreed, and I covered this in a few replies, I should have
| put it in my main comment, CYA is the entire reason.
|
| I'm not saying a business surrounding an open source project
| can't make money. I am saying trying to make money by locking
| away features is a bad way to do it. Focus on your product
| and do it in a single stream rather than separating it into
| FOSS and a paid tier. Make your money on support contracts.
|
| Smaller companies that self-support probably won't pay you
| for those features anyways.
| hvasilev wrote:
| There are a million ways in which your business can go belly up,
| there is so much that can go wrong at any point. I see these open
| source startups and I just cannot fathom how clueless MOST of
| these people need to be to build their businesses around an
| ideology.
|
| I guess if you start from a very specific strategy and you make
| sure that the FREE/OSS route is the optimal for the sake of your
| business, it can make sense. Honestly if this happens to me, I
| would probably get discouraged by the track record of such
| companies, and just backtrack into a model with a better one, in
| order to give my business the best possible chance.
| ce385 wrote:
| A 100%. We try to make as much as possible of our online video
| editor (www.typestudio.co) free of charge and try to be as
| transparent as possible in our communication. But with open
| source we could never raise a seed round.
| phkahler wrote:
| Open source sits alongside Free Software. Free Software as
| defined by the FSF is software that respects the _users_ freedom.
| Freedom to use, copy, modify... They do say you can charge for
| it, but never claim it 's a good business strategy.
|
| Consulting. Services. Education. Those seem like words that might
| let you make money. You can attach "open source" to those words
| but it obviously doesnt stand on it's own as a business model.
| bartread wrote:
| > Consulting. Services. Education. Those seem like words that
| might let you make money.
|
| And that's cool but to a very great degree these often boil
| down to an exchange of time for money (unless by services you
| mean SaaS which is really just a product business with a
| different revenue model). You can make a living but you're on a
| treadmill that you can't ever really afford to get off of, and
| it doesn't really scale other than by adding more people.
|
| I mean it's OK, don't get me wrong - it's certainly better than
| a kick in the balls - and you can make a decent living from it.
| But I don't find it particularly appealing: I'd much rather be
| involved in creating products that you can sell over and over
| again. And, if what you've created is of value to others, why
| shouldn't you charge them a fee to use it?
|
| (Btw, I'd also add paid support to your list but, again, I
| wouldn't want to build a business heavily based around
| providing support because support can really wear you down - or
| at least it can really wear me down. It's absolutely necessary,
| but not something I find at all enjoyable.)
| phkahler wrote:
| >> And that's cool but to a very great degree these often
| boil down to an exchange of time for money
|
| So you want to collect rent.
|
| And businesses based on open source want to collect rent from
| the work other people have already done for free.
|
| Sounds exactly like one of the reasons Free Software came
| along in the first place.
| jstanley wrote:
| > And, if what you've created is of value to others, why
| shouldn't you charge them a fee to use it?
|
| You can, but you probably won't succeed if it's open source,
| because people can share it around freely without your
| consent.
| amelius wrote:
| There is a middle way: license your software so that big
| players with more than (say) $1M revenue will have to pay
| for the development of the software, while the small guy
| can use the free version.
|
| > because people can share it around freely without your
| consent.
|
| The nice thing about this approach is that big players like
| FAANG can't really get around it. But it doesn't matter
| since your software is probably already a bargain for them
| (all these big companies are essentially built on open
| source).
| mids_hn wrote:
| Another approach is a source-available license.
|
| The one I'm interested in would be one, where viewing,
| modifying, recompiling the source is allowed, but
| redistribution is allowed only to those who had bought the
| license from all owners of the source and it's
| modifications. It would produce a nice "waterfall" effect.
|
| It wouldn't be open-source nor free software, but most
| people don't really need limitless redistribution, and the
| source would be proof that said software isn't malicious.
| jiofih wrote:
| Aka commercial software. Nothing wrong with it indeed!
|
| Just don't package it with a weird "open" license and pretend
| it's OSS. You can dual license if needed and deal with the
| consequences.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| The real treadmill is the current monetary system. Even if
| you make a product, but revenue doesn't grow at least 15-20%
| YoY (the rate of money printing last year), its value is
| shrinking over time.
| WJW wrote:
| The real real treadmill is nature. Even if you eat today,
| you'll need more food tomorrow. How outrageous is that?!
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I'm fine with eating the same amount of food. My body
| doesn't need 20% more food every year to get the same
| amount of nutrients out of it.
| zokier wrote:
| The sale value of commercial software licenses stems from its
| supply being _artificially_ constrained, which is only
| enabled by the monopoly granted by government. Exploiting
| that monopoly to limit access to the software to only those
| with pockets deep enough to pay for that privilege can indeed
| seen in a negative way.
| phkahler wrote:
| I find it interesting. The reason it can be viewed
| negatively is that the production cost is zero for
| software. Nobody minds paying a reasonable price for an
| item that takes effort to make. But we know software can
| copied for free - barring deliberate schemes to prevent
| that.
|
| Even many businesses consider product design a "cost
| center" and production/manufacturing a "profit center". I
| prefer to think of engineering as an investment in the
| future.
|
| So "open source" as a business sounds to these people like
| the investment has already been done for free, and
| production is free, so we should be able to make massive
| profit! But they're not providing any value unless they add
| something significant.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > And that's cool but to a very great degree these often boil
| down to an exchange of time for money
|
| Isn't that what all business interactions end up being in the
| end? Yes, it is a treadmill, but life itself is a treadmill.
| You need to keep feeding and sheltering yourself even though
| you JUST ate yesterday.
|
| I don't think planning to support yourself indefinitely for a
| short period of work is a healthy expectation. Do you really
| think you can provide enough value to the world in a few
| years to provide for yourself for your entire life?
|
| Having to work consistently is the norm, not a treadmill.
| zokier wrote:
| > Isn't that what all business interactions end up being in
| the end?
|
| Only if you ignore capital. Many business interactions
| revolve around having access to or utilizing capital in
| some way. Renting and financing maybe the most obvious
| examples, but plenty of others too.
|
| The key question is that can/should software be considered
| such capital asset? It being intellectual (or "imaginary"
| as some pundits put it), and not tangible, property.
| ghaff wrote:
| Certainly one obvious example is that, given sufficient
| capital, I can give it to a wealth management person at a
| brokerage, give them some guidelines, and pretty much sit
| back.
|
| You can also become a silent partner in some business
| where you collect a skim of the profits while someone(s)
| else do the work to make sure the business continues to
| produce profits.
|
| I was answering the vein of someone who wants to put in a
| largely one-shot investment of time and continue to
| collect money over a subsequent period.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Capital is insanely cheap right now, and trying to get a
| good return on your investment is not easy.
|
| Yes, you could be a silent partner in a business.... but
| you likely won't get great returns, and you risk losing
| it all of the company goes under.
| ghaff wrote:
| The key is "sufficient capital" obviously. And, of
| course, it's all about diversification and rate of
| return. As you correctly note, being a silent partner in
| a business is riskier than a lot of the alternatives and,
| if it isn't a commensurately higher expected return,
| probably not a good idea.
|
| However, given sufficient capital (what's sufficient
| depends on what sort of income stream you're looking
| for), largely passive investments in various forms can
| produce that. After all, that's what many people are
| looking for when they retire.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, any product/service, probably has at least some level
| of ongoing bug fixes, security patches, updates, etc. There
| are periodically threads on here about creating businesses
| that mostly just throw off revenue. And there are
| invariably people who created a nice income stream for a
| modicum of ongoing effort. But there are very few paths to
| spending time over a year or so to get to a significant
| income stream that's little more work than depositing
| customer payments.
| jkepler wrote:
| > Having to work consistently is the norm, not a treadmill.
|
| Agreed. Work is what creates value for others. However,
| trading one's work for money that's designed to loose value
| over time via the inflation tax central banks impose on us
| all is why so many hard working people feel they're on a
| treadmill that they can't get off. If our money functioned
| correctly as a tool to store value over time, people could
| work, save, and with frugal living could actually get ahead
| _if_ their work consistently created value for their
| clients or customers. There are systemic monetary reasons
| why work often resembles a treadmill.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Inflation has been so tiny for decades. And in fact, most
| Americans are in debt, so inflation HELPS them.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Only 20% of people in the USA have more than 10K in the
| bank. Savings losing money over time isn't relevant to
| most people, they are spending what they earn before it
| matters.
|
| (and, btw, my point is not that people in the USA are
| spendthrifts. It's that most only make enough to support
| themselves).
| varispeed wrote:
| The big problem is that there is no distinction between an
| individual user, SME or a big corporation. The create grounds
| for exploitation of software developers, social divide and
| other unintended consequences. The promotion of open source by
| big corporations is cheaper in the long run that spending money
| on R&D, salaries, taxes as there is always going to be a good
| enough project for such corporation to appropriate and make
| money off of, without having to pay anything to contributors.
| hdkekbro wrote:
| Who are these imaginary foes who are presenting their business
| model to investors with simply the words "Open Source" on a
| single slide?
| taylorwc wrote:
| Early stage investor here. You'd be shocked. It's extremely en
| vogue to start a company and have your value prop be "open
| source alternative to X," without any regard for whether there
| is actually any logic to something being open source.
| adenta wrote:
| I was thinking about this recently. Everyone wants to
| replicate the success of Mattermost.
|
| I think the reason Mattermost works is because the customer
| is an IT department. When you get outside IT, the value prop
| completely vanishes. Regular people buying software don't
| know what open source is.
| bdcravens wrote:
| For every Mattermost, there's multiple RethinkDBs.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Most absurd open source alternative you have been pitched?
| taylorwc wrote:
| I'd feel a little bad calling any out bc it's usually not
| too hard to figure it out if I gave that info even without
| a name :)
| bdcravens wrote:
| I'll read between the lines and assume that means you've
| heard some pretty absurd ones.
| taylorwc wrote:
| Haha I mean nothing that was obviously ridiculous, like
| "Applebee's, but open source" or something. It was more
| just really hand-wavy logic around why their product
| needed something open source, with no really compelling
| answer.
| mcbits wrote:
| I think "because everything should be open source" is a
| fine answer to why something should be open source, even
| if it doesn't answer the different and more important
| question about how the company will make money.
| smashah wrote:
| As an early stage investor do you outright reject "open
| source" projects or would you consider one that's already
| making some money? I've never considered putting it this way
| but I guess you could say the project I maintain is an `"open
| source" alternative to a specific Twillio product` and MRR is
| showing steady/strong growth. But being a solo maintainer is
| seeming to be a strike against me (ahem yc).
|
| What are early stage investors' criteria for open source, in
| your opinion?
| taylorwc wrote:
| > Do you outright reject "open source" projects ... ?
|
| No! I'm bullish on open source, I just think the current
| climate is weird. I have a small vc fund, currently 8
| portfolio companies and almost half have at least some open
| source element to their product offering. I'd definitely
| look at something you're describing, and the fact that
| you're seeing steady MRR growth is a huge accomplishment,
| regardless of whether you ever choose to take vc money.
|
| Happy to have a discussion on the topic if helpful, don't
| feel the need to be in sales mode. You can hit me up if
| interested: taylor at abstraction.vc
| [deleted]
| blueyes wrote:
| Open source is to software makers what Groupon is to restaurants:
| a way to get people in the door, but many of those people are
| not, and will never become, the customers you seek. Every open
| source business sells something else, often a solution to its own
| complexity, such as managed instances.
| offtop5 wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head, I think ghost blog is relatively
| easy to set up, but for $9 a month and you'll handle my hosting
| and my ssl certs, and most people with a bit of disposable
| income are fine with paying that. I just spent $80 on a nice
| meal and a couple of drinks, if my blog is anything like an
| income source I'll have no problem with spending $100 a month
| for someone to manage it for me.
|
| I would still advise students, and other new developers to go
| through the motions of hosting things themselves via AWS or
| whatever. If you can get a Ubuntu instance on ec2 to run a
| public facing website you probably can walk into a tech company
| and get an entry level job. It's not necessarily hard to learn
| how to do these things, it's just tedious. Avoiding the tedious
| drama is how open source companies make money
| bombcar wrote:
| Open Source isn't a business model but it CAN be a support model
| - for the right market the number of companies who will be
| willing to fund features/fixes that the company can't be bothered
| to get noticeable.
|
| It can also be shown as a "backup" - if we fail you have the
| source and can continue to maintain it.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I have worked at a few companies that had contracts written
| such that if we went out of business (or stopped supporting the
| product) they would get access to the source code. We would
| regularly upload our source to Iron Mountain for escrow as part
| of our contract.
| m-ee wrote:
| I've seen this done with hardware as well when a company I
| worked for purchased a very specialized IC
| ant6n wrote:
| What does the ,,source code" for hardware look like? Does
| it also involve patent licenses?
| kevincox wrote:
| "backup" is one of the main reasons I prefer open source. Even
| if it is funded by one company now (and I pay them) there is
| some sort of continuum plan if they go bust. I am not
| immediately screwed and I can consider options such as self-
| maintenance, forks or a migration. This also applies if they
| change the terms or price.
| bombcar wrote:
| The amount of monkey-patching I've done to production systems
| where I don't even have the code (Java is great for this) is
| immense.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I personally believe Java wouldn't have been successful 5
| years earlier, during the time when everyone was encrypting
| their code. It was an inacceptable trade-off before
| Internet. After internet, most software is partly online
| anyway.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Maintenance is a really good point, but we haven't found a
| way to monetize it.
|
| If I gave my software as OSS to paid customers, I'd
| immediately lose most of my other sales and give my little
| implementation secrets to my competitors.
|
| I'd like to be able to say "And for +15%, get the source and
| ability to compile and fix forever". And not lose my business
| in the process.
| bombcar wrote:
| You don't have to use a true open source license- simply a
| "shared source" or something with a clause making it BSD
| when the business ceases operations or similar.
| laurent92 wrote:
| But then, my customer has an interest in making me go out
| of business.
| kemitchell wrote:
| Straw Man
|
| I've seen "not a business model" quipped a hundred times, as if
| that ends whatever debate is going on. I've yet to see anyone
| actually argue that open source actually _is_ a business model,
| as opposed to having their argument bent that way. The author
| doesn 't link to any examples. Who are they browbeating?
|
| I don't see MongoDB arguing that the meaning of open source
| should address financial incentives for developers, either. I see
| them arguing that open source copyleft can be strong enough to
| demand openness from their competitors, as GPL would have in the
| packaged-software era. Mongo have a financial concern, but
| exactly to the author's point about means versus ends, they're
| not trying to write their business into any definition. They're
| reading the definition to cover a license that works for their
| business.
|
| If open source didn't concern itself with business, it wouldn't
| exist. The whole pitch was to business. Cathedral and the Bazaar
| was a marketing manual for selling manager-types. O'Reilly
| bankrolled events and meetings. Early on in OSI history, they
| readily approved several stronger copyleft licenses for specific
| businesses. MPL. Sleepycat. QPL. IPL. RPL. Arguably AGPL. That's
| the history.
|
| JMW does say there hasn't been a successful open core product,
| but he defines success as "ubiquity in the modern data center".
| In business, there's plenty of success between irrelevance and
| market domination. Ferraris and fast chargers aren't ubiquitous
| in modern garages.
|
| What I see here is that open source _is_ a business model to some
| interested parties. That model is add-on services---integration,
| customization, support, hosting---and no other. Never mind that
| dual licensing, open core, delayed release, and others existed
| well before RedHat and WordPress and IBM successes made
| headlines. Never mind that these models had their business
| standard bearers, too. Never mind that they sometimes offered
| support documentation or configurations for hosting that add-on
| _service_ companies didn 't.
|
| The difference now is that the anti-commercial, permissive-
| focused, "open source means I never hear 'no'" faction view
| happens to correspond to the interests of the titans of industry,
| who are all cloud services companies. These companies want to
| commoditize their complements---"open source" means we can reap
| what you sow and sell it to our customers---but not the
| proprietary code they use to differentiate their clouds. They
| patronize the big open source foundations.
|
| We shouldn't be asking what open source _is_ or _means_ , as if
| it's an end in itself. We should be asking what it's _for_. And
| accepting there was never any conflict-free consensus there. We
| brushed all that under a rug in the late 1990s and early 2000s,
| because there was fame and money and a sense of purpose to be had
| selling "open source" as a brand and a "revolution". Now that
| work is done, the victorious allies are squabbling again. So it
| goes.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > These companies want to commoditize their complements---"open
| source" means we can reap what you sow and sell it to our
| customers---but not the proprietary code they use to
| differentiate their clouds.
|
| I've worked with numerous SaaS businesses who run open source
| for as much external software as possible because it has better
| economics at scale. They want tight control of software
| configurations, ability to diagnose problems themselves, quick
| application of security patches, etc. It's not cheap; you have
| to hire highly qualified engineers to make it work.
|
| The approach makes more sense as the business gets bigger, in
| the same way that it makes sense at some point to design your
| own data centers, own hardware, etc. It's therefore not
| surprising to see large businesses go all-in on open source.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I pretty much stopped taking this seriously after they compared
| restaurants to software development. Restaurants have very
| different operating cost structures.
| II2II wrote:
| The article's point is the product is not the business model,
| and the author did not try to stretch the point by comparing
| open source software business models to culinary business
| models. I suspect the example was selected since many people
| aspire to open their own restaurant even though they know (or
| ought to know) the failure rate is atrociously high.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| COVID-19 enters the chat.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Baseball is not a business model either.
| jarrell_mark wrote:
| Open source tends to be used as a user acquisition strategy for
| companies in the growth stage not worrying about monetization.
|
| Once they get to the stage of trying to monetize their newfound
| userbase, they rethink the value of releasing their product as
| open source.
| f430 wrote:
| Open source is as sustainable as a closed business model in some
| sectors as long as you are willing to be creative.
|
| I've invested/funded/donated to several OS projects. I don't
| really expect to make money in most. I do it for the same reason
| I give large tips time to time.
|
| _Somebody has to do it because the value they are providing is
| IMMENSE_.
|
| I ask nothing in return. I give without really thinking about
| maximizing profit. The way I see it is that when you give to good
| cause the universe will reward you in ways you don't expect.
|
| I encourage others who are successful to give to OS projects
| especially folks who work on projects full time with little to no
| way of supporting themselves because they can't memorize graph
| algorithms or do whiteboard interviews or neurally diverse.
|
| As much as I have gripes with Github as a corporate entity, it's
| platform does serve a useful purpose in that it facilitates the
| movement of capital to OS projects.
| ivanche wrote:
| I applaud you sir! I started doing something similar one year
| ago - at the beginning of each month I donate a few $ to one of
| free/open source projects I use (and every month it's another
| project that receives donation). I know that one donation won't
| change author's life, but if enough people do it regularly...
| rapnie wrote:
| The mentioned Redhat article Part 2 is a 404. Here's the archived
| version:
|
| "How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms, Part 2: Open Core
| vs. Hybrid Business Models"
|
| https://archive.is/Yhr8l
| Railsify wrote:
| It's often used as a marketing model.
| zouhair wrote:
| Baking bread is not a business model, a bakery on the other hand.
| pvorb wrote:
| A bakery is a business. Selling the bread to consumers in a
| shop is the business model.
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| Always with the Open-source is not a business model garbage.
|
| Its time to realize that the English Language is not a business
| model either. But from it a lot of economic activity is spawned
| by it, and created through it. The same with open-source.
| sunstone wrote:
| Oh yes it is. But like most products it has its market segment.
| And that segment is a group that requires a certain function that
| is not a competitive advantage for any in the group and wants to
| get that function for the lowest possible cost.
|
| Ok, so much for abstractions. A stark example is that on
| Microsoft's Azure the majority of VM's are running Linux. A lot
| of companies want cloud based VM's and they don't want to pay for
| Microsoft's OS to run them when they can use Linux for free, so
| they don't.
|
| Another example is OpenStreetMap. Many companies (including
| Apple) spend millions a year upgrading openstreetmaps. A lot of
| companies need a mapping function but it's silly for each one to
| carry the burden of creating their own map when they can all
| pitch in and use the final result.
|
| This is the market segment where Open Source makes sense.
| rrdharan wrote:
| These are use cases and examples where open source makes sense,
| not a business (i.e. sustainable profit) model.
| slap_shot wrote:
| SaaS is out sourced IT. Plenty of SaaS could open source their
| entire code base and it would have little effect on sales; people
| would gladly still pay for it to be hosted.
|
| In some categories, having the code open source helps gain
| adoption early in the process.
|
| So yes, open source is not a business model, but plenty of open
| source software is monetized these days.
| xupybd wrote:
| Very true, also it's a way of sucking people in. I run a few
| servers at work, hosting non critical services, such as
| password management, wiki and other things that aren't used by
| many in the org. The day those get used by more than a few
| people we will go paid SAAS as I don't have the time or mandate
| to provide 24/7 support.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > SaaS is out sourced IT. Plenty of SaaS could open source
| their entire code base and it would have little effect on
| sales; people would gladly still pay for it to be hosted.
|
| The problem is that with open source, anybody can be the SaaS
| provider and make the money from the open source software. In
| fact, companies will be more willing to go with either the
| bigger names or providers they have existing contracts with,
| than a small open source company.
|
| SaaS inherently favors the larger corporations.
| musicale wrote:
| > SaaS
|
| > plenty of open source software is monetized these days
|
| One of the most successful models has been to take open source
| software that someone else wrote, add your own proprietary
| extensions and enhancements, and sell it as a service.
|
| Some of the most appealing aspects of open source for
| businesses are potentially reduced labor costs (because much of
| the software development work will be either done for free or
| paid for by others) and faster time to market (because much or
| most of the engineering work has already been done.)
| abetusk wrote:
| I would encourage people to read the article. VM Brasseur has a
| click-baity title, which is fine, but the point they are making
| is actually a bit more subtle. I'll quote from the article:
|
| > There is a great number of potential business models, but "open
| source" is not one of them. It is, instead, one of the many tools
| that can be employed in order to make a selected business model
| work as expected.
|
| > Therefore open source ... does not ... concern itself with
| business any more than food concerns itself with business. If
| there is a business that has a business model that is not living
| up to expectations, and if that business model uses open source
| as one if its tools, it's illogical to blame open source for the
| failure.
|
| The gist of the article isn't "open source and business are
| incompatible", rather, it's saying "don't blame open source for a
| failure of your business".
|
| VM Brasseur focuses on open core specifically, a subset of an
| "open source business strategy", talking about what kind of
| expectations one should have engaging in that strategy, pointing
| to John Mark Walker's post on "How to Make Money from Open Source
| Platforms" [0].
|
| As an aside, I would like to point out that there _are_ successes
| in some businesses pursuing an "open source" strategy, for a
| broader form of open source, either using open source as a key
| feature or because the technology was open sourced, abandoned and
| picked up by someone else. Arduino [1] comes to mind, where they
| used the open sourced Arduino platform, the IDE, the libraries
| and the open source hardware schematic and boards, that was
| essentially abandoned by the original creators and picked up by
| Massimo Banzi and David Mellis. There were other factors to
| Arduino's success, such as focusing on artists and educators,
| there being a need for a cheap, accessible
| electronics/microcontroller platform, selling physical devices
| and various other economic factors that went into making the
| business viable, etc., so maybe I'm being overly pedantic and not
| really contradicting VM Brasseur's claim.
|
| In case people don't know, VM Brasseur is a big proponent of open
| source and has written a book called "Forge Your Future With Open
| Source" [2] and is in the process of writing a new book about
| "FOSS strategy in business" [3].
|
| [0] https://www.linux.com/news/how-make-money-open-source-
| platfo...
|
| [1] https://arduinohistory.github.io/
|
| [2] https://pragprog.com/titles/vbopens/forge-your-future-
| with-o...
|
| [3] https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2021/03/19/coming-
| soon-...
| ghaff wrote:
| Stephen Walli and Jeff Borek have periodically done a faux
| debate at conferences on this topic. (Spoiler alert: They don't
| actually disagree.)
|
| I actually like the "Open source is not a business model"
| framing because, while open source clearly influences what you
| can do with respect to business models and execution, it's a
| reminder that open source is not a singular business model.
| Furthermore, a company's business model/plan will involve a
| variety of things that may not have much to do with open source
| directly.
| matsemann wrote:
| It's really common for Launc HNs, though. This search shows many
| just the last two months:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| (with some false positives) Amusingly, two variants of "open
| source Datadog" the same week.
|
| Are these kind of OS copies successful in YC context? They are
| apparently getting accepted.
| eye8one2 wrote:
| Whats up with all the opensource hate on here lately? Has Bill
| Gates secretly bought this site or something? (User was shadow
| banned for this post)
| detaro wrote:
| in what way is this "opensource hate"?
| bdcravens wrote:
| It's not. It's a useful discussion about the pragmatic
| limitation of open source.
| nadspoly wrote:
| Maybe the pandemic made people realise affording food and stuff
| for your work is nice but open source doesn't come near that
| except a lucky few.
| detaro wrote:
| Same question to you: how is this "opensource hate"?
| adamlangsner wrote:
| It is not a business model. But it is a good communication and
| branding strategy
| seoaeu wrote:
| What this article misses is the presence of bad faith actors who
| make billions from open source but studiously work to prevent
| even a small amount of that flowing back to the companies that
| wrote the software. Kind of like the difference between a
| restaurant failing because they can't get enough customers vs.
| failing because people keep robbing them.
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