[HN Gopher] Open source is the way out of a tech downturn
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Open source is the way out of a tech downturn
Author : ny711
Score : 72 points
Date : 2022-12-14 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.plural.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.plural.sh)
| arexxbifs wrote:
| Large scale FOSS success is dependant on fiscal surplus from non-
| FOSS ventures and the ability of the US empire to globally
| enforce related legal aspects (licensing). The article correctly
| states that the former is diminishing. Like it or not, so is the
| latter.
| culi wrote:
| large scale FOSS came first and I think it's a rather recent
| phenomenon that people are getting serious about fairly
| compensating the work of OSS maintainers that multi-[mb]illion
| dollar companies are based on
|
| does anybody remember the original online Flash games?
| Newgrounds and Kongregate and all that? It was mostly people
| with hobbies. Passion projects. Rarely did the creators make
| any money off them even when their games got played by
| millions. When in-app purchases became a thing I saw a lot of
| these original flash games turn into mobile games with added
| in-app purchases littered throughout. Nowadays if you visit
| Miniclip or Kongregate and play a more recent game, you'll find
| the same. Either tons of ads or tons of in-app purchases
|
| I think there's a strong cultural effect there once money is
| mixed in. Once upon a time online drug forums were filled with
| people sharing their "TEKs" about growing weed plants and
| freely trading seeds of certain varieties. Now in the aftermath
| of legalization you'll hardly ever find this type of stuff for
| free. I think the shrooms community is in a similar place as
| well.
|
| OSS is now fueling multibillion dollar companies and
| maintainers are starting to demand compensation. Many will
| still contribute for "free" because it looks good on a resume,
| but I really think we're gonna see a strong decline simply due
| to the cultural impact of the transformation of Social Capital
| to financial capital
|
| If you wanna get anthropological about this, I HIGHLY recommend
| this book[^0] about the social capital that fueled the social
| capital system that underpinned the system of traditional
| craftsmanship of Cairo, Egypt and the World Bank's attempt to
| "capture" that value as a market (and the lasting impacts its
| had)
|
| [^0]: Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and
| the State in Cairo
| culi wrote:
| To be clear, I definitely think OSS maintainers deserve to
| have the financial stability necessary to produce their work
| arexxbifs wrote:
| I don't think we really disagree, but I might be mistaken.
|
| > large scale FOSS came first
|
| FOSS, let alone large scale FOSS, appeared well into a long
| period of western imperial surplus and cheap fuel, in a
| unipolar world where the US had unique capabilities of
| projecting power.
|
| > hobbies. Passion projects. (...) maintainers are starting
| to demand compensation (...) the transformation of Social
| Capital to financial capital
|
| Precisely. When times are good, people will indulge in
| activities like that because incentives align differently.
| Maintaining enterprise-grade software for free in a
| contracting economy, on the other hand, will probably not be
| as tempting. Pay the rent or push upstream?
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| 2022 is/was a terrible year for a lot of people in specific areas
| or regions of tech, but was it a terrible year across the board?
| The only fundamental shift I'm seeing is back to some semblance
| of rational thought and expectations, but I've been through a few
| of these so might have different goalposts. For me 2022 was a
| "2000-light" year.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > some semblance of rational thought and expectations
|
| The other day I overheard someone asking when investors would
| stop caring about profit so their company could get back to
| focusing on growth.
|
| It was really a testament to how long we've been in the bubble.
| There are people out there who earnestly don't understand that
| the raison d'etre of a publicly traded company is to generate
| profit and value for shareholders. Their entire careers, which
| may be nearly a decade long, have been in a world where revenue
| growth was all that mattered. I've seen people sincerely
| perplexed with a company's stock drops when they beat revenue
| at earnings while ignoring that their cost growth outpaced
| revenue growth.
|
| From what I've seen we're still only at the borderlands of
| rational thought.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| All ideas that are true generally, when treated as axioms
| (and then devoid of the context from which they were derived)
| eventually lead to irrational thought and behavior. "Modern"
| economic theory and investor capitalism seem to have
| perverted, "a rising tide lifts all boats," into becoming
| accustomed to surfing on tidal waves.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| By "the Way Out of a Tech Downturn", he means that companies
| using more open source can save them money, and companies saving
| money is "the way out of the tech downturn"? And by "tech
| downturn" he means... "destruction of shareholder value", he's
| talking... stock prices?
|
| I honestly don't think this has much to do with any reality.
|
| I don't think any current "tech downturn" or reduction in stock
| prices specifically is caused by company spending on proprietary
| licenses; I don't think companies saving an amount of expenses
| equal to spending on proprietary licenses would have much effect
| on stock prices even if it occured (well, it might harm the stock
| prices of an companies selling that proprietary software if done
| on a wide scale!); and I don't even think that switching from
| proprietary software to open source can end up saving you the
| money he thinks it can.
| tech_tuna wrote:
| I thought he was saying that everyone should use Typescript. .
| .
| globalreset wrote:
| Thank you for saving my time thought!
| DesiLurker wrote:
| how about we go the other way and help out open source
| development by open sourcing codebases of failed companies in the
| downturn and releasing the patents/licences? this would be a step
| one for next generation of startups to build upon. The VCs
| funding current startups (including YC) could implement this
| tomorrow as a policy and create a huge body of work ready to be
| reused.
| WJW wrote:
| I don't think the writer of this article has thought this all the
| way through. Sure, replacing one of the SAASes from your tech
| stack with some self-hosted OSS will reduce your spending (as
| long as you spend less on the operations than you did on the SAAS
| of course). The main problem for tech companies comes when all
| their customers have the same idea and cancel their account in
| favor of OSS alternatives. That would lead to a much deeper
| downturn.
|
| I also wonder how the "use FOSS, it's free!" mindset will coexist
| with the "pay OSS devs more" movement. That will be very
| interesting to watch for sure.
| mjg235 wrote:
| Hey I'm Michael, the author of the article, and I did consider
| this but didn't go into detail for fear of bloating the read. I
| think there's two points here.
|
| 1. Not all software has viable OSS alternatives. The most
| obvious is consumer software, where some self-hosted solution
| is simply nonviable, but even something like Snowflake provides
| a ton of value by offering turnkey petabyte-scalable
| datawarehouses which are operationally complex enough I
| struggle to find an alternative to it (that said many smaller
| snowflake users probably can do just fine with a cheaper
| alternative like Clickhouse).
|
| Where I think the switching will mostly happen is where SaaS
| lock-in has been exploited far too much to create exploitive
| pricing power (looker is the best example of this to me, it's
| really just an admittedly very good visualization tool but
| extremely overmonetized), if there are low-friction self-hosted
| OSS alternatives, people should swap out of those low-value,
| high-cost products and recycle the cash to prevent layoffs or
| better grow their own products.
|
| 2. At Plural we are working on improving OSS monetization
| mainly for self-hosted OSS which is actually very valuable in
| theory (fortune 500s often prefer it for security reasons), but
| usually poorly monetized. This is still early-stage obviously
| but will ultimately be us allowing oss developers to monetize
| for either support or open core features, and us handling the
| licensing and billing in a centralized, low-friction way.
|
| This could theoretically claw back some of the cost savings,
| but if the overcharging is more due to excess pricing power
| from the realities of "cloud" infrastructure and the lock-in it
| creates, there should be at least a large delta remaining for
| users by eliminating that.
| blowski wrote:
| In a utopian world, companies would "take what they need, pay
| what they can".
|
| In the real world, the tech giants will likely dominate the
| open source market, either by donations that allow them to
| prioritise, or by killing other versions.
|
| But is it necessarily a bad thing? It's not perfect but perhaps
| it's the closest we'll get.
| xiande04 wrote:
| > The main problem for tech companies comes when all their
| customers have the same idea and cancel their account in favor
| of OSS alternatives.
|
| That implies that all tech companies have OSS alternatives.
| PraetorianGourd wrote:
| If there is a "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks
| like a nail" example in this industry, this is it.
|
| Open source is not a panacea, in fact it can be the opposite. I
| don't know the opposite of a panacea. But a maintainer can decide
| to fuck right off. And unless your team has the skill required,
| or another maintainer steps up, you are screwed. Businesses like
| predictable, they like contracts, they like knowing in 4 years
| somebody will support them. F/OSS advocates need to recognize
| that.
| gigel82 wrote:
| So... abusing free labor?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If someone gives something away for free, and you use it for
| free, that's not "abuse", that's just... taking exactly what
| was offered.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Until you start asking for free support, free consulting,
| etc. People are generally a-holes.
|
| I stopped working on most of my open source projects because
| of it. I still open source stuff that I actively use / work
| on, but don't actively advertise the projects, and ignore any
| unreasonable request (all MIT, so anyone can fork as they
| please). Not worth the mental health burden, I get enough of
| that from my day-job :)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, you can ask people to pay for support, or you can ask
| them to shut the fuck up. You can also do what they ask
| from you. You are free to choose.
|
| The real problem is that people were sucked into a social
| network when all they wanted was some easy to manage public
| code repositories. If that's a problem for you, fight the
| social network, but this is not an open source problem.
| sibit wrote:
| > I stopped working on most of my open-source projects
| because of it.
|
| I've yet to get any traction on any of my open-source
| projects outside of myself, some old coworkers, and a few
| dozen random people. This morning while looking at someone
| else's semi-abandoned project I noticed there were 600
| unaddressed open issues so I figured I would jump in and
| try to help some people. After answering the same question
| for the 4th time (linking them to the official
| documentation) I started to feel truly grateful that
| nothing I've released has become popular.
| bitwize wrote:
| Or, "How Cheap-As-Free Software Can Help Consolidate More Wealth
| in the Hands of the Bourgeoisie"
| rakoo wrote:
| Which is the reason why I believe non-copyleft licenses are now
| a mistake
| RRRA wrote:
| Always have been . GIF
| vorpalhex wrote:
| FOSS is literally optional. Don't create it if you don't want
| your software used by people you dislike.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there are many faces to FOSS .. maybe one is cute, another is
| more like commodification of industry-core building parts,
| yet another is personal for the author and their realms.. etc
| atopia wrote:
| Realistically, the money is going to the Bourgeoisie either
| way...
| tomrod wrote:
| My memetic sibling in tech, allow me to introduce you to the
| world of democratic socialist policies.[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism
| robocat wrote:
| Could you tell me what you mean by the word "Bourgeoisie"? I
| thought it approximately meant "middle-class" or maybe
| professionals.
| ummonk wrote:
| No "bourgeoisie" was meant to refer to capital owners (with
| "petit-bourgeoisie" referring to small business owners).
| Middle-class are the "proletariat" by Marx and co.
|
| Incidentally, the underclass that many on the modern left
| focus on were pejoratively considered "lumpen-proletariat".
| peatfreak wrote:
| > Incidentally, the underclass that many on the modern left
| focus on were pejoratively considered "lumpen-proletariat".
|
| This is absolutely correct in terms of orthodox Marxist
| theory. It's interesting how "lumpenproletariat" has been
| whitewashed out of modern Marxist analysis. You just don't
| hear this term anymore.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| That's congruent with some of the eat-the-rich movements:
| they end up being the rich steering the poor to attack the
| middle class out of frustration.
|
| High and low versus middle.
| zoogeny wrote:
| This article didn't price in opportunity cost.
|
| It isn't just a $150k/annum expense on an individual SRE salary.
| One should consider the HR time to source candidates and time to
| interview. It would include the time your tech team is brought
| into system design and security meetings, time your tech leads
| spend in 1:1s. It may involve time for your CTO to document the
| part of your systems for enterprise customers who require full
| architecture details for their requisition process. It may
| involve time for your product team, business analysts or
| executives to be retrained on software that is unfamiliar and
| non-standard to them.
|
| Most of these activities slow down critical parts of your
| business which could be focused on generating revenue. A fair
| accounting should attempt to estimate these costs. Consider: if
| you didn't disrupt the business and instead spent the same effort
| on revenue generating product features then how much could you
| earn?
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