12 ms·

Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

205 points by panic 11y ago

dzdt 11y ago
Bad headline. Article is about identifying open source infrastructure tools as an overlooked category for venture capital funding.
- Anchor 11y ago
  Maybe if VCs do not see a way to make a decent return on their investments on common infrastructure (as seems to be the case also with physical infrastructure), we should consider funding that work through taxes. The article refers to Mark Suster's comment that "[OSS projects] directly caused tech’s rapid rise". This work benefits many, and we rely on it to exist - and function (Heartbleed), so there are similarities to physical infrastructure. How about a new civil servant job: OSS maintainer.
  - cpr 11y ago
    Sure, let the efficiency experts at the government find and supply the workers. ;-)
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - forgottenpass 11y ago
    Why should my taxes subsidize the open source toolkits of closed source projects? Unless you're talking about taxing only software startups, I don't want them getting a handout.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - aidenn0 11y ago
      Your taxes subsidize the highways used by commercial shipping companies too.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > How about a new civil servant job: OSS maintainer. https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/ EDIT: > We are transforming government from the inside out, creating cultural change by working with teams inside agencies who want to create great services for the public.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      How wonderful is that site... https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customizing-a-slack-bot/ https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customiz... I can't tell what's more wrong here. The passive-aggressiveness of writing a bot to correct people, or the fact it's going on on a .gov. (And before you scream at me for being a heartless sexist bastard or some such, this would be just as messed up if it were a bot that corrects your->you're. Passive aggressiveness certainly does not improve workplace health.)
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        18F is doing phenomenal work fixing government. I'll let the excessive PC-ness slide. It's a bot. Ignore it.
        scrollaway 11y ago
        For the record, I don't know who they are - I've seen them linked once before but I have no ties nor love for San Francisco and their work is very localized. So I don't particularly doubt their work but I literally just picked the top post on their front page. If they are doing phenomenal work, I'm not impressed :) And seeing as my previous post is predictably getting instant downvoted, I should also state that I really don't care about PCness one way or another. What I do see is that "fixing government" apparently includes policing how people talk to each other in an extremely passive-aggressive way that would not be tolerated in any community I moderate or, really, have ever been a part of. All that in the name of improving workplace communications, which this simply does not achieve.
        11y ago
- anotheryou 11y ago
  thanks, came to the comments just to see if it was about internet culture of some sort or not.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  Yeah. It also, frankly, isn't really a blindspot so much as a known problem by devs that contribute/heavily use OS. We just don't make the financial decisions.
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  Thank you for that spectacular TL;DR. No rational investor wants to invest in something that will absolutely not give them a return. Most open source infrastructure tools lack a business model to capture revenue from its users. So one of several things will have to happen in order for open source infrastructure to get funded: - Investors will part ways with their money, full knowing that they will not see a return. (Unlikely to happen.) - Investors will strong-arm infrastructure projects into restructuring into a for-profit model. (Unlikely to succeed.) - People other than investors will have to step up. (Plausible.) "People" here can refer to independently wealthy individuals, successful companies, the government, or a flash mob of donators (crowd-funding). (Note: Return means capital return, not "social good" return.) For the record, I contribute a little here and there to open source projects (usually in the form of vulnerability reporting) and started several FLOSS of my own (including several cryptography projects for PHP developers to use in their projects). To date, I've made $0 from any of it, and I don't see that changing in the near future for me.
  - adekok 11y ago
    > Most open source infrastructure tools lack a business model to capture revenue from its users. Like youtube videographers? Who start off doing it for fun, and then later monetize it? That evidence shows you're wrong.
    - sarciszewski 11y ago
      How do you monetize, say, OpenSSL?
      - wmf 11y ago
        Wasn't the purported reason why OpenSSL rotted that the developers were fully booked doing paid consulting and had no time to spend on maintenance? http://openssl.com/what.html http://openssl.com/what.html
        sarciszewski 11y ago
- dang 11y ago
  Ok, let's use yours instead. Thanks! If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
  - sarciszewski 11y ago
    I like this one. Thanks again 'dang :)
  - nayafia 11y ago
    hi there! I wrote this article. Glad to see it on HN. I didn't see the original headline, but wanted to point out that the current headline is IMO inaccurate. OSS infrastructure isn't an overlooked category for VC funding; it's just not venture backable. My suggestion was not that VC should fix the problem, but that we in tech should recognize the issue and find another way of supporting it.
    - dang 11y ago
      Well I think we have to go with the author's interpretation. :) Thanks!
      - nayafia 11y ago
        thank you! :)
diziet 11y ago
Ethan Kurzweil at Bessemer and Puneet Agarwal at True both have done NPMs seed and A rounds: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/npm#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/npm#/entity. I've never met Puneet but I know Ethan has a thesis regarding platforms/developer driven projects.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ErikAugust 11y ago
"My Free Software Runs Your Company", reads the shirt that Aaron Swartz used to sport: http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1253014/thumbs/o-AARON-SWARTZ-facebook.jpg http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1253014/thumbs/o-AARON-SWARTZ-face...
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Can this tshirt still be purchased somewhere?
  - striking 11y ago
    This was a Xen T-shirt around 2013-2014 (http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Swag#Hall_of_Fame http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Swag#Hall_of_Fam...) but it seems to be missing from the xen.org store unfortunately (http://www.cafepress.com/xen_org http://www.cafepress.com/xen_org) It seems simple enough, though. Make your own!
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - xorcist 11y ago
      The sleeve says "Best Practical", makers of RT, so that's presumably where he got his.
gopi 11y ago
I think top tech philanthropists like Zuckerberg and Gates should look into this.
- fijal 11y ago
  As you might have noticed, the problem with this thinking is that you (or I) don't decide what Zuckerberg or Gates spends his money on - they decide. However much you trust them to make their decisions, they're ultimately not responsible to you or anyone else how they do it.
- EC1 11y ago
  Zuckerberg has spawned a new era of addiction that we haven't fully realized yet because we are still living in it and have yet to see the outcomes. Facebook is a net negative for society. Social media has replaced the really terrible feelings. When's the last time you were sad and alone for an entire day? Likely never, you can pull out your phone at any given second and plug those feelings, and you'll stop there and never realize what forces those feelings really have. It's the forces of human despair that drive us to do big things. Social media drowns out that force. You can plug any sad moment with a bit of social media and bring yourself from 'sometimes really sad' to 'never sad but always mediocre'. I'm not the best at articulating ideas but I hope you know what I mean. We are slowly all becoming the same person in a different shell and it's terrifying.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mwpmaybe 11y ago
From the article: "But hardly any founder, VC, or big tech employee was aware of the issue, even when they used or benefitted directly from these projects." I just can't wrap my mind around this. As a former "big tech employee" and current founder I am constantly cognizant of the free software that shapes my working day and every solution I implement. From kernels and userspace tools to compilers and interpreters to IDEs and VCS to frameworks and protocols to online services and communication tools... it's nuts how much stuff we all use. I'm living on ramen now but one of my personal goals is to be successful enough to give back in a substantial way to these developers and projects that have been so instrumental to everything we're doing. Do people really take all this for granted? Are we as a community not doing a good enough job of teaching/explaining it?
- freshhawk 11y ago
  In my experience, hell yes this is taken for granted. Completely. "Open source" means "free stuff I take for granted" and the idea of contributing back in any way is viewed as a saintly contribution to a charity (or maybe a PR exercise).
- adekok 11y ago
  Absolutely, many non-engineers are unaware (or in denial) that they benefit from open source projects. In one previous company I worked at, a VP told me how terrible it was that an open source project was competing with them, and that open source (in general) was against capitalist principles. I had to explain very slowly that if he couldn't compete against an open source project... perhaps his company with tens of millions dollars in VC funding didn't deserve to succeed. And, that the company's product depended on using dozens of open source projects for free. Needless to say he wasn't pleased.
- Beltiras 11y ago
  On the average techies know and appreciate it. Business types and CXO's don't (by and large). I wanted a donation budget and my boss replied "what do we get for that?". I explained, after picking my jaw off the floor. No budget thou.....
hwestbrook 11y ago
Seems as though she undermines her whole point with the "Here’s what is true about the “open source is really well funded” myth" section. The open source projects that people/businesses really care about are funded. Isn't a non-funded open source project just one an open source project that no one really cares about? I think there is a really subtle line that she has missed by assuming all open source projects developers use are really important. There probably should be at least three categories: (1) really important projects (funded / managed), (2) projects that are not really that important (not funded / managed by community) and (3) those that are not important (not funded / not managed).
- dyladan 11y ago
  This does not explain things like openssl that are important to just about every app but still horribly underfunded.
- wmf 11y ago
  In recent years it has been discovered that OpenSSL, bash, and NTP (just off the top of my head) were critically underfunded for years.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  > The open source projects that people/businesses really care about are funded. Isn't a non-funded open source project just one an open source project that no one really cares about? It's one that no one with substantial spare cash cares about. Granted, it's broadly understood that people without money aren't actually people, but it's considered gauche to say so out loud.
  - hwestbrook 11y ago
    Are you taking my argument and projecting it onto how people are valued within a society, and even onto how I value people? That would stretch my argument to encapsulate a much broader topic than was intended. You would have to make a lot of assumptions both about me and my argument to do so.
someguydave 11y ago
She completely misses the fact that all of these open source tools run on top of completely closed and secretive hardware platforms. It's true that Intel (for example) is 'well-funded', but Intel has a track record of selling out the user's best interest (even if it is just transparency) for a profitable purpose. And Intel is among the better companies in the OSS world.
jamisteven 11y ago
Having a really hard time with this article. What is the author getting at? Do they not understand what "opensource" means? Are they suggesting we somehow try to monetize the tools surround opensource development languages?
freshhawk 11y ago
This is a type of discussion that comes up often. There are some very important things to consider to avoid causing unintentional harm. First, understand the difference between social norms and market norms (I like this overview: http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-4-%E2%80%93-the-cost-of-social-norms/ http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-4-%E2%...) and how the introduction of market norms crowd out social norms (this is a good overview: https://natewkratzer.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/market-norms-are-crowding-out-social-norms-and-society-is-poorer-as-a-result/ https://natewkratzer.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/market-norms-a...). Now that you have the necessary context, you can understand why I'm extremely doubtful that VC's can realistically have a large positive impact on the open source community. Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. There isn't enough money available to compensate for the man-hours invested in open source projects. Open source projects are successful because they motivate contributors with social capital rewards of some kind and because they allow many different actors to combine human resources to eliminate shared costs/problems. If some kind of wealthy supervillain wanted to destroy open source the best way to do it would be to inject a lot of money into the system, get everyone to start thinking in terms of how much they will be paid per hour to contribute to the project. It would be peanuts. Now the market norms would eclipse the social ones and they would mostly stop contributing. It would probably also be useful to use the funding power to steer projects towards architectures useful to you and less useful to others, if some of those others are your competitors then it may be your duty to do so. This overlaps quite a bit with the existing naive view of the open source community as a big group of untapped future unpaid interns to exploit as well. This, of course, doesn't mean that there isn't promise in funding infrastructure projects developed by paid contributors that are donated to the public on completion. Just that mixing the two models almost certainly won't work.
- adekok 11y ago
  > Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. I'm willing to believe that most open source projects could make substantial improvements if they had funding. See how Patreon has made a huge difference for Youtube videographers.
ralmidani 11y ago
I'm the founder of a startup working on free software applications. Making money off free software infrastructure is hard, because infrastructure is meant to be used by developers. A developer knows (or can learn) how to implement, manage, and maintain your piece of free software infrastructure, so how can you convince a developer to pay you for support? Applications, on the other hand, can be targeted at non-developers. These users can convince themselves or their bosses that your free (as in freedom) application is worth paying for, so you can make it run smoothly and let them focus on running their business. The only solution I can think of is for free software infrastructure developers to set up foundations which can take donations, and for application developers to support the infrastructure projects they depend upon. One of the best examples of this is the Django Software Foundation. I made a donation last month, and I haven't even started making money.
- nzoschke 11y ago
  I agree with your general explanation of the challenges. I like the example Automattic sets. They give away the WordPress engine, but also run it as a subscription service. Running software is hard, and there are plenty of people that will exchange money for an SLA, both service availability and support response time.
amlgsmsn 11y ago
Mozilla with it's hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue comes to mind as a steward of such a initiative. But they seem to have been spending the money in pursuing project without a chance to succeed like FirefoxOS and expensive office and perks. E.g. https://ryanseys.com/blog/summer-at-mozilla/ https://ryanseys.com/blog/summer-at-mozilla/ >Interns at Mozilla, myself included, are truly spoiled rotten. Competitive pay, free travel/housing, free snacks/drinks and catered lunches every week were really just icing on the massive cake that was my internship! >Oh, and did I mention that Mozilla also sent me to Paris, France?! Yeah, it happened. For my final working week, myself and a handful of the Identity team met up in the Paris office and hacked on Persona, and ate… and drank… a lot! http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-mozillas-amazing-office-space-in-san-francisco-2012-3?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-mozillas-amazing-offic... http://ngokevin.com/blog/mozilla-day-one/ http://ngokevin.com/blog/mozilla-day-one/
- Blackthorn 11y ago
  What's wrong with offering good jobs and perks? That sort of stuff is necessary to hire strong.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- shawn-furyan 11y ago
  It's not surprising that compensation and perks of non-profits converge with those of for-profits in the same industry. They are hiring from the same talent pool. Also, at the margins, I tend to think that perks allow organizations to hire more cheaply than wage increases.
  - marvy 11y ago
    > perks allow [hiring] more cheaply than wage increases That sounds like the kind of thing some bored economist must have done some kind study on at some point. I'm too lazy to look for it, so maybe someone else can volunteer. I'll just say that sounds very likely to be true.
rdlecler1 11y ago
I'd love to see something like NIH grants for open source.
jondubois 11y ago
I don't know anyone who has raised VC funding for an open source project. The most surprising example of this for me is Socket.io (https://github.com/socketio/socket.io https://github.com/socketio/socket.io) - This is a hugely popular open source project; but it was never able to get funding on its own merit - To the VC world, it was always seen as a 'side project' of another startup - Not as a fundable project in its own right. The archnemesis of open source infrastructure software are services. By funding services exclusively, VCs have been actively pushing the adoption of services to the detriment of open source... For example, instead of encouraging startups to run their own open source database engine (which is quite feasible), startups may be tempted to use a hosted database-as-a-service instead (because it was advertised to them). Instead of using an open source CMS and host it themselves, they will use a hosted as-a-service solution (even though it's more expensive and often doesn't make sense for this startup economically). Instead of doing their own performance monitoring for their app (using an open source tool), they will use a service instead. Not so long ago, the 'as-a-service' companies which did well were the ones which had roots in open source and actually did a lot of OSS work themselves (E.g. Wordpress, Red Hat). Now you have a lot of as-a-service startups which came out of nowhere, raised a boatload of VC funding and are stealing all the limelight away from smaller OSS (pioneering) projects who have been working towards a specific vision for many years.
- infinite8s 11y ago
  That's only true if you discount or ignore the time cost of requiring an internal engineer to manage those open source systems. A lot of the reason to use external services is to mitigate the operational cost (which can be amortized across all the service's customers), since presumably that systems isn't a core competitive advantage for the company.
- manigandham 11y ago
  How does funding services require that others adopt those services? Weigh the costs and use what's best for your business. Software on it's own isn't a service, there will always be a business case for someone else to do the "hard work" and just run it for you.
- ageek123 11y ago
nzoschke 11y ago
We're working on open source cloud infrastructure at Convox (YC S15). http://convox.com/ http://convox.com/ https://github.com/convox/rack https://github.com/convox/rack The current technology goal is to build a high quality "batteries included" way to setup and operate AWS for engineering teams. We are working for a low complexity, high reliability system: * 1 command installer to provision a VPC, container cluster, and other important AWS services * 1 command to deploy apps to the cluster * Following best practices for cloud architecture (immutable infrastructure, automated updates and rollbacks) * Leveraging AWS's reliability and scalability (apps are ELB -> instance, nothing experimental) I'm heavily biased, but it does feel like important work that could have a huge impact. Companies could save a tremendous amount of time, energy and money if they don't have to re-invent the wheel and build bespoke tools. Programmers just getting started deserve a way to learn and use AWS without needing to know the intimate details of 20+ services. Docker is a great example. We really couldn't build our project without Docker. The amount of expertise that's encoded into the Docker API, documentation and growing ecosystem is amazing. When every computer and server talks the Docker API, we all can focus more on our business and less on the systems that run it.
- bobwaycott 11y ago
  Doesn't running on AWS make this decidedly and automatically not open-source infrastructure? [edit]—typos
  - hueving 11y ago
    I agree, it sounds like an open source tool to help lock you in to closed source infrastructure. Maybe the author meant any open source relevant to infrastructure even if not infrastructure itself?
  - nl 11y ago
    By the examples given in the linked article I'd say something running against AWS qualifies. (I'd assume that AWS is just an initial implementation anyway - and clearly that makes sense in this market)
  - nzoschke 11y ago
dkuebric 11y ago
What about chef? Mesos? Docker? Sysdig? Drupal? Mongodb? Isn't there a lot of infrastructure software that is maintained or outright developed by VC-funded entities?
alexnewman 11y ago
cloudera...?
agibsonccc 11y ago
There seems to be a lot of confusion around open source projects vs companies. There are plenty of for profit companies around open source software that are venture backed: Mesos(mesosphere) Spark(Databricks) Flink (Data Artisans) Zeppelin (NFLabs) Scala (typesafe) Linux (Red hat) Hadoop (Horton, Cloudera, MapR) Elasticsearch (Elastic) PredictionIO (PredictionIO Inc) Meteor (Meteor Inc) Deeplearning4j (My company skymind) RethinkDB(RethinkDB inc) Redis (Redis Labs) Wordpress(Automattic) Drupal(Acquia) Docker (docker inc) Coreos (coreos inc) NGINX(nginx inc) and the list goes on! Acquired companies also include springsource (VMWare) , jboss (redhat), and ansible (redhat) Lastly, there's open source from companies such as facebook where the goal is likely hiring. By open sourcing internal tools, it's easier to onboard new devs for recruiting. If you like their tools why not work there? The key distinction people are missing is that these companies don't monetize open source directly. Instead open source is used as a means of building a user base that will indirectly generate revenue in other ways such as support, licensing solutions around or on top of the software (open core), or through some form of consulting. FOSS such as the GNU software is a different beast where the goal isn't profit. I think the confusion is: we can all use the software provided by these companies for free (depending on the context/license) without paying them and contribute back in other ways such as bug reports and the like. The other thing here is individual devs monetizing their singular github repos. There's no reason you can't charge for support or consulting. Radim @ gensim does exactly that and he does fine. Just because you can git clone a repo doesn't mean you can use it effectively. You typically seek support via community or commercial. There's no reason both can't exist and they both do. I hope that helps a bit!
- ageek123 11y ago
  > The key distinction people are missing is that these companies don't monetize open source directly. Instead open source is used as a means of building a user base that will indirectly generate revenue in other ways This isn't a distinction, it's the definition of open source. By definition if you have an open source company, you're making money through some channel other than keeping the software proprietary and selling binaries of it. So your list quite rightly invalidates the author's claim--it's not just some subtle distinction that was ignored, it's proof that you can indeed make money from open source software.
wildmXranat 11y ago
So I like everything that Zed Shaw wrote on this topic before. Whether his points were mostly or somewhat correlated with her point of view, I don't remember, but it was full of great ideas. His project Mongrel, allowed other for profit Ruby projects exist in the way that the community needed. A good analog of getting paid with 'free to use' theory are calculators. We know that 2 + 2 is 4. The theory is free and out there. If you want a thing that does the calculation for you, then you gotta pay $5 for a calculator. CS theory is similar. Each tool or abstraction builds on a previous one. While we can't charge at each step of abstraction, we can at least license accordingly to encourage sharing of profits made from it's use.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Got a link to a comparable Zed Shaw post you were thinking about? I've only read a few of his but enjoyed them.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

205 points by panic 11y ago

dzdt 11y ago

Bad headline. Article is about identifying open source infrastructure tools as an overlooked category for venture capital funding.

Anchor 11y ago
Maybe if VCs do not see a way to make a decent return on their investments on common infrastructure (as seems to be the case also with physical infrastructure), we should consider funding that work through taxes. The article refers to Mark Suster's comment that "[OSS projects] directly caused tech’s rapid rise". This work benefits many, and we rely on it to exist - and function (Heartbleed), so there are similarities to physical infrastructure. How about a new civil servant job: OSS maintainer.
- cpr 11y ago
  Sure, let the efficiency experts at the government find and supply the workers. ;-)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  Why should my taxes subsidize the open source toolkits of closed source projects? Unless you're talking about taxing only software startups, I don't want them getting a handout.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - aidenn0 11y ago
    Your taxes subsidize the highways used by commercial shipping companies too.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > How about a new civil servant job: OSS maintainer. https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/ EDIT: > We are transforming government from the inside out, creating cultural change by working with teams inside agencies who want to create great services for the public.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    How wonderful is that site... https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customizing-a-slack-bot/ https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customiz... I can't tell what's more wrong here. The passive-aggressiveness of writing a bot to correct people, or the fact it's going on on a .gov. (And before you scream at me for being a heartless sexist bastard or some such, this would be just as messed up if it were a bot that corrects your->you're. Passive aggressiveness certainly does not improve workplace health.)
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      18F is doing phenomenal work fixing government. I'll let the excessive PC-ness slide. It's a bot. Ignore it.
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        For the record, I don't know who they are - I've seen them linked once before but I have no ties nor love for San Francisco and their work is very localized. So I don't particularly doubt their work but I literally just picked the top post on their front page. If they are doing phenomenal work, I'm not impressed :) And seeing as my previous post is predictably getting instant downvoted, I should also state that I really don't care about PCness one way or another. What I do see is that "fixing government" apparently includes policing how people talk to each other in an extremely passive-aggressive way that would not be tolerated in any community I moderate or, really, have ever been a part of. All that in the name of improving workplace communications, which this simply does not achieve.
        11y ago
anotheryou 11y ago
thanks, came to the comments just to see if it was about internet culture of some sort or not.
fweespeech 11y ago
Yeah. It also, frankly, isn't really a blindspot so much as a known problem by devs that contribute/heavily use OS. We just don't make the financial decisions.
sarciszewski 11y ago
Thank you for that spectacular TL;DR. No rational investor wants to invest in something that will absolutely not give them a return. Most open source infrastructure tools lack a business model to capture revenue from its users. So one of several things will have to happen in order for open source infrastructure to get funded: - Investors will part ways with their money, full knowing that they will not see a return. (Unlikely to happen.) - Investors will strong-arm infrastructure projects into restructuring into a for-profit model. (Unlikely to succeed.) - People other than investors will have to step up. (Plausible.) "People" here can refer to independently wealthy individuals, successful companies, the government, or a flash mob of donators (crowd-funding). (Note: Return means capital return, not "social good" return.) For the record, I contribute a little here and there to open source projects (usually in the form of vulnerability reporting) and started several FLOSS of my own (including several cryptography projects for PHP developers to use in their projects). To date, I've made $0 from any of it, and I don't see that changing in the near future for me.
- adekok 11y ago
  > Most open source infrastructure tools lack a business model to capture revenue from its users. Like youtube videographers? Who start off doing it for fun, and then later monetize it? That evidence shows you're wrong.
  - sarciszewski 11y ago
    How do you monetize, say, OpenSSL?
    - wmf 11y ago
      Wasn't the purported reason why OpenSSL rotted that the developers were fully booked doing paid consulting and had no time to spend on maintenance? http://openssl.com/what.html http://openssl.com/what.html
      - sarciszewski 11y ago
dang 11y ago
Ok, let's use yours instead. Thanks! If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  I like this one. Thanks again 'dang :)
- nayafia 11y ago
  hi there! I wrote this article. Glad to see it on HN. I didn't see the original headline, but wanted to point out that the current headline is IMO inaccurate. OSS infrastructure isn't an overlooked category for VC funding; it's just not venture backable. My suggestion was not that VC should fix the problem, but that we in tech should recognize the issue and find another way of supporting it.
  - dang 11y ago
    Well I think we have to go with the author's interpretation. :) Thanks!
    - nayafia 11y ago
      thank you! :)

diziet 11y ago

Ethan Kurzweil at Bessemer and Puneet Agarwal at True both have done NPMs seed and A rounds: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/npm#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/npm#/entity. I've never met Puneet but I know Ethan has a thesis regarding platforms/developer driven projects.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

ErikAugust 11y ago

"My Free Software Runs Your Company", reads the shirt that Aaron Swartz used to sport: http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1253014/thumbs/o-AARON-SWARTZ-facebook.jpg http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1253014/thumbs/o-AARON-SWARTZ-face...

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Can this tshirt still be purchased somewhere?
- striking 11y ago
  This was a Xen T-shirt around 2013-2014 (http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Swag#Hall_of_Fame http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Swag#Hall_of_Fam...) but it seems to be missing from the xen.org store unfortunately (http://www.cafepress.com/xen_org http://www.cafepress.com/xen_org) It seems simple enough, though. Make your own!
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  - xorcist 11y ago
    The sleeve says "Best Practical", makers of RT, so that's presumably where he got his.

gopi 11y ago

I think top tech philanthropists like Zuckerberg and Gates should look into this.

fijal 11y ago
As you might have noticed, the problem with this thinking is that you (or I) don't decide what Zuckerberg or Gates spends his money on - they decide. However much you trust them to make their decisions, they're ultimately not responsible to you or anyone else how they do it.
EC1 11y ago
Zuckerberg has spawned a new era of addiction that we haven't fully realized yet because we are still living in it and have yet to see the outcomes. Facebook is a net negative for society. Social media has replaced the really terrible feelings. When's the last time you were sad and alone for an entire day? Likely never, you can pull out your phone at any given second and plug those feelings, and you'll stop there and never realize what forces those feelings really have. It's the forces of human despair that drive us to do big things. Social media drowns out that force. You can plug any sad moment with a bit of social media and bring yourself from 'sometimes really sad' to 'never sad but always mediocre'. I'm not the best at articulating ideas but I hope you know what I mean. We are slowly all becoming the same person in a different shell and it's terrifying.

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mwpmaybe 11y ago

From the article: "But hardly any founder, VC, or big tech employee was aware of the issue, even when they used or benefitted directly from these projects." I just can't wrap my mind around this. As a former "big tech employee" and current founder I am constantly cognizant of the free software that shapes my working day and every solution I implement. From kernels and userspace tools to compilers and interpreters to IDEs and VCS to frameworks and protocols to online services and communication tools... it's nuts how much stuff we all use. I'm living on ramen now but one of my personal goals is to be successful enough to give back in a substantial way to these developers and projects that have been so instrumental to everything we're doing. Do people really take all this for granted? Are we as a community not doing a good enough job of teaching/explaining it?

freshhawk 11y ago
In my experience, hell yes this is taken for granted. Completely. "Open source" means "free stuff I take for granted" and the idea of contributing back in any way is viewed as a saintly contribution to a charity (or maybe a PR exercise).
adekok 11y ago
Absolutely, many non-engineers are unaware (or in denial) that they benefit from open source projects. In one previous company I worked at, a VP told me how terrible it was that an open source project was competing with them, and that open source (in general) was against capitalist principles. I had to explain very slowly that if he couldn't compete against an open source project... perhaps his company with tens of millions dollars in VC funding didn't deserve to succeed. And, that the company's product depended on using dozens of open source projects for free. Needless to say he wasn't pleased.
Beltiras 11y ago
On the average techies know and appreciate it. Business types and CXO's don't (by and large). I wanted a donation budget and my boss replied "what do we get for that?". I explained, after picking my jaw off the floor. No budget thou.....

hwestbrook 11y ago

Seems as though she undermines her whole point with the "Here’s what is true about the “open source is really well funded” myth" section. The open source projects that people/businesses really care about are funded. Isn't a non-funded open source project just one an open source project that no one really cares about? I think there is a really subtle line that she has missed by assuming all open source projects developers use are really important. There probably should be at least three categories: (1) really important projects (funded / managed), (2) projects that are not really that important (not funded / managed by community) and (3) those that are not important (not funded / not managed).

dyladan 11y ago
This does not explain things like openssl that are important to just about every app but still horribly underfunded.
wmf 11y ago
In recent years it has been discovered that OpenSSL, bash, and NTP (just off the top of my head) were critically underfunded for years.
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PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> The open source projects that people/businesses really care about are funded. Isn't a non-funded open source project just one an open source project that no one really cares about? It's one that no one with substantial spare cash cares about. Granted, it's broadly understood that people without money aren't actually people, but it's considered gauche to say so out loud.
- hwestbrook 11y ago
  Are you taking my argument and projecting it onto how people are valued within a society, and even onto how I value people? That would stretch my argument to encapsulate a much broader topic than was intended. You would have to make a lot of assumptions both about me and my argument to do so.

someguydave 11y ago

She completely misses the fact that all of these open source tools run on top of completely closed and secretive hardware platforms. It's true that Intel (for example) is 'well-funded', but Intel has a track record of selling out the user's best interest (even if it is just transparency) for a profitable purpose. And Intel is among the better companies in the OSS world.

jamisteven 11y ago

Having a really hard time with this article. What is the author getting at? Do they not understand what "opensource" means? Are they suggesting we somehow try to monetize the tools surround opensource development languages?

freshhawk 11y ago

This is a type of discussion that comes up often. There are some very important things to consider to avoid causing unintentional harm. First, understand the difference between social norms and market norms (I like this overview: http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-4-%E2%80%93-the-cost-of-social-norms/ http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-4-%E2%...) and how the introduction of market norms crowd out social norms (this is a good overview: https://natewkratzer.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/market-norms-are-crowding-out-social-norms-and-society-is-poorer-as-a-result/ https://natewkratzer.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/market-norms-a...). Now that you have the necessary context, you can understand why I'm extremely doubtful that VC's can realistically have a large positive impact on the open source community. Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. There isn't enough money available to compensate for the man-hours invested in open source projects. Open source projects are successful because they motivate contributors with social capital rewards of some kind and because they allow many different actors to combine human resources to eliminate shared costs/problems. If some kind of wealthy supervillain wanted to destroy open source the best way to do it would be to inject a lot of money into the system, get everyone to start thinking in terms of how much they will be paid per hour to contribute to the project. It would be peanuts. Now the market norms would eclipse the social ones and they would mostly stop contributing. It would probably also be useful to use the funding power to steer projects towards architectures useful to you and less useful to others, if some of those others are your competitors then it may be your duty to do so. This overlaps quite a bit with the existing naive view of the open source community as a big group of untapped future unpaid interns to exploit as well. This, of course, doesn't mean that there isn't promise in funding infrastructure projects developed by paid contributors that are donated to the public on completion. Just that mixing the two models almost certainly won't work.

adekok 11y ago
> Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. I'm willing to believe that most open source projects could make substantial improvements if they had funding. See how Patreon has made a huge difference for Youtube videographers.

ralmidani 11y ago

I'm the founder of a startup working on free software applications. Making money off free software infrastructure is hard, because infrastructure is meant to be used by developers. A developer knows (or can learn) how to implement, manage, and maintain your piece of free software infrastructure, so how can you convince a developer to pay you for support? Applications, on the other hand, can be targeted at non-developers. These users can convince themselves or their bosses that your free (as in freedom) application is worth paying for, so you can make it run smoothly and let them focus on running their business. The only solution I can think of is for free software infrastructure developers to set up foundations which can take donations, and for application developers to support the infrastructure projects they depend upon. One of the best examples of this is the Django Software Foundation. I made a donation last month, and I haven't even started making money.

nzoschke 11y ago
I agree with your general explanation of the challenges. I like the example Automattic sets. They give away the WordPress engine, but also run it as a subscription service. Running software is hard, and there are plenty of people that will exchange money for an SLA, both service availability and support response time.

amlgsmsn 11y ago

Mozilla with it's hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue comes to mind as a steward of such a initiative. But they seem to have been spending the money in pursuing project without a chance to succeed like FirefoxOS and expensive office and perks. E.g. https://ryanseys.com/blog/summer-at-mozilla/ https://ryanseys.com/blog/summer-at-mozilla/ >Interns at Mozilla, myself included, are truly spoiled rotten. Competitive pay, free travel/housing, free snacks/drinks and catered lunches every week were really just icing on the massive cake that was my internship! >Oh, and did I mention that Mozilla also sent me to Paris, France?! Yeah, it happened. For my final working week, myself and a handful of the Identity team met up in the Paris office and hacked on Persona, and ate… and drank… a lot! http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-mozillas-amazing-office-space-in-san-francisco-2012-3?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-mozillas-amazing-offic... http://ngokevin.com/blog/mozilla-day-one/ http://ngokevin.com/blog/mozilla-day-one/

Blackthorn 11y ago
What's wrong with offering good jobs and perks? That sort of stuff is necessary to hire strong.
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shawn-furyan 11y ago
It's not surprising that compensation and perks of non-profits converge with those of for-profits in the same industry. They are hiring from the same talent pool. Also, at the margins, I tend to think that perks allow organizations to hire more cheaply than wage increases.
- marvy 11y ago
  > perks allow [hiring] more cheaply than wage increases That sounds like the kind of thing some bored economist must have done some kind study on at some point. I'm too lazy to look for it, so maybe someone else can volunteer. I'll just say that sounds very likely to be true.

rdlecler1 11y ago

I'd love to see something like NIH grants for open source.

jondubois 11y ago

I don't know anyone who has raised VC funding for an open source project. The most surprising example of this for me is Socket.io (https://github.com/socketio/socket.io https://github.com/socketio/socket.io) - This is a hugely popular open source project; but it was never able to get funding on its own merit - To the VC world, it was always seen as a 'side project' of another startup - Not as a fundable project in its own right. The archnemesis of open source infrastructure software are services. By funding services exclusively, VCs have been actively pushing the adoption of services to the detriment of open source... For example, instead of encouraging startups to run their own open source database engine (which is quite feasible), startups may be tempted to use a hosted database-as-a-service instead (because it was advertised to them). Instead of using an open source CMS and host it themselves, they will use a hosted as-a-service solution (even though it's more expensive and often doesn't make sense for this startup economically). Instead of doing their own performance monitoring for their app (using an open source tool), they will use a service instead. Not so long ago, the 'as-a-service' companies which did well were the ones which had roots in open source and actually did a lot of OSS work themselves (E.g. Wordpress, Red Hat). Now you have a lot of as-a-service startups which came out of nowhere, raised a boatload of VC funding and are stealing all the limelight away from smaller OSS (pioneering) projects who have been working towards a specific vision for many years.

infinite8s 11y ago
That's only true if you discount or ignore the time cost of requiring an internal engineer to manage those open source systems. A lot of the reason to use external services is to mitigate the operational cost (which can be amortized across all the service's customers), since presumably that systems isn't a core competitive advantage for the company.
manigandham 11y ago
How does funding services require that others adopt those services? Weigh the costs and use what's best for your business. Software on it's own isn't a service, there will always be a business case for someone else to do the "hard work" and just run it for you.
ageek123 11y ago

nzoschke 11y ago

We're working on open source cloud infrastructure at Convox (YC S15). http://convox.com/ http://convox.com/ https://github.com/convox/rack https://github.com/convox/rack The current technology goal is to build a high quality "batteries included" way to setup and operate AWS for engineering teams. We are working for a low complexity, high reliability system: * 1 command installer to provision a VPC, container cluster, and other important AWS services * 1 command to deploy apps to the cluster * Following best practices for cloud architecture (immutable infrastructure, automated updates and rollbacks) * Leveraging AWS's reliability and scalability (apps are ELB -> instance, nothing experimental) I'm heavily biased, but it does feel like important work that could have a huge impact. Companies could save a tremendous amount of time, energy and money if they don't have to re-invent the wheel and build bespoke tools. Programmers just getting started deserve a way to learn and use AWS without needing to know the intimate details of 20+ services. Docker is a great example. We really couldn't build our project without Docker. The amount of expertise that's encoded into the Docker API, documentation and growing ecosystem is amazing. When every computer and server talks the Docker API, we all can focus more on our business and less on the systems that run it.

bobwaycott 11y ago
Doesn't running on AWS make this decidedly and automatically not open-source infrastructure? [edit]—typos
- hueving 11y ago
  I agree, it sounds like an open source tool to help lock you in to closed source infrastructure. Maybe the author meant any open source relevant to infrastructure even if not infrastructure itself?
- nl 11y ago
  By the examples given in the linked article I'd say something running against AWS qualifies. (I'd assume that AWS is just an initial implementation anyway - and clearly that makes sense in this market)
- nzoschke 11y ago

dkuebric 11y ago

What about chef? Mesos? Docker? Sysdig? Drupal? Mongodb? Isn't there a lot of infrastructure software that is maintained or outright developed by VC-funded entities?

alexnewman 11y ago

cloudera...?

agibsonccc 11y ago

There seems to be a lot of confusion around open source projects vs companies. There are plenty of for profit companies around open source software that are venture backed: Mesos(mesosphere) Spark(Databricks) Flink (Data Artisans) Zeppelin (NFLabs) Scala (typesafe) Linux (Red hat) Hadoop (Horton, Cloudera, MapR) Elasticsearch (Elastic) PredictionIO (PredictionIO Inc) Meteor (Meteor Inc) Deeplearning4j (My company skymind) RethinkDB(RethinkDB inc) Redis (Redis Labs) Wordpress(Automattic) Drupal(Acquia) Docker (docker inc) Coreos (coreos inc) NGINX(nginx inc) and the list goes on! Acquired companies also include springsource (VMWare) , jboss (redhat), and ansible (redhat) Lastly, there's open source from companies such as facebook where the goal is likely hiring. By open sourcing internal tools, it's easier to onboard new devs for recruiting. If you like their tools why not work there? The key distinction people are missing is that these companies don't monetize open source directly. Instead open source is used as a means of building a user base that will indirectly generate revenue in other ways such as support, licensing solutions around or on top of the software (open core), or through some form of consulting. FOSS such as the GNU software is a different beast where the goal isn't profit. I think the confusion is: we can all use the software provided by these companies for free (depending on the context/license) without paying them and contribute back in other ways such as bug reports and the like. The other thing here is individual devs monetizing their singular github repos. There's no reason you can't charge for support or consulting. Radim @ gensim does exactly that and he does fine. Just because you can git clone a repo doesn't mean you can use it effectively. You typically seek support via community or commercial. There's no reason both can't exist and they both do. I hope that helps a bit!

ageek123 11y ago
> The key distinction people are missing is that these companies don't monetize open source directly. Instead open source is used as a means of building a user base that will indirectly generate revenue in other ways This isn't a distinction, it's the definition of open source. By definition if you have an open source company, you're making money through some channel other than keeping the software proprietary and selling binaries of it. So your list quite rightly invalidates the author's claim--it's not just some subtle distinction that was ignored, it's proof that you can indeed make money from open source software.

wildmXranat 11y ago

So I like everything that Zed Shaw wrote on this topic before. Whether his points were mostly or somewhat correlated with her point of view, I don't remember, but it was full of great ideas. His project Mongrel, allowed other for profit Ruby projects exist in the way that the community needed. A good analog of getting paid with 'free to use' theory are calculators. We know that 2 + 2 is 4. The theory is free and out there. If you want a thing that does the calculation for you, then you gotta pay $5 for a calculator. CS theory is similar. Each tool or abstraction builds on a previous one. While we can't charge at each step of abstraction, we can at least license accordingly to encourage sharing of profits made from it's use.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Got a link to a comparable Zed Shaw post you were thinking about? I've only read a few of his but enjoyed them.

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