12 ms·

Open Source is losing, SaaS is leading, APIs will win…

42 points by vr3690 11y ago

vr3690 11y ago
Came across this article on Medium and wondered the people here on HN think about it. I am not sure about the author's methodology for comparing OSS with SaaS APIs. Looks very pseudo-sceincey. But if there's any truth in the conclusion (that people are leaning more towards SaaS APIs than OSS), I am worried over time it will increase the barrier to entry for building new software thus resulting in fewer awesome stuff unless you have deeper pockets.
sethish 11y ago
If you add a trendline for the term 'Software' you will see that it has been steadily decreasing at the same rate as 'open source'.
justinlilly 11y ago
The three trend graphs at the tops are disingenuous. Here they are in relative comparison to one another: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20... Software as a service is a completely flat line by comparison.
- justinlilly 11y ago
  adding "saas" makes a bit more of a difference: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API%2C%20saas&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20...
  - vr3690 11y ago
    I did the same thing just before you replied. The difference with "saas" is super trivial though.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- majewsky 11y ago
  Another thing: Look at the geographical distribution for "api" and observe a huge peak for Indonesia, stomping everything else into the ground. I'd guess that "api" is some sort of very common word in the Indonesian language.
sklogic 11y ago
I find it quite annoying that recently web hipstors apparently hijacked the term "API", and now everyone assume that by default "API" means something totally different from what it used to.
- vr3690 11y ago
  What does "API" mean to you (or originally meant) vs the hijacked term?
  - sklogic 11y ago
    Wikipedia have not succumbed to the hipstors so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interf... API is an exposed interface of any library, standalone program, etc. It's a very wide term. But stupid hipstors reduced it to their stupid understanding of a web RPC.
    - jo909 11y ago
      You are not wrong, but your tone is very rude. Yes, API means much more than web RPC. But the "web hipstors" are not wrong in calling their services API either. Educating people about the multiple other meanings of that word is fine, condemning people that use it for a limited (but correct) meaning seems very unnecessary to me.
      - sklogic 11y ago
        My tone is rightfully rude. I hate what the hipstors are turning this world into.
- seangrogg 11y ago
  It is somewhat annoying when I mention that React has a "slim API" and people ask for an http endpoint...
- talles 11y ago
  I guess the reason is that web service don't sound as glamorous.
AndrewUnmuted 11y ago
This whole article is predicated on the wrong measurement. When you search Google Trends for Open Source Software as a type of Software Industry [1], you get a much different picture. [1] https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F01pjyj&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F01pjyj&cmpt=q...
- rubiquity 11y ago
  At this point in the game, Googling for Open Source is like talking about oxygen. I don't even think about it. I just breathe.
- andrewstuart2 11y ago
  100% agreed, but for different reasons. I recently realized that I've been mistaking google trends as accurate feedback on the popularity of a subject. It is not. My current thought is that it much better indicates a lack of consensus (or foreknowledge) of the proper source for information about a search term. If, for example, you know that godoc.org is the best place to search for golang libraries, you'd probably just type godoc.org. If not, you'd probably just google "golang rest library" or some such term, adding to the results for golang. Once those sources become well-known and begin being passed around on side-channels (outside the reach of google searches), then google trends is no longer accurate. For any given suject, it's impossible to get a gauge on how much traffic is just going directly to bookmarks or links. Unless you're collecting anonymous usage statistics from a market-leading browser. For example. :-D
donpark 11y ago
I disagree. While SaaS blinks in and out, requires maintenance, and most fading away over time when interest or business model dwindles, open source projects lives on even in orphaned form. Time is on open source's side.
nzoschke 11y ago
> Today, the CTO of a company can spend engineering resources to build their search solution with Elasticsearch or buy speed with Algolia’s SaaS. I think OSS has the long term advantage here. Everyone needs log storage and search. The combination of OSS and highly competitive IaaS will drive this part of the stack towards commodity pricing and little total cost of ownership (setup, and operations) It's already happening. Elasticsearch is quality software. You can provision an Elasticsearch cluster on AWS with a click of a button. You can also store all your logs in CloudWatch forever. This stack costs pennies to run compared to logging services like Splunk. Yes configuring it takes some time but an end state for this container generation is much less config. Now you own your logs and data and search. Not some SaaS vendor. Disclaimer. I'm working on an OSS platform, Convox, with the goal of helping the CTO get cost effective and reliable private infrastructure without big setup burdens and huge SaaS bills.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  I think it just depends on whether you can afford an ops person. If you have one, setting up your own stack makes financial sense, as it'll be cheaper. If you don't have enough ops to justify hiring one, then you might as well pay for the (more expensive per unit) SaaS offerings that will be cheaper purely because they're still only a few services.
  - LamaOfRuin 11y ago
    That assumes the SaaS option doesn't also require some amount of ops. An assumption I wouldn't necessarily bet on when you start using SaaS from multiple providers to satisfy your various needs.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Sure, but SaaS generally require less ops. That's what you're paying for, in the end.
      - LamaOfRuin 11y ago
notacoward 11y ago
Maybe one of the reasons people don't search for "open source" as much as they used to is that it doesn't need explaining any more. Anybody who has reason to care has already been exposed to the concept by now.
aurora72 11y ago
What does Microsoft do these days? Open source many of its software! And OSS is preferred not because it's free & open, because it works and it gets things done!
- cyphar 11y ago
  > What does Microsoft do these days? Open source many of its software! And OSS is preferred not because it's free & open, because it works and it gets things done! I prefer free software because of the fact it respects my freedom. Even if there was a "better" proprietary editor then Vim I wouldn't use it. Stop spreading the wrong message, practical convenience is a side-effect of freedom allowing innovation.
tmbsundar 11y ago
Not quite. If I want to start a project in, say R, I don't think I will start by searching "Open Source". I will search for "R". Here is the trend: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API%2C%20R&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20... So, this analysis is not accurate. Someone searching for "Open Source" might have been prevalent when the OSS movement was nascent. Now I think people will look for specific technologies rather than blanket terms.
- andrewstuart2 11y ago
  Plus, the consensus has been reached by now, I'd imagine, that github, bitbucket, and gitlab are the best places to go for open source software. If you just wanted to explore the world of open source, you'd either search one of those terms, or go directly to the site.
- mavhc 11y ago
  I use "open source" when searching for Windows applications, to avoid the trialware etc
- manigandham 11y ago
  Yes, this is the fallacy of using search terms as the data for any analysis that isn't about search terms.
- ConfuciusSay02 11y ago
  Yeah, I always cringe when people claim to have made some huge insight based on Google search trends.
- jdonaldson 11y ago
  Yeah, you have to be careful which conclusions you reach from these trend plots. By the author's arguments, I could argue that maybe people just won't be interested in software at all anymore in a few years: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API%2C%20software&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20... A lot of these concepts are just too general to search for. That doesn't mean they're less popular, it just means their conceptual boundaries are too big for a single phrase.
drivingmenuts 11y ago
"All this has happened before. All this will happen again." -- the writings of Pythia.
flohofwoe 11y ago
Eh, the search term Open Source is becoming less frequent simply because it has become the default and software that is not Open Source has become the exotic case. Just search on google trends for 'github' which has basically become a substitute word for 'open source' and you see a nicely growing curve.
cies 11y ago
> Open Source is losing, SaaS is leading And what are these SaaS apps mostly built with? Open source software. They usually build on a mix of technologies that can be called an "open source web technology stack". I even believe the current effort of M$ to open source some of it's technologies is geared at making sure those do not become irrelevant in the SaaS-age.
elcapitan 11y ago
It rather seems to me that software that has been successfully established feature-wise as service will eventually get copied as a off-the-shelf OSS software (see the discussion about cloning Slack)? Basically like commoditization of other goods, but in the information economy with zero marginal costs obviously being a free commodity.
StavrosK 11y ago
This article feels like it's saying "measurements show that the sky is actually yellow!". No, it's not. I can plainly see that open-source code is 99.999% of my stack, with a tiny bit of proprietary code (mine, and even much of that is open-sourced by me in library form) on top. If your measurements show that OSS is losing, your measurements must be wrong.
- uptownJimmy 11y ago
  anecdotes != data;
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    That's another fallacy. Anecdotes are data, they're just an extremely weak form. A million anecdotes may be better than a single data point.
tryitnow 11y ago
There's some good points in this article, but those are lost in the false comparison of OSS/SaaS/APIs. That's not even like comparing apples to oranges, it's like comparing apples to apple trees.
cyphar 11y ago
I don't agree that the free software business models are failures. Many large companies need actual enterprise support and licensing to fulfill their business requirements. Just because most start-ups (which is clearly the author's circle of friends) aren't big enough to need such support doesn't mean that it's "failed". Support is a real value add, because it means that you have developers on call that can maintain the system you based your stack on. The fact that the code is free software doesn't make a practical difference to you (aside from moral differences I won't go into here).
norea-armozel 11y ago
This smacks of a complete misunderstanding of SaaS and FLOSS. How did this person even get into software development? Seriously, because to me if a SaaS is using a FLOSS licensed library and regularly contributes to it on its github repo then it's clearly not a matter of FLOSS in decline. It's just that FLOSS as a whole has become the ordinary of software development (just like CAD/CAM is the ordinary of aircraft manufacturing). Also, using Google Trends to prove a point on something that requires you to see actual participation just proves my skepticism is right on this point. Google Trends doesn't look at git commits. Google Trends doesn't look at symposiums or standards organization contributions (cash, research, code, etc). All it does is look at search words. Wow! You found out that people aren't searching that much on the subject anymore, WTG! /s
yarrel 11y ago
This is why digital humanities education is important and useful. It stops this kind of mistake.
mchahn 11y ago
> The increase in development speed is driven by the innovation of re-using existing blocks. Basically, developers don’t need to reinvent the wheel every day. In the 60's, when TTL integrated logic chips appeared, the digital hardware world took off. Anyone could design at a higher level of abstraction. For many years people said that there needs to be a TTL of software. It seems we might be getting there.

42 points by vr3690 11y ago

Came across this article on Medium and wondered the people here on HN think about it. I am not sure about the author's methodology for comparing OSS with SaaS APIs. Looks very pseudo-sceincey. But if there's any truth in the conclusion (that people are leaning more towards SaaS APIs than OSS), I am worried over time it will increase the barrier to entry for building new software thus resulting in fewer awesome stuff unless you have deeper pockets.

sethish 11y ago

If you add a trendline for the term 'Software' you will see that it has been steadily decreasing at the same rate as 'open source'.

justinlilly 11y ago

The three trend graphs at the tops are disingenuous. Here they are in relative comparison to one another: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20... Software as a service is a completely flat line by comparison.

justinlilly 11y ago
adding "saas" makes a bit more of a difference: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API%2C%20saas&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20...
- vr3690 11y ago
  I did the same thing just before you replied. The difference with "saas" is super trivial though.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
majewsky 11y ago
Another thing: Look at the geographical distribution for "api" and observe a huge peak for Indonesia, stomping everything else into the ground. I'd guess that "api" is some sort of very common word in the Indonesian language.

sklogic 11y ago

I find it quite annoying that recently web hipstors apparently hijacked the term "API", and now everyone assume that by default "API" means something totally different from what it used to.

vr3690 11y ago
What does "API" mean to you (or originally meant) vs the hijacked term?
- sklogic 11y ago
  Wikipedia have not succumbed to the hipstors so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interf... API is an exposed interface of any library, standalone program, etc. It's a very wide term. But stupid hipstors reduced it to their stupid understanding of a web RPC.
  - jo909 11y ago
    You are not wrong, but your tone is very rude. Yes, API means much more than web RPC. But the "web hipstors" are not wrong in calling their services API either. Educating people about the multiple other meanings of that word is fine, condemning people that use it for a limited (but correct) meaning seems very unnecessary to me.
    - sklogic 11y ago
      My tone is rightfully rude. I hate what the hipstors are turning this world into.
seangrogg 11y ago
It is somewhat annoying when I mention that React has a "slim API" and people ask for an http endpoint...
talles 11y ago
I guess the reason is that web service don't sound as glamorous.

AndrewUnmuted 11y ago

This whole article is predicated on the wrong measurement. When you search Google Trends for Open Source Software as a type of Software Industry [1], you get a much different picture. [1] https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F01pjyj&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F01pjyj&cmpt=q...

rubiquity 11y ago
At this point in the game, Googling for Open Source is like talking about oxygen. I don't even think about it. I just breathe.
andrewstuart2 11y ago
100% agreed, but for different reasons. I recently realized that I've been mistaking google trends as accurate feedback on the popularity of a subject. It is not. My current thought is that it much better indicates a lack of consensus (or foreknowledge) of the proper source for information about a search term. If, for example, you know that godoc.org is the best place to search for golang libraries, you'd probably just type godoc.org. If not, you'd probably just google "golang rest library" or some such term, adding to the results for golang. Once those sources become well-known and begin being passed around on side-channels (outside the reach of google searches), then google trends is no longer accurate. For any given suject, it's impossible to get a gauge on how much traffic is just going directly to bookmarks or links. Unless you're collecting anonymous usage statistics from a market-leading browser. For example. :-D

donpark 11y ago

I disagree. While SaaS blinks in and out, requires maintenance, and most fading away over time when interest or business model dwindles, open source projects lives on even in orphaned form. Time is on open source's side.

nzoschke 11y ago

> Today, the CTO of a company can spend engineering resources to build their search solution with Elasticsearch or buy speed with Algolia’s SaaS. I think OSS has the long term advantage here. Everyone needs log storage and search. The combination of OSS and highly competitive IaaS will drive this part of the stack towards commodity pricing and little total cost of ownership (setup, and operations) It's already happening. Elasticsearch is quality software. You can provision an Elasticsearch cluster on AWS with a click of a button. You can also store all your logs in CloudWatch forever. This stack costs pennies to run compared to logging services like Splunk. Yes configuring it takes some time but an end state for this container generation is much less config. Now you own your logs and data and search. Not some SaaS vendor. Disclaimer. I'm working on an OSS platform, Convox, with the goal of helping the CTO get cost effective and reliable private infrastructure without big setup burdens and huge SaaS bills.

StavrosK 11y ago
I think it just depends on whether you can afford an ops person. If you have one, setting up your own stack makes financial sense, as it'll be cheaper. If you don't have enough ops to justify hiring one, then you might as well pay for the (more expensive per unit) SaaS offerings that will be cheaper purely because they're still only a few services.
- LamaOfRuin 11y ago
  That assumes the SaaS option doesn't also require some amount of ops. An assumption I wouldn't necessarily bet on when you start using SaaS from multiple providers to satisfy your various needs.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Sure, but SaaS generally require less ops. That's what you're paying for, in the end.
    - LamaOfRuin 11y ago

notacoward 11y ago

Maybe one of the reasons people don't search for "open source" as much as they used to is that it doesn't need explaining any more. Anybody who has reason to care has already been exposed to the concept by now.

aurora72 11y ago

What does Microsoft do these days? Open source many of its software! And OSS is preferred not because it's free & open, because it works and it gets things done!

cyphar 11y ago
> What does Microsoft do these days? Open source many of its software! And OSS is preferred not because it's free & open, because it works and it gets things done! I prefer free software because of the fact it respects my freedom. Even if there was a "better" proprietary editor then Vim I wouldn't use it. Stop spreading the wrong message, practical convenience is a side-effect of freedom allowing innovation.

tmbsundar 11y ago

Not quite. If I want to start a project in, say R, I don't think I will start by searching "Open Source". I will search for "R". Here is the trend: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API%2C%20R&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20... So, this analysis is not accurate. Someone searching for "Open Source" might have been prevalent when the OSS movement was nascent. Now I think people will look for specific technologies rather than blanket terms.

andrewstuart2 11y ago
Plus, the consensus has been reached by now, I'd imagine, that github, bitbucket, and gitlab are the best places to go for open source software. If you just wanted to explore the world of open source, you'd either search one of those terms, or go directly to the site.
mavhc 11y ago
I use "open source" when searching for Windows applications, to avoid the trialware etc
manigandham 11y ago
Yes, this is the fallacy of using search terms as the data for any analysis that isn't about search terms.
ConfuciusSay02 11y ago
Yeah, I always cringe when people claim to have made some huge insight based on Google search trends.
jdonaldson 11y ago
Yeah, you have to be careful which conclusions you reach from these trend plots. By the author's arguments, I could argue that maybe people just won't be interested in software at all anymore in a few years: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API%2C%20software&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20... A lot of these concepts are just too general to search for. That doesn't mean they're less popular, it just means their conceptual boundaries are too big for a single phrase.

drivingmenuts 11y ago

"All this has happened before. All this will happen again." -- the writings of Pythia.

flohofwoe 11y ago

Eh, the search term Open Source is becoming less frequent simply because it has become the default and software that is not Open Source has become the exotic case. Just search on google trends for 'github' which has basically become a substitute word for 'open source' and you see a nicely growing curve.

cies 11y ago

> Open Source is losing, SaaS is leading And what are these SaaS apps mostly built with? Open source software. They usually build on a mix of technologies that can be called an "open source web technology stack". I even believe the current effort of M$ to open source some of it's technologies is geared at making sure those do not become irrelevant in the SaaS-age.

elcapitan 11y ago

It rather seems to me that software that has been successfully established feature-wise as service will eventually get copied as a off-the-shelf OSS software (see the discussion about cloning Slack)? Basically like commoditization of other goods, but in the information economy with zero marginal costs obviously being a free commodity.

StavrosK 11y ago

This article feels like it's saying "measurements show that the sky is actually yellow!". No, it's not. I can plainly see that open-source code is 99.999% of my stack, with a tiny bit of proprietary code (mine, and even much of that is open-sourced by me in library form) on top. If your measurements show that OSS is losing, your measurements must be wrong.

uptownJimmy 11y ago
anecdotes != data;
- StavrosK 11y ago
  That's another fallacy. Anecdotes are data, they're just an extremely weak form. A million anecdotes may be better than a single data point.

tryitnow 11y ago

There's some good points in this article, but those are lost in the false comparison of OSS/SaaS/APIs. That's not even like comparing apples to oranges, it's like comparing apples to apple trees.

cyphar 11y ago

I don't agree that the free software business models are failures. Many large companies need actual enterprise support and licensing to fulfill their business requirements. Just because most start-ups (which is clearly the author's circle of friends) aren't big enough to need such support doesn't mean that it's "failed". Support is a real value add, because it means that you have developers on call that can maintain the system you based your stack on. The fact that the code is free software doesn't make a practical difference to you (aside from moral differences I won't go into here).

norea-armozel 11y ago

This smacks of a complete misunderstanding of SaaS and FLOSS. How did this person even get into software development? Seriously, because to me if a SaaS is using a FLOSS licensed library and regularly contributes to it on its github repo then it's clearly not a matter of FLOSS in decline. It's just that FLOSS as a whole has become the ordinary of software development (just like CAD/CAM is the ordinary of aircraft manufacturing). Also, using Google Trends to prove a point on something that requires you to see actual participation just proves my skepticism is right on this point. Google Trends doesn't look at git commits. Google Trends doesn't look at symposiums or standards organization contributions (cash, research, code, etc). All it does is look at search words. Wow! You found out that people aren't searching that much on the subject anymore, WTG! /s

yarrel 11y ago

This is why digital humanities education is important and useful. It stops this kind of mistake.

mchahn 11y ago

> The increase in development speed is driven by the innovation of re-using existing blocks. Basically, developers don’t need to reinvent the wheel every day. In the 60's, when TTL integrated logic chips appeared, the digital hardware world took off. Anyone could design at a higher level of abstraction. For many years people said that there needs to be a TTL of software. It seems we might be getting there.