6 ms·

Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies o

by avaer 10y ago

Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies over the last several years, napkin math tells me we wouldn't have the project being abandoned for being a "bloody hell" to work on.

Cthulhu_ 10y ago
The main problem for developers is that getting your company to pay for something like developer tools can be very hard and a long project. Ideally every team gets a budget and a credit card to do as they see fit, but in practice a lot of (especially bigger) companies have a whole acquisition process. It's not uncommon for the hours spent in getting a license for e.g. an editor to be far more expensive than the product itself. I believe this is often highlighted again when Sublime Text is in the news again. This as opposed to open source tooling which has no such hurdles.
- taude 10y ago
  Why do you think open source tooling has no such hurdles? At these same "larger" companies, they're going to have an open source review board, and legal involved for each open source product you want to use. Just because you can download and use it on your local machine, doesn't mean you're not violating your corp policy and procedure.
  - hackits 10y ago
    Whats more surprising is the company I work for does have a support agreement with Oracle, although when we've run into problems that do need a technical expert from Oracle such as crash dumps and stack traces we're told to figure it out our-self. Kind of defeats the whole reason to have a closed source system when you're still on the hook and charging out $500 per hour to clients.
    - jonny_eh 10y ago
      and then you can't search stackoverflow for help, compared to using something like postgres
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
        Is it fair to say that kind of people that want to pay for an SFTP client for an automated process probably aren't doing much digging around on stackoverflow?
    - nulagrithom 10y ago
      This problem was well demonstrated at my shop the other day. There's a lot of fear of open source here. We needed to run a simple FTP process. I said I'd write a short script. "You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too." "Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?" "Well, yes... But it's currently not working. We've got a ticket in to fix it." That was months ago. Yesterday it broke and there was no alert. There's also still no logs. Gotta be careful about that "open source" stuff though.
      - lurker456 10y ago
        Open source doesn't allow you to pass the buck. Commercial software with support contracts does. There is also the "look how much we're paying! it must be good" factor.
        brazzledazzle 10y ago
        Many companies are paid handsomely to take the blame.
      - taude 10y ago
        They're also afraid of the abomination you quickly scripted together that the future-you, who no longer works for them, then has to try and figure out.
  - nailer 10y ago
    A good way to address this is have a tools budget. Product Manager has $X per team member. Is encouraged to coordinate purchases and pool purchases together for licenses. Licenses can be proprietary or Open Source licenses X, Y and Z.
azernik 10y ago
It's a classic "public good" - an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay. Things like emergency services, last-mile road infrastructure, and environmental protection work. A special-case of positive externalities. These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  Which makes me wonder why governments don't give more grants for writing open source code. They do it for research, which is another thing that would otherwise probably not pay for itself. I guess if they started doing it a lot of commercial companies would complain to them about the competition.
  - acdha 10y ago
    Governments do fund some things directly – most commonly grants to specific interests – but one other area which helps is allowing staff to work on open-source projects. At least in the United States civil servants’ work is generally considered public domain so we don't have to deal with the IP concerns which many companies still obsess over, which is nice. If you poke around https://government.github.com/community https://government.github.com/community you'll find a lot of government created projects but checking those organizations/ contributors will often turn up a ton of forks of popular tools. One common thing is improving security defaults or accessibility, which are tedious but mandatory for government. If you value this, make sure to let your elected representatives know: I'm sure they hear from the major contractors regularly.
  - oever 10y ago
    Dutch government has explicitly funded quite some projects, e.g. libressl and libreoffice, but compared to budgets for closed source, it's still very little. Here's a nice blog about how the UK deals with this. https://governmenttechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/12/15/next-steps-for-open-source-in-government/ https://governmenttechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/12/15/next-ste... As to infrastructure work, easiest way to help and still profit is to hire one or more developers that explicitly work on a set of FOSS libraries. That way you have that knowledge in-house and a connection into the community. Also, you'll have some highly motivated employees.
sangnoir 10y ago
> Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. The regular market rules don't really apply to Open source software. A lot of viable (or even thriving) open source projects would be dismal failures as stand-alone businesses or startups. Paradoxically, the only way they can provide real value is in their current form of open source projects. I would have given CyanogenMod as an example, but the amount of inept management at the startup there would cloud the issue.
cookiecaper 10y ago
Yeah, I really think that open-source software shot itself in the foot by incorporating unlimited free sharing for every recipient into its mantra. Now everyone thinks that open-source has to mean impoverished, because despite all the happy vibes, very few people will pay for software that they could otherwise get for free. You can make your software "source available", i.e., not open-source under activist definitions but still have a GitHub repo and all that, and restrict [heavy?] commercial use. I think it'd be interesting to see more open-source devs take that route and stop giving away the farm. This will still allow people to use your stuff, developers will get familiar with the tooling and expect to be able to use it at work, and companies that have the dough can be compelled to pony up for a license. On Windows, there is still an underappreciated market for cheap early-90s-shareware-style applications that are < $100 a pop, but I think most of them think that sharing the source means they have to enter the poor house, which is sad. We should show people that there's a way to share your source without bankrupting yourself in the meantime. The GPL almost gets there, as it makes large-scale commercial use undesirable due to its infectious nature, which allows for dual-licensing, but with everything server-side nowadays, those stipulations are much less effective (have to go AGPL).
- egeozcan 10y ago
  There's no shared source license which bans commercial usages but I think the software industry desperately needs one. I'm selling the software and want to enable the user to make modifications for private use and even share those modifications if they so desire = I have to hire a lawyer and hope he comes up with something that stands the test of a trial. Not giving away something for free (as in freedom) but asking for free legal advice may sound ironic but it's not about the money, it's about having something reliable for a very common use case.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    That's typically the purpose of AGPL plus a dual license offering for cash. This will probably require copyright assignments to make it work tho
- alphapapa 10y ago
VeejayRampay 10y ago
No, companies that make billions of dollars in an ecosystem that benefits from said tools and don't pay a dime for the public good are to blame. It's not a problem with open source, it's a problem with a culture that takes and doesn't give back enough.
0x445442 10y ago
Hopefully the author will be able to parlay the street cred generated from PhantomJS by selling future employers or customers on the same napkin math.
edoloughlin 10y ago
Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there Does it have to be a market?
- spiderjerusalem 10y ago
  Amen. Somehow a lot of comments in this thread are blinded to the fact that the 'commons' are not simply subsumed within the 'market'. The logic of commons is quite orthogonal to that of markets.

by avaer 10y ago

Cthulhu_ 10y ago

The main problem for developers is that getting your company to pay for something like developer tools can be very hard and a long project. Ideally every team gets a budget and a credit card to do as they see fit, but in practice a lot of (especially bigger) companies have a whole acquisition process. It's not uncommon for the hours spent in getting a license for e.g. an editor to be far more expensive than the product itself. I believe this is often highlighted again when Sublime Text is in the news again. This as opposed to open source tooling which has no such hurdles.

taude 10y ago
Why do you think open source tooling has no such hurdles? At these same "larger" companies, they're going to have an open source review board, and legal involved for each open source product you want to use. Just because you can download and use it on your local machine, doesn't mean you're not violating your corp policy and procedure.
- hackits 10y ago
  Whats more surprising is the company I work for does have a support agreement with Oracle, although when we've run into problems that do need a technical expert from Oracle such as crash dumps and stack traces we're told to figure it out our-self. Kind of defeats the whole reason to have a closed source system when you're still on the hook and charging out $500 per hour to clients.
  - jonny_eh 10y ago
    and then you can't search stackoverflow for help, compared to using something like postgres
    - brazzledazzle 10y ago
      Is it fair to say that kind of people that want to pay for an SFTP client for an automated process probably aren't doing much digging around on stackoverflow?
  - nulagrithom 10y ago
    This problem was well demonstrated at my shop the other day. There's a lot of fear of open source here. We needed to run a simple FTP process. I said I'd write a short script. "You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too." "Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?" "Well, yes... But it's currently not working. We've got a ticket in to fix it." That was months ago. Yesterday it broke and there was no alert. There's also still no logs. Gotta be careful about that "open source" stuff though.
    - lurker456 10y ago
      Open source doesn't allow you to pass the buck. Commercial software with support contracts does. There is also the "look how much we're paying! it must be good" factor.
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
        Many companies are paid handsomely to take the blame.
    - taude 10y ago
      They're also afraid of the abomination you quickly scripted together that the future-you, who no longer works for them, then has to try and figure out.
- nailer 10y ago
  A good way to address this is have a tools budget. Product Manager has $X per team member. Is encouraged to coordinate purchases and pool purchases together for licenses. Licenses can be proprietary or Open Source licenses X, Y and Z.

azernik 10y ago

It's a classic "public good" - an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay. Things like emergency services, last-mile road infrastructure, and environmental protection work. A special-case of positive externalities. These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.

IshKebab 10y ago
Which makes me wonder why governments don't give more grants for writing open source code. They do it for research, which is another thing that would otherwise probably not pay for itself. I guess if they started doing it a lot of commercial companies would complain to them about the competition.
- acdha 10y ago
  Governments do fund some things directly – most commonly grants to specific interests – but one other area which helps is allowing staff to work on open-source projects. At least in the United States civil servants’ work is generally considered public domain so we don't have to deal with the IP concerns which many companies still obsess over, which is nice. If you poke around https://government.github.com/community https://government.github.com/community you'll find a lot of government created projects but checking those organizations/ contributors will often turn up a ton of forks of popular tools. One common thing is improving security defaults or accessibility, which are tedious but mandatory for government. If you value this, make sure to let your elected representatives know: I'm sure they hear from the major contractors regularly.
- oever 10y ago
  Dutch government has explicitly funded quite some projects, e.g. libressl and libreoffice, but compared to budgets for closed source, it's still very little. Here's a nice blog about how the UK deals with this. https://governmenttechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/12/15/next-steps-for-open-source-in-government/ https://governmenttechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/12/15/next-ste... As to infrastructure work, easiest way to help and still profit is to hire one or more developers that explicitly work on a set of FOSS libraries. That way you have that knowledge in-house and a connection into the community. Also, you'll have some highly motivated employees.

sangnoir 10y ago

> Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. The regular market rules don't really apply to Open source software. A lot of viable (or even thriving) open source projects would be dismal failures as stand-alone businesses or startups. Paradoxically, the only way they can provide real value is in their current form of open source projects. I would have given CyanogenMod as an example, but the amount of inept management at the startup there would cloud the issue.

cookiecaper 10y ago

Yeah, I really think that open-source software shot itself in the foot by incorporating unlimited free sharing for every recipient into its mantra. Now everyone thinks that open-source has to mean impoverished, because despite all the happy vibes, very few people will pay for software that they could otherwise get for free. You can make your software "source available", i.e., not open-source under activist definitions but still have a GitHub repo and all that, and restrict [heavy?] commercial use. I think it'd be interesting to see more open-source devs take that route and stop giving away the farm. This will still allow people to use your stuff, developers will get familiar with the tooling and expect to be able to use it at work, and companies that have the dough can be compelled to pony up for a license. On Windows, there is still an underappreciated market for cheap early-90s-shareware-style applications that are < $100 a pop, but I think most of them think that sharing the source means they have to enter the poor house, which is sad. We should show people that there's a way to share your source without bankrupting yourself in the meantime. The GPL almost gets there, as it makes large-scale commercial use undesirable due to its infectious nature, which allows for dual-licensing, but with everything server-side nowadays, those stipulations are much less effective (have to go AGPL).

egeozcan 10y ago
There's no shared source license which bans commercial usages but I think the software industry desperately needs one. I'm selling the software and want to enable the user to make modifications for private use and even share those modifications if they so desire = I have to hire a lawyer and hope he comes up with something that stands the test of a trial. Not giving away something for free (as in freedom) but asking for free legal advice may sound ironic but it's not about the money, it's about having something reliable for a very common use case.
- x0x0 10y ago
  That's typically the purpose of AGPL plus a dual license offering for cash. This will probably require copyright assignments to make it work tho
alphapapa 10y ago

VeejayRampay 10y ago

No, companies that make billions of dollars in an ecosystem that benefits from said tools and don't pay a dime for the public good are to blame. It's not a problem with open source, it's a problem with a culture that takes and doesn't give back enough.

0x445442 10y ago

Hopefully the author will be able to parlay the street cred generated from PhantomJS by selling future employers or customers on the same napkin math.

edoloughlin 10y ago

Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there Does it have to be a market?

spiderjerusalem 10y ago
Amen. Somehow a lot of comments in this thread are blinded to the fact that the 'commons' are not simply subsumed within the 'market'. The logic of commons is quite orthogonal to that of markets.