4 ms·

I've been wondering whether a for-pay alternative to the open-source ecosystem could be developed. The problem seems to be that open-source gratis software con

I've been wondering whether a for-pay alternative to the open-source ecosystem could be developed. The problem seems to be that open-source gratis software contributes nearly zero friction to a company building out its tech, so any alternative would have to compete against that near-zero friction. I just don't see each company negotiating separate prices with 100,000 package maintainers to use all of their software on a custom linux distro just for one of their internal servers or whatever. It's a tremendous amount of friction for each company to bear. If that friction could be eliminated, while keeping a requirement to pay for use of the software, then I think a non-gratis ecosystem could dwarf the gratis software world within two or three years from its launch.

wongarsu 8y ago
How would that be different from the regular Microsoft Ecosystem? I can spin up a quick testserver using Windows Server, running an IIS webserver and Microsoft SQL Server, with my software stack written in C#, programmed in Visual Studio. It covers pretty much everything I could need, and involves ordering à la carte instead of negotiations. Obviously it costs more and unless I spin up a cloud server I can't "just spin up a server" without making sure I have enough licences etc. But AWS/GCP/Azure solve that mostly.
- kanzure 8y ago
  My understanding is that Microsoft does not auto-publish+sell third-party libraries in a package repository. So the difference is basically the distinction made in the old cathedral/bazaar analogies.
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    They do have nuget for packages, but that doesn't have an integrated payment system. Despite this, there are plenty of paid C# packages you can buy around the web.
- rpeden 8y ago
  You can do pretty much the same with ASP.NET core + Kestrel, too. Substitute Postgres for SQL Server if you want to stay all open source. But even with SQL Server, you can deploy the whole stack on Linux.
amelius 8y ago
How about a crowd-funded model (like Kickstarter)? Or a model based on Patreon?

wongarsu 8y ago

How would that be different from the regular Microsoft Ecosystem? I can spin up a quick testserver using Windows Server, running an IIS webserver and Microsoft SQL Server, with my software stack written in C#, programmed in Visual Studio. It covers pretty much everything I could need, and involves ordering à la carte instead of negotiations. Obviously it costs more and unless I spin up a cloud server I can't "just spin up a server" without making sure I have enough licences etc. But AWS/GCP/Azure solve that mostly.

kanzure 8y ago
My understanding is that Microsoft does not auto-publish+sell third-party libraries in a package repository. So the difference is basically the distinction made in the old cathedral/bazaar analogies.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  They do have nuget for packages, but that doesn't have an integrated payment system. Despite this, there are plenty of paid C# packages you can buy around the web.
rpeden 8y ago
You can do pretty much the same with ASP.NET core + Kestrel, too. Substitute Postgres for SQL Server if you want to stay all open source. But even with SQL Server, you can deploy the whole stack on Linux.

amelius 8y ago

How about a crowd-funded model (like Kickstarter)? Or a model based on Patreon?