4 ms·

Dont think this is as cut and dry as you make it out to be. The emergence of cloud providers + hosted solutions and the ongoing disappearance of on premise comp

by dman 8y ago

Dont think this is as cut and dry as you make it out to be. The emergence of cloud providers + hosted solutions and the ongoing disappearance of on premise computing means its increasingly hard to figure out a business model for infrastructure tech. Multiple database companies with excellent products (Rethinkdb et al) have faced significant challenges commercializing software that is open source. We need credible monetization strategies for building infrastructure level open source software. I do not fully agree with the Commons clause implementation, but I understand the need for it to exist and welcome efforts in this area. DISCLAIMER: Views expressed in this post are my own and do not represent my employer in any way.

rectang 8y ago
I would very much like to see those companies succeed. But when a company forces me to choose between their survival and the survival of Open Source as an institution, my choice is made.
- kemitchell 8y ago
  Hyperbole for hyperbole: When an institution can't respond to urgent needs, or privileges one side of a balance over the other until it tips, there is nothing you can do for it. I've read messages on OSI's mailing list that if you have to ask how your're going to make money making open source, you're the wrong person to make open source, and ought to make proprietary software, instead.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> The emergence of cloud providers + hosted solutions and the ongoing disappearance of on premise computing means its increasingly hard to figure out a business model for infrastructure tech. The fact that open source works to the benefit of the largest providers of software-related services by commoditizing software itself is not new with the rise of the cloud as a new and popular domain of software-related services. And the source available and free non-commercial and selective commercial use, but negotiate a separate license for commercial use that we want to monopolize model is not an innovative solution to that problem, and generally isn't all that successful of a solution, especially as a switch for software which already has open source versions available that third parties can fork and commercially exploit even after the change.
- dman 8y ago
  Licensing choices dont exist in a vacuum, they are made with a business climate in mind. I think many projects picked liberal licenses in a climate where the assumption was that you could make your money selling integration / consulting on top of the software. I think we are no longer living in that world. In this new cloudy world we need to find a way to fund the development of infrastructure software (databases / debuggers / libraries etc).
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > I think many projects picked liberal licenses in a climate where the assumption was that you could make your money selling integration / consulting on top of the software. I think we are no longer living in that world. The anti-consulting provision in th Commons Clause license pretty clearly indicates that it's crafters do think that we are living in that world, and that (as numerous people have observed for at least a couple of decades) the advantage in that market with open source isn't necessarily with the developer but often with the entity with the most developed professional services organization and relationships. > In this new cloudy world we need to find a way to fund the development of infrastructure software (databases / debuggers / libraries etc). I don't think that's actually a problem, nor do I think that, to the extent it is a problem, the Commons Clause really addresses it in any general way. Software with such a clause ab initio simply would not get wide adoption in “the cloudy world” you refer to; what the Commons Clause aims to solve is the problem of ”how to capture revenue via technical lock-in after first building broad adoption through the attractiveness of open source when you as a development firm haven't developed the capacities that would leave you well positioned to capture associated services sales with open source”. But it doesn't seem all that likely to be successful in more than the short term, since it incorporates the main problems of classic proprietary software in the cloud domain.
joshberkus 8y ago
If you read the shutdown blog post for RethinkDB, licensing was not among their problems. Instead, they were market positioning, reputation, and developing products suitable for their market in a timely fashion. In other words, business execution. Believe it or don't, no license, no matter how clever, will allow you to be financially successful if you blow the business execution. Let's turn this on its head: what was the business plan that RedisLabs re-invented itself under? Was it a good business plan? Is is vulnerability to Amazon/MS that made it fail, or was the plan flawed from the start?

by dman 8y ago

rectang 8y ago

I would very much like to see those companies succeed. But when a company forces me to choose between their survival and the survival of Open Source as an institution, my choice is made.

kemitchell 8y ago
Hyperbole for hyperbole: When an institution can't respond to urgent needs, or privileges one side of a balance over the other until it tips, there is nothing you can do for it. I've read messages on OSI's mailing list that if you have to ask how your're going to make money making open source, you're the wrong person to make open source, and ought to make proprietary software, instead.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> The emergence of cloud providers + hosted solutions and the ongoing disappearance of on premise computing means its increasingly hard to figure out a business model for infrastructure tech. The fact that open source works to the benefit of the largest providers of software-related services by commoditizing software itself is not new with the rise of the cloud as a new and popular domain of software-related services. And the source available and free non-commercial and selective commercial use, but negotiate a separate license for commercial use that we want to monopolize model is not an innovative solution to that problem, and generally isn't all that successful of a solution, especially as a switch for software which already has open source versions available that third parties can fork and commercially exploit even after the change.

dman 8y ago
Licensing choices dont exist in a vacuum, they are made with a business climate in mind. I think many projects picked liberal licenses in a climate where the assumption was that you could make your money selling integration / consulting on top of the software. I think we are no longer living in that world. In this new cloudy world we need to find a way to fund the development of infrastructure software (databases / debuggers / libraries etc).
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > I think many projects picked liberal licenses in a climate where the assumption was that you could make your money selling integration / consulting on top of the software. I think we are no longer living in that world. The anti-consulting provision in th Commons Clause license pretty clearly indicates that it's crafters do think that we are living in that world, and that (as numerous people have observed for at least a couple of decades) the advantage in that market with open source isn't necessarily with the developer but often with the entity with the most developed professional services organization and relationships. > In this new cloudy world we need to find a way to fund the development of infrastructure software (databases / debuggers / libraries etc). I don't think that's actually a problem, nor do I think that, to the extent it is a problem, the Commons Clause really addresses it in any general way. Software with such a clause ab initio simply would not get wide adoption in “the cloudy world” you refer to; what the Commons Clause aims to solve is the problem of ”how to capture revenue via technical lock-in after first building broad adoption through the attractiveness of open source when you as a development firm haven't developed the capacities that would leave you well positioned to capture associated services sales with open source”. But it doesn't seem all that likely to be successful in more than the short term, since it incorporates the main problems of classic proprietary software in the cloud domain.

joshberkus 8y ago

If you read the shutdown blog post for RethinkDB, licensing was not among their problems. Instead, they were market positioning, reputation, and developing products suitable for their market in a timely fashion. In other words, business execution. Believe it or don't, no license, no matter how clever, will allow you to be financially successful if you blow the business execution. Let's turn this on its head: what was the business plan that RedisLabs re-invented itself under? Was it a good business plan? Is is vulnerability to Amazon/MS that made it fail, or was the plan flawed from the start?