4 ms·
Another possibility is simply that people are contributing less because both the upfront and long-term cost of making a profit themselves on their code has gone
by smokinn 16y ago
Another possibility is simply that people are contributing less because both the upfront and long-term cost of making a profit themselves on their code has gone radically down.
Optimizely launched today. Normally A/B testing is simply a framework feature someone (or rather many people, typically independently) implements and puts out there. Instead, with a little more work and very little upfront capital you can turn that feature you would've put out as open source into a revenue generating product. For lots of people it's not worth turning into a product if your servers are going to cost you thousands of dollars a month from day one but if it's just 20-50$/month then the economics change entirely. From the community you lost all the people who would give something away for free simply because it would've been too big a hassle and risk to turn it into something profitable.
Another good example is http://directededge.com http://directededge.com . An adaptive recommendation service seems like the ideal fun project to hack on as an open source API/library. But now it's a subscription product too. I'm sure many others can be found.
- _delirium 16y agoIt's only really in certain areas that that happens, though, mainly webapps. If you want to be a popular provider of something else, free software is often still the way to go, even if you also want to make money. Clojure, for example, could've adopted a freemium business model, say by allowing the free version to be used noncommercially but requiring a license to use it commercially. But it chose an OSS licensing model instead, I'm guessing at least partly because: 1) the main initial motivation was building an interesting language; and 2) non-free-software programming languages are a non-starter among many potential users.
- joe_the_user 16y agoI don't think fremium is even slightly believable these days as a language license. Even Java and dot-net claim to be free... Maybe for a web service...
- stcredzero 16y agoOne could get the same effect through a killer commercial library/app that's only available on a particular platform. I don't know of any real-life examples.
- zedshaw 16y agoThat's actually another good way to say it, and is sort of what I said. But, not everyone has the same risk tolerance so it can't be the sole cause otherwise people would have done it sooner than 2009. Another contributing factor is corporations taking advantage of the commons. Combine the two and you get our current situation.
- stcredzero 16y agoFor the newer/younger readers, I believe that "commons" refers to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons