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So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source? If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your

So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source? If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as a bonus who may fork your core themselves). I remember from a undergrad class reading Google's system design papers, that they publish only the top-level architecture for core systems they use, and only after 3-5 years of use when they have moved on to a better system. After all this (Docker/Redis/Elastic/Nginx), I think that might be the best path forward. You can provide the benefits of open-source and recognition for the architects, but not lose your competitive advantage. Open-sourcing your core product seems too idealistic.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago
can be, I am interviewing quite a bit lately, among start ups there seems to be a renewed interest in doing devices. Probably because it is harder to do the commoditization trick or to re-implement the solution when hardware is involved.
admax88q 8y ago
You could AGPL and sell proprietary exceptions. Amazon won't touch AGPL code.
- ignoramous 8y ago
  Well, most enterprises wouldn't: https://blog.dgraph.io/post/relicensing-dgraph/ https://blog.dgraph.io/post/relicensing-dgraph/
- sneak 8y ago
  Has the AGPL ever successfully held up in court?
  - sjwright 8y ago
    Surely it doesn't need to—either you accept the license or you don't accept the license. If you don't accept the license, you can't use the software. I'd imagine that the challenge with the AGPL is catching and suing the non-compliant services.
    - sneak 8y ago
      If the source is available, I absolutely can use the software—regardless of license. The only thing preventing me from doing so would be either criminal or civil law, and while IANAL, I don’t believe there are criminal penalties for license violations. The copyright holder would have to sue me, and prove that I violated the license, and then they might be able to get a court to force me to stop, pay them, or both. I am curious whether there are any practical observations, one way or the other, about the AGPL’s enforceability.
      - sjwright 8y ago
        Obviously you can use the software. Of course you'll probably get away with a license violation if you're not shouty about it. Similarly, I can use a pirated copy of Windows XP too, with effectively zero risk of getting caught. Nobody is suggesting that an AGPL licence violation would result in a criminal penalty, but if you got caught you may be forced to release any changes you made to the source code. And you could lose the ability to use the software in future—if your business relied on it you might be screwed. Personally I think the AGPL is stupid, but people are free to pick whatever license terms they like for their copyrighted works. Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.
        sneak 8y ago
        The way you get forced is by someone filing a civil suit. My question was has anyone done that and been successful. It looks like the answer is yes, although it was settled out of court and not adjudicated. I am curious if a judge has ever found the AGPL to be a valid license constraint. Personally, I find “you are licensed to use the software without releasing your modifications on your internet connected computer, however if you open a port and offer it as a service, you are not” to be entirely ridiculous. It seems to me that a license can’t (or at least shouldn’t) hinge on what other software I am or am not running on my computer (eg a webserver). That is why I asked. I’m all for copyleft (despite the fact that its validity hinges on an inherent affirmation of the validity of the concept of intellectual property), but I passionately hate the AGPL because I think it is an unjust infringement upon my freedom as a user. It’s like saying “you have a license to use this software as long as you don’t run a browser that accesses porn on the same machine”. I think it oversteps the boundaries of copyright-as-designed.
- Gaelan 8y ago
  But will anyone else?
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Others are happy to provide AGPLv3 code as SaaS, look at MongoDB's issues. You can build a ton of tooling around said code to enhance performance, adding features and billing, all while not modifying the core AGPLv3 code and thus avoiding the need to contribute back. This is a scummy business practice, but technically legal.
  - nvarsj 8y ago
    Why is it a scummy business practice?
    - tingol 8y ago
      Because your core business feature is done by someone else and you just take it and use it for your own profit without giving anything back. Do you need a definition of what scummy means?
      - nvarsj 8y ago
        No need to be rude. I know what scummy means. It's just not clear to me why this is considered scummy. Anyone is welcome to take the open source and benefit from it as long as they comply with the license. This is a very fundamental aspect of open source. A company invests money and engineers in building commercial tooling, which you then pay for because there is added value. You are not paying for the open source - which is freely available. How is that scummy?
        tingol 8y ago
        I apologize for the brash response. The "comply with the license" part is the problem you're not seeing, using open source as SaaS is a loophole not a license feature. An example being, I license something as open source which means if you don't pay for it (assuming there's an option for that), you are bound to follow the license I provided which means all further work has to be open source (the same license I used) and source has to be provided with the product. In an ideal world this would mean either: 1. We both get paid 2. We both contribute to open software which is available to anyone But in our world it means, technically I'm not selling software but a service so I don't have to do shit. so the result (with scummy companies) is the following: 1. I don't get paid for software critical to your business 2. No one gets the benefit of the new product created despite my license Hence, scum.
- yingw787 8y ago
  Maybe. At least our company won't touch GPL code; as one colleague described to me, if you violate a proprietary license, a company will come after you for money, while violating a GPL license gets the EFF involved who will come after you for your source code. I'm still wary, though. I could imagine if the resultant fines or source code releases from violating a GPL license weren't a strong enough deterrent, you could win by using a GPL-licensed product enough, then parry off attacks from EFF/FSF until you do a complete rewrite of the product underneath, then pay the fine/contribution to EFF/FSF while toppling the original company. If the company is big enough, and can afford enough good lawyers, there may be legal ways to get around laws. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7572332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7572332
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    The only claimants to your source code are those to whom you've distributed binaries built from GPL sources. Anyone else can pound sand.
    - ktjfi 8y ago
      If you were the author of a GPL piece of code whose licence was violated, and the EFF came to you and said "we'll pay for the lawyers and in exchange we get publicity", most people would say yes.
    - hisham_hm 8y ago
      not the case for AGPL: then it's everyone who has access to your online service built with the code.
      - j16sdiz 8y ago
        I don't think it works like that. This is a copyright license at its heart. It is a contract between the copyright-owner and the service owner. The end user is just 3rd party.
        8y ago
- MichaelMoser123 8y ago
  agpl will not save you if they choose to re-implement the solution.
  - baddox 8y ago
    Nor will anything else, I reckon.
    - MichaelMoser123 8y ago
      keeping the system proprietary will make it harder for them to understand what you are doing; but that will also be very limiting move - in the enterprise software space.
    - curt15 8y ago
      That's basically how the first GPL software came into being -- as a (partial) reimplementation of commercially licensed unix.
wskinner 8y ago
My understanding is that Google has recently deviated from this strategy. The result of the strategy you mention is that the industry standardized on other companies' implementation of ideas that came from Google: Hadoop (MapReduce), HDFS (GFS), ZooKeeper (Chubby, and more. For examples of newer open source projects that see more active maintenance from Google, see Kubernetes and TensorFlow.
- tehbeard 8y ago
  Does that deviation lineup with Google's entry into offering cloud computing?
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Pretty much. That's when it became clear that Google would have to support whatever is popular outside Google.
- yingw787 8y ago
  I know some people who develop on top of Tensorflow; from my conversations with them, Tensorflow's moat is Google making a lot of breaking changes by incorporating a lot of new functionality. I've also heard complaints that the online documentation isn't terribly great for triaging not-happy paths, to the point where you kind of have to just dig through the source code to figure out what's going on. Also, if you want to poach the maintainers, you would somehow have to poach them away from Google (which isn't happening, since ML at scale is something Google does best, and is an ongoing field of research). You can't become as good at using Tensorflow as Google is by simply forking the project.
- shereadsthenews 8y ago
  But K8s is not a development of Google software. It is developed specifically for the public, it throws out all of the interesting parts of Borg, and Google themselves don't use it, or barely do. As for that other stuff it seems to have worked out fine for Google: they describe obsolete technologies and the outside world develops hideous analogs of those and uses them for decades. Hadoop for example is just an unbelievably bad implementation of map reduce as it was ten years ago and is laughable compared to what Google replaced it with. HDFS is a joke of GFS which Google turned off eight years back. It's really remarkable the way the industry is essentially self-disabling in this regard. Meanwhile Google does not burden itself with trying to adopt every idea they read in a paper, and maintain a significant cost and efficiency advantage by doing so.
ChikkaChiChi 8y ago
Support, certifications, and subscriptions all seem to work fine for a number of companies. I don't think there is a future in open source enterprise software where trade secrets are hidden from the public.
pjmlp 8y ago
What happened is the realisation that FOSS developers also have to pay their bills and idealism only takes so far. So anyone that refuses to pay for their tools will eventually either loose them, or contend to be happy to use lesser ones.
- geodel 8y ago
  Exactly right. Its amazing thing in software industry that developers want to be highly paid themselves along with free work from other software developers.
  - z3t4 8y ago
    I guess it's the "eat or be eaten" attitude. Give someone a chicken that hatch golden eggs, and they will kill the chicken.
- ChristianGeek 8y ago
  “Loose” is the opposite of “tight,” “lose” is the opposite of “find.” Easy to remember because the opposites have the same number of letters.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Thank you for this public service.
  - sureaboutthis 8y ago
    It always amazes me how often I see this spelling error.
    - triangleman 8y ago
      In fairness it feels rather arbitrary and counterintuitive of a spelling rule.
    - quickthrower2 8y ago
      Given that lose is pronounced looze and loose is pronounced looce I can see why it’s confusing.
westoque 8y ago
I think Hashicorp[0] has nailed down the open source enterprise model perfectly. Where they make open source software for enterprise and provide services to support. [0]: https://www.hashicorp.com https://www.hashicorp.com
- user5994461 8y ago
  They barely have any revenue and they're struggling. It's probably one of the next companies to be acquired in the coming years.
  - the_common_man 8y ago
    I have always wondered what this enterprise support means? So if a big company starts using vagrant, they would dole out 100k for a support contract? I find this hard to believe but what do I know.
    - GenerocUsername 8y ago
      My enterprise company wont even get us Postman Premium to the tune of ~$150 per seat per year... So here we are slacking postman collections back and forth on our current year mac books.
      - pavelevst 8y ago
        Did you consider to create testing app to simulate customer experience? I can be a single html+js file in a git, for each major feature
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      You would be amazed at the spread between big companies who decide "we won't pay $20 for support for something critical!" and other companies who decide "OMG, we can't run /bin/bash without a support contract and someone to yell at if it goes wrong!"
  - sqs 8y ago
zzzcpan 8y ago
> If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS It seems not obvious to everyone, but you don't have to use a license, that allows AWS to run you into the ground. Take a look at API Copyleft License: https://github.com/kemitchell/api-copyleft-license https://github.com/kemitchell/api-copyleft-license
- geofft 8y ago
  This is not a FOSS license in the sense of the Debian Free Software Guidelines or Open Source Definition: it compels you to publish your changes, even if you're only making internal use. Free software / open source licenses do not require that. Most obviously, it fails the "desert island" and "dissident" tests of https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html . (There are plenty of perfectly fine licenses that are not DFSG/OSD licenses, but it's not what most people mean by "open source," and importantly it will be impossible to get this software into a mainstream Linux distro, so you won't have the sort of adoption that actual open source licenses get you.) Also, it's not clear this would prevent AWS from running you into the ground. Amazon is more than happy to publish the source code of what they run internally; they make their money off operations and not software, so they're perfectly happy to commoditize software. The copyright holder is the one trying to make an "open core" business. AWS can just reimplement it.
- omeid2 8y ago
  Oh boy, just skimming through that license and I can see a bunch of lawyers having a good giggle and a field day over it. > you must contribute all software that invokes this software's functionality.. So that rules out all proprietary operating systems, databases, 3rd party services, but why stop there? give us your CPU microcode.
ryanmarsh 8y ago
This is incredibly deft on F5's part. What are the alternatives to F5's products? Cloud products, and home rolled Nginx configs.
- tyingq 8y ago
  I imagine haproxy might get more popular if F5 does anything to hobble the open source part of nginx.
  - vetrom 8y ago
    haproxy is amazingly functional and has done a fine job of evolving over the years. At a particular $DEFUNCTCLOUDVENDOR we implemented a haproxy based ELB-ish solution with home grown control logic to replace a F5 installation whos configuration size grew unwieldy (the F5 config parser was falling over in their LBs) while we were nowhere near the F5's touted connection/throughput numbers. F5 wasn't really willing to work with us on licensing, so we implemented a system based on haproxy VMs that worked because we were more than a bit overprovisioned on switching capacity and were able to shard that configuration base more effectively over more VMs. This was 2011, so I'd hope newer F5 gear has gotten past that.
    - swasheck 8y ago
      18 months ago I was in a shop that used F5 and it was a nightmare. Some of the best network admins I've ever worked with and they couldn't nail down why the load balancer did the things it did, when it did them. It was bad enough that the config had more exceptions than rules just so that we could try to eliminate anomalies. I hope NGINX doesn't suffer too much under this new ownership.
      - tyingq 8y ago
        It may get embedded tcl.
curiousjorge 8y ago
hey, theres no free lunch
zmix 8y ago
> your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. As somebody, who has no knowledge about that part of the business (Amazon Web Services in production), could you elaborate on that with a few lines or point me to some articles? Thank you.
- feydaykyn 8y ago
  Just today, AWS announced a fork of Elasticsearch: Open Distro for Elasticsearch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 A few months ago, AWS launched a MongoDb fork
  - geofft 8y ago
    For context, Elasticsearch merged their proprietary add-ons into the main repos https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open and MongoDB relicensed to a not-quite-open-source license that compels you to release code for your entire infrastructure if you're running MongoDB as a servie https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license... . If you make your money on support and not open core, it's difficult for Amazon to do anything to you, e.g., Red Hat is doing just fine despite Amazon Linux being a thing. (There's also https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/ https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/ , a long-term-support version of the JDK, because Oracle is getting more aggressive about Oracle JDK licensing.)
johannes1234321 8y ago
When developing an open source product and trying to do a business around this is a tough ride, as competitors who do less development can do services cheaper. Open source strives where different entities develop the software together to the mutual benefit without a single company trying to push their roadmap, without a single company trying to grab all revenue. See Linux, see different Apache projects, see PHP etc.
ThrustVectoring 8y ago
There absolutely is a future for enterprise open source. It's not through direct monetization, but rather driving down the price of complements for existing product lines. Running a service on AWS requires two goods. High-margin computing resources that Amazon really wants to sell, and the software to turn those computing resources into solutions to business problems. Solving the business problems has a fixed dollar amount to be split between the two, so the cheaper the software is the more money Amazon's customers can afford to spend on AWS. So the final equilibrium is that Amazon ends up funding open-source solutions, and profits off it from increased AWS margins.
- panarky 8y ago
  Amazon figured this out and surrounded their high-margin computing resources with a dizzying array of free-as-in-beer tools. But they also figured out that making their free-as-in-beer tools also free-as-in-freedom open source, they'd lift all clouds and not just their own. As the dominant player, Amazon loses from anything that reduces vendor lock-in. That's why precious little of Amazon's cloud tooling is released on Github. With Kubernetes, Google made the the opposite calculation. As a challenger, it's to Google's benefit to open-source cloud tooling like Kubernetes. Even though their competitors benefit, Google benefits more from standardized tools that reduce switching costs.
  - nvarsj 8y ago
    This! Kubernetes in some ways was a shot in AWS’s direction. It gives companies a reason to switch to Google. GKE is still far more stable and mature than EKS. AWS still beats gcp in most other ways though (imho), so it’s far from a slam dunk. But it has opened up a door for Google.
  - pcnix 8y ago
    Interesting read on this topic by Stratechery - https://stratechery.com/2016/how-google-cloud-platform-is-challenging-aws/ https://stratechery.com/2016/how-google-cloud-platform-is-ch...
RIMR 8y ago
I think the issue here is that you're viewing the merit of open-source entirely based on the immediate profitability of the software. The benefits of FOSS are largely non-monetary. I know as entrepreneurs and professionals that might be a hard line-of-thought to default to, but I think it is extremely short-sighted (and borderline ignorant) to judge the merits of free software by its profitability.
blihp 8y ago
Note that none of the successful large companies are actually open sourcing their 'secret sauce'. There is no open source version of Google's search engine, Facebook's social network etc. It's only supporting tools and infrastructure they release (i.e. commoditization of their complements or dependencies.) A product company open sourcing their core product is committing suicide on the product front. Sure, there will be services companies who may benefit (Red Hat or providers like AWS etc.) but the company that actually produces the software rarely will.
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  To expand on this, these companies are not open sourcing their data. Facebook no longer gives you access to the social graph. Google doesnt have an open API for their search results or search volume.
  - vishwajeetv 8y ago
    Providing an API doesn't mean open sourcing the data. Because the API provider can very well restrict who can use it, and how it is used, and throttle it.
- ken 8y ago
  I don't think Facebook has any "secret sauce". The integration and scale is certainly impressive, but there's no part of the functionality which is at all mysterious to me. Unlike, say, Google Search, everything on Facebook appears pretty straightforward. They did open-source HHVM, React, GraphQL, and Cassandra, which are the closest things I can see to a secret sauce.
  - tonyarkles 8y ago
    Their ad-targeting infrastructure likely has some secret subtleties to it.
    - pm90 8y ago
      Meh, not really. Cookies all the way down.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
I'd say this is more of a problem with VC funded OSS companies treating a commodity as an investment that needs to be milked where a few individuals working efficiently might otherwise be able to make a very comfortable living doing e.g. support and consulting. Many smaller projects are surviving just fine like this. But when such projects take on tens/hundreds of millions of funding, it is inevitable that the technology becomes secondary to paying back the investors 10x, no matter what. Ironically most of that kind of funding seems to go towards sales and marketing rather than R&D. Usually core committers are only a minority of employees in such companies and things get worse when that no longer includes the C-level executives. This creates a lot of friction when inevitably somebody else undercuts such projects in terms of quality, features or price. This is inevitable because all software eventually becomes a commodity. Your fancy pants DB clustering solution might be shit hot this year but you can bet there will be half a dozen projects imitating what you did within years. This is basically what is happened to mongodb. It's all about diversifying, "adding value", proprietary extensions, etc. for their paying customers instead of doing what they were good at for all their users. And courtesy of the license, copyright transfers and outside contributions dry up and it's all on the company to do everything in house. Great, as long there's money but when that dries up it creates problems. Meanwhile projects like postgresql and others provide more or less drop in replacements, because they can and because there are users and developers in having that. Apparently they are still doing fine in terms of share price. Best of luck to them but I probably won't be using it. Most healthy OSS projects out there have licenses that are well understood from a legal point of view and battle-tested in years/decades of use. Some have quirks that need working around (e.g. the classpath exception for GPL v2), others are fine as is (e.g. Apache 2.0). They also have a plurality of copyright holders spread over many companies that makes re-licensing impractical. Most such projects have a core of developers that are typically employed by a big company taking an interest in the project. Having key people in key projects is of strategic importance to them and ensures their interests are taken care off. The whole point of OSS is commoditization and pooling resources between otherwise less likely to collaborate companies and individuals to get things done better than each of them would be likely to achieve by themselves. That's why most operating systems these days are largely made up of open source software, much of which has had multiple generations of developers working on it. Most of the build tooling around that, same thing. Apple, MS, Google, they all ship mixes of proprietary code and OSS code. Quite a lot of this stuff can be traced back to the early days of unix. Almost every big fortune 500 software company out there pays people to contribute to and represent them in OSS projects that are vital to their business. Even the less popular ones like Oracle actually contribute a lot. That's not charity; it's key to their success. MS just retired two generations of their in house browser in favor of an open source project primarily backed with Google and with significant portions of Apple contributions from back in the Webkit days. If you'd have to choose two competitors for MS, those would probably be at the top of your list. Why did they do this? Browsers are a commodity and they were negatively differentiating with their in house efforts (as demonstrated by world + dog installing something else). They tried to fix it (Edge) and it didn't work out. All of the surviving browsers are now built around open source projects. I think Edge is probably going down as the last non OSS browser to be widely used. I use open source components, libraries, and tools for almost everything I do. I love Github. I share code there myself. Most of the stuff I depend on has neither VCs nor much corporate funding behind it and its fine. Some of it does have VC funding and its also fine. My life would be hell if I had to reinvent all those wheels. I agree funding OSS development is key but I don't agree that that needs to primarily come from companies that own the software and sell licenses+support. That's not how most OSS software I use works; it instead thrives on companies using and paying for people to contribute. Nginx is one of many software packages that I use. I don't think I'll ever pay for licensing or support; because frankly they are relatively unimportant to me. As for the dozens of npm dependencies and their hundreds of transitive dependencies, nope. Not a cent. I would probably consider SAAS solutions when it makes sense; as I have done with e.g. Mariadb and Elasticsearch. But mostly OSS works because it is free as in speech and beer. In the case of nginx, there are dozens of OSS web servers out there. It's just one of many moving parts I need to worry about. I'll pick whatever is cheap and convenient.
ummonk 8y ago
Source-available commercial software might be a more viable route to go.
xorcist 8y ago
Obviously open source isn't going away. It's just that VC struggles to understand the implications, still, and the past half a decade has been imprinted deeply by all the cheap money. If your worst nightmare is that a big company like Amazon uses your software then perhaps your business model wasn't really for the cloud era. Selling licenses is to the VC crowd what sequels are to Hollywood, comfort food that everyone knows how to handle but simultaneously knows isn't going to be the future. Linux isn't worse off because it is used by AWS and Google. Quite the contrary.
- benatkin 8y ago
  I agree. Open Source software is not a good way to build a moat, and investors should take this into account. It's good for companies that focus on building employees, teams, and customer relationships, and keeping them strong at all times. They can't fall back on exclusivity of their code, hosting, or support offerings. The ideal Open Source company would probably be something like Red Hat.
paulddraper 8y ago
Gitlab and Hashicorp are going pretty strong. Maybe they get acquired though.
Ericson2314 8y ago
Or keep open source and do enough antitrust that businesses must compete on other axes.
pfarnsworth 8y ago
Enterprise open source is bleak. There aren't very many enterprise open source projects with pure intent anymore, they are all looking for the big payday, which unfortunately companies like Google and Facebook have encouraged. Look at Confluent/Kafka. The PMC is stuffed with Confluent employees and they behave that way. They aren't acting like an Apache project, they are only acting in their own self interest. Any new ideas get the run around, and only their ideas see the light of day. I don't even know why they bother being open source, except maybe to get the free development and bug fixes.
late2part 8y ago
* If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. * In the world I live in, far more commercially supported open source runs outside of AWS, then runs ON AWS, then AWS has copied and usurped.
marcotaves 8y ago
I honestly and personaly think is better and no snark here ok or affiliated thinking ok I think initially that in a business wise or business view stricly ok I think I would probably keep my core ´´pulo do gato`` logic on coding lines right for my sustainable material reality of sustainable way of living righ...with confort yah people enjoys it we all enjoy right... if you find hard to see how to keep your company afloat opening your main magic step of the code arquitecture that financialy monetarily strictly speaking gives you the bread of everyday and the building blocks of your little dreams right...then you as I would too my friend , not only have the freedom to do so , furthermore...An Conservatory approach is Always the best way...righ... I would keep usually probably 1 step above the open one a little ´omitted` yeah to use a more beautiful word...so, because of the bread of tomorrow right: The Old circus Master Edvar and this is absolutely TRUE! Said MAster Edvar that for a Circus Woman or Man, the Art of Blowing Fire, as impacting and beautiful as it is ( I , Marco Taves, have a picture of myself me blowing a meteor of 3 meters high or much more and 2 meters thick Ball Of Fire from my own mouth spitting lumpenõl(german)/querosene(portuguese) ) so... Edvar Master said that: Blowing fire is bread for today and hunger for tomorrow!!! SO! I open source what I in this example would could but keep 1 little step: Not for the bread of today, right...But mind you: The bread of tomorrow yeah... And this paragraph above is the important one in this comment ok I mean no much analogies with the pulo do gato, ok, we make good analogies, or we do not make any analogies, ok!!! Thats what I do but you have freewill, right! so... the story of the Onca[1] (Panthera Onca) and the pulo do gato[2] thanks 1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar 2- explain later or googlefu yeah... thanks!!!
fierro 8y ago
is there such a thing as available source, closed license?
- black-tea 8y ago
  Yes. Source code is copyrighted and you can make it available under any licence you like, including a proprietary one.
_pmf_ 8y ago
Yeah, it's almost as if it makes sense to copyright the API to prevent unlicensed usage of decade long investments. But apparently, Oracle is a bad guy for doing this, and Google is applauded for stealing Java. Can't have it both ways.
ec109685 8y ago
The company sold for 650 million so it isn’t a bad outcome. They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers, added their proprietary bits and were successful and sold the company. Isn’t this a great win?
- snaky 8y ago
  > They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers Had all the volunteers' impact being so big? Nginx was created by single developer who is NGINX, Inc CTO now, and then developed pretty much by Nginx employees only.
  - mfjordvald 8y ago
    Very big yes! No doubt Igor deserves the majority of the honour for Nginx, but volunteer contributors were a big part earlier on, both in patches, investigations and community support. Search through the change log for "thanks to" http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES and you'll see a lot of contributions. Two people who stand out as frequent contributors are Piotr Sikora and Maxim Dounin (who went on to actually work at Nginx!). And this does not show the mailing list discussions and bug investigations or the documentation maintained by the community in the early days. [This post is not intended to mean this sale is bad, just to highlight some of the awesome community contributors]
rmc 8y ago
Or use copyright licences which the big tech companies are scared of. Affero GPL or some of the more radical "copyfarleft" licences.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago

can be, I am interviewing quite a bit lately, among start ups there seems to be a renewed interest in doing devices. Probably because it is harder to do the commoditization trick or to re-implement the solution when hardware is involved.

admax88q 8y ago

You could AGPL and sell proprietary exceptions. Amazon won't touch AGPL code.

ignoramous 8y ago
Well, most enterprises wouldn't: https://blog.dgraph.io/post/relicensing-dgraph/ https://blog.dgraph.io/post/relicensing-dgraph/
sneak 8y ago
Has the AGPL ever successfully held up in court?
- sjwright 8y ago
  Surely it doesn't need to—either you accept the license or you don't accept the license. If you don't accept the license, you can't use the software. I'd imagine that the challenge with the AGPL is catching and suing the non-compliant services.
  - sneak 8y ago
    If the source is available, I absolutely can use the software—regardless of license. The only thing preventing me from doing so would be either criminal or civil law, and while IANAL, I don’t believe there are criminal penalties for license violations. The copyright holder would have to sue me, and prove that I violated the license, and then they might be able to get a court to force me to stop, pay them, or both. I am curious whether there are any practical observations, one way or the other, about the AGPL’s enforceability.
    - sjwright 8y ago
      Obviously you can use the software. Of course you'll probably get away with a license violation if you're not shouty about it. Similarly, I can use a pirated copy of Windows XP too, with effectively zero risk of getting caught. Nobody is suggesting that an AGPL licence violation would result in a criminal penalty, but if you got caught you may be forced to release any changes you made to the source code. And you could lose the ability to use the software in future—if your business relied on it you might be screwed. Personally I think the AGPL is stupid, but people are free to pick whatever license terms they like for their copyrighted works. Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.
      - sneak 8y ago
        The way you get forced is by someone filing a civil suit. My question was has anyone done that and been successful. It looks like the answer is yes, although it was settled out of court and not adjudicated. I am curious if a judge has ever found the AGPL to be a valid license constraint. Personally, I find “you are licensed to use the software without releasing your modifications on your internet connected computer, however if you open a port and offer it as a service, you are not” to be entirely ridiculous. It seems to me that a license can’t (or at least shouldn’t) hinge on what other software I am or am not running on my computer (eg a webserver). That is why I asked. I’m all for copyleft (despite the fact that its validity hinges on an inherent affirmation of the validity of the concept of intellectual property), but I passionately hate the AGPL because I think it is an unjust infringement upon my freedom as a user. It’s like saying “you have a license to use this software as long as you don’t run a browser that accesses porn on the same machine”. I think it oversteps the boundaries of copyright-as-designed.
Gaelan 8y ago
But will anyone else?
StudentStuff 8y ago
Others are happy to provide AGPLv3 code as SaaS, look at MongoDB's issues. You can build a ton of tooling around said code to enhance performance, adding features and billing, all while not modifying the core AGPLv3 code and thus avoiding the need to contribute back. This is a scummy business practice, but technically legal.
- nvarsj 8y ago
  Why is it a scummy business practice?
  - tingol 8y ago
    Because your core business feature is done by someone else and you just take it and use it for your own profit without giving anything back. Do you need a definition of what scummy means?
    - nvarsj 8y ago
      No need to be rude. I know what scummy means. It's just not clear to me why this is considered scummy. Anyone is welcome to take the open source and benefit from it as long as they comply with the license. This is a very fundamental aspect of open source. A company invests money and engineers in building commercial tooling, which you then pay for because there is added value. You are not paying for the open source - which is freely available. How is that scummy?
      - tingol 8y ago
        I apologize for the brash response. The "comply with the license" part is the problem you're not seeing, using open source as SaaS is a loophole not a license feature. An example being, I license something as open source which means if you don't pay for it (assuming there's an option for that), you are bound to follow the license I provided which means all further work has to be open source (the same license I used) and source has to be provided with the product. In an ideal world this would mean either: 1. We both get paid 2. We both contribute to open software which is available to anyone But in our world it means, technically I'm not selling software but a service so I don't have to do shit. so the result (with scummy companies) is the following: 1. I don't get paid for software critical to your business 2. No one gets the benefit of the new product created despite my license Hence, scum.
yingw787 8y ago
Maybe. At least our company won't touch GPL code; as one colleague described to me, if you violate a proprietary license, a company will come after you for money, while violating a GPL license gets the EFF involved who will come after you for your source code. I'm still wary, though. I could imagine if the resultant fines or source code releases from violating a GPL license weren't a strong enough deterrent, you could win by using a GPL-licensed product enough, then parry off attacks from EFF/FSF until you do a complete rewrite of the product underneath, then pay the fine/contribution to EFF/FSF while toppling the original company. If the company is big enough, and can afford enough good lawyers, there may be legal ways to get around laws. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7572332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7572332
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  The only claimants to your source code are those to whom you've distributed binaries built from GPL sources. Anyone else can pound sand.
  - ktjfi 8y ago
    If you were the author of a GPL piece of code whose licence was violated, and the EFF came to you and said "we'll pay for the lawyers and in exchange we get publicity", most people would say yes.
  - hisham_hm 8y ago
    not the case for AGPL: then it's everyone who has access to your online service built with the code.
    - j16sdiz 8y ago
      I don't think it works like that. This is a copyright license at its heart. It is a contract between the copyright-owner and the service owner. The end user is just 3rd party.
      - 8y ago
MichaelMoser123 8y ago
agpl will not save you if they choose to re-implement the solution.
- baddox 8y ago
  Nor will anything else, I reckon.
  - MichaelMoser123 8y ago
    keeping the system proprietary will make it harder for them to understand what you are doing; but that will also be very limiting move - in the enterprise software space.
  - curt15 8y ago
    That's basically how the first GPL software came into being -- as a (partial) reimplementation of commercially licensed unix.

wskinner 8y ago

My understanding is that Google has recently deviated from this strategy. The result of the strategy you mention is that the industry standardized on other companies' implementation of ideas that came from Google: Hadoop (MapReduce), HDFS (GFS), ZooKeeper (Chubby, and more. For examples of newer open source projects that see more active maintenance from Google, see Kubernetes and TensorFlow.

tehbeard 8y ago
Does that deviation lineup with Google's entry into offering cloud computing?
- skybrian 8y ago
  Pretty much. That's when it became clear that Google would have to support whatever is popular outside Google.
yingw787 8y ago
I know some people who develop on top of Tensorflow; from my conversations with them, Tensorflow's moat is Google making a lot of breaking changes by incorporating a lot of new functionality. I've also heard complaints that the online documentation isn't terribly great for triaging not-happy paths, to the point where you kind of have to just dig through the source code to figure out what's going on. Also, if you want to poach the maintainers, you would somehow have to poach them away from Google (which isn't happening, since ML at scale is something Google does best, and is an ongoing field of research). You can't become as good at using Tensorflow as Google is by simply forking the project.
shereadsthenews 8y ago
But K8s is not a development of Google software. It is developed specifically for the public, it throws out all of the interesting parts of Borg, and Google themselves don't use it, or barely do. As for that other stuff it seems to have worked out fine for Google: they describe obsolete technologies and the outside world develops hideous analogs of those and uses them for decades. Hadoop for example is just an unbelievably bad implementation of map reduce as it was ten years ago and is laughable compared to what Google replaced it with. HDFS is a joke of GFS which Google turned off eight years back. It's really remarkable the way the industry is essentially self-disabling in this regard. Meanwhile Google does not burden itself with trying to adopt every idea they read in a paper, and maintain a significant cost and efficiency advantage by doing so.

ChikkaChiChi 8y ago

Support, certifications, and subscriptions all seem to work fine for a number of companies. I don't think there is a future in open source enterprise software where trade secrets are hidden from the public.

pjmlp 8y ago

What happened is the realisation that FOSS developers also have to pay their bills and idealism only takes so far. So anyone that refuses to pay for their tools will eventually either loose them, or contend to be happy to use lesser ones.

geodel 8y ago
Exactly right. Its amazing thing in software industry that developers want to be highly paid themselves along with free work from other software developers.
- z3t4 8y ago
  I guess it's the "eat or be eaten" attitude. Give someone a chicken that hatch golden eggs, and they will kill the chicken.
ChristianGeek 8y ago
“Loose” is the opposite of “tight,” “lose” is the opposite of “find.” Easy to remember because the opposites have the same number of letters.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Thank you for this public service.
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  It always amazes me how often I see this spelling error.
  - triangleman 8y ago
    In fairness it feels rather arbitrary and counterintuitive of a spelling rule.
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    Given that lose is pronounced looze and loose is pronounced looce I can see why it’s confusing.

westoque 8y ago

I think Hashicorp[0] has nailed down the open source enterprise model perfectly. Where they make open source software for enterprise and provide services to support. [0]: https://www.hashicorp.com https://www.hashicorp.com

user5994461 8y ago
They barely have any revenue and they're struggling. It's probably one of the next companies to be acquired in the coming years.
- the_common_man 8y ago
  I have always wondered what this enterprise support means? So if a big company starts using vagrant, they would dole out 100k for a support contract? I find this hard to believe but what do I know.
  - GenerocUsername 8y ago
    My enterprise company wont even get us Postman Premium to the tune of ~$150 per seat per year... So here we are slacking postman collections back and forth on our current year mac books.
    - pavelevst 8y ago
      Did you consider to create testing app to simulate customer experience? I can be a single html+js file in a git, for each major feature
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    You would be amazed at the spread between big companies who decide "we won't pay $20 for support for something critical!" and other companies who decide "OMG, we can't run /bin/bash without a support contract and someone to yell at if it goes wrong!"
- sqs 8y ago

zzzcpan 8y ago

> If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS It seems not obvious to everyone, but you don't have to use a license, that allows AWS to run you into the ground. Take a look at API Copyleft License: https://github.com/kemitchell/api-copyleft-license https://github.com/kemitchell/api-copyleft-license

geofft 8y ago
This is not a FOSS license in the sense of the Debian Free Software Guidelines or Open Source Definition: it compels you to publish your changes, even if you're only making internal use. Free software / open source licenses do not require that. Most obviously, it fails the "desert island" and "dissident" tests of https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html . (There are plenty of perfectly fine licenses that are not DFSG/OSD licenses, but it's not what most people mean by "open source," and importantly it will be impossible to get this software into a mainstream Linux distro, so you won't have the sort of adoption that actual open source licenses get you.) Also, it's not clear this would prevent AWS from running you into the ground. Amazon is more than happy to publish the source code of what they run internally; they make their money off operations and not software, so they're perfectly happy to commoditize software. The copyright holder is the one trying to make an "open core" business. AWS can just reimplement it.
omeid2 8y ago
Oh boy, just skimming through that license and I can see a bunch of lawyers having a good giggle and a field day over it. > you must contribute all software that invokes this software's functionality.. So that rules out all proprietary operating systems, databases, 3rd party services, but why stop there? give us your CPU microcode.

ryanmarsh 8y ago

This is incredibly deft on F5's part. What are the alternatives to F5's products? Cloud products, and home rolled Nginx configs.

tyingq 8y ago
I imagine haproxy might get more popular if F5 does anything to hobble the open source part of nginx.
- vetrom 8y ago
  haproxy is amazingly functional and has done a fine job of evolving over the years. At a particular $DEFUNCTCLOUDVENDOR we implemented a haproxy based ELB-ish solution with home grown control logic to replace a F5 installation whos configuration size grew unwieldy (the F5 config parser was falling over in their LBs) while we were nowhere near the F5's touted connection/throughput numbers. F5 wasn't really willing to work with us on licensing, so we implemented a system based on haproxy VMs that worked because we were more than a bit overprovisioned on switching capacity and were able to shard that configuration base more effectively over more VMs. This was 2011, so I'd hope newer F5 gear has gotten past that.
  - swasheck 8y ago
    18 months ago I was in a shop that used F5 and it was a nightmare. Some of the best network admins I've ever worked with and they couldn't nail down why the load balancer did the things it did, when it did them. It was bad enough that the config had more exceptions than rules just so that we could try to eliminate anomalies. I hope NGINX doesn't suffer too much under this new ownership.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      It may get embedded tcl.

curiousjorge 8y ago

hey, theres no free lunch

zmix 8y ago

> your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. As somebody, who has no knowledge about that part of the business (Amazon Web Services in production), could you elaborate on that with a few lines or point me to some articles? Thank you.

feydaykyn 8y ago
Just today, AWS announced a fork of Elasticsearch: Open Distro for Elasticsearch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602 A few months ago, AWS launched a MongoDb fork
- geofft 8y ago
  For context, Elasticsearch merged their proprietary add-ons into the main repos https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open and MongoDB relicensed to a not-quite-open-source license that compels you to release code for your entire infrastructure if you're running MongoDB as a servie https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license... . If you make your money on support and not open core, it's difficult for Amazon to do anything to you, e.g., Red Hat is doing just fine despite Amazon Linux being a thing. (There's also https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/ https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/ , a long-term-support version of the JDK, because Oracle is getting more aggressive about Oracle JDK licensing.)

johannes1234321 8y ago

When developing an open source product and trying to do a business around this is a tough ride, as competitors who do less development can do services cheaper. Open source strives where different entities develop the software together to the mutual benefit without a single company trying to push their roadmap, without a single company trying to grab all revenue. See Linux, see different Apache projects, see PHP etc.

ThrustVectoring 8y ago

There absolutely is a future for enterprise open source. It's not through direct monetization, but rather driving down the price of complements for existing product lines. Running a service on AWS requires two goods. High-margin computing resources that Amazon really wants to sell, and the software to turn those computing resources into solutions to business problems. Solving the business problems has a fixed dollar amount to be split between the two, so the cheaper the software is the more money Amazon's customers can afford to spend on AWS. So the final equilibrium is that Amazon ends up funding open-source solutions, and profits off it from increased AWS margins.

panarky 8y ago
Amazon figured this out and surrounded their high-margin computing resources with a dizzying array of free-as-in-beer tools. But they also figured out that making their free-as-in-beer tools also free-as-in-freedom open source, they'd lift all clouds and not just their own. As the dominant player, Amazon loses from anything that reduces vendor lock-in. That's why precious little of Amazon's cloud tooling is released on Github. With Kubernetes, Google made the the opposite calculation. As a challenger, it's to Google's benefit to open-source cloud tooling like Kubernetes. Even though their competitors benefit, Google benefits more from standardized tools that reduce switching costs.
- nvarsj 8y ago
  This! Kubernetes in some ways was a shot in AWS’s direction. It gives companies a reason to switch to Google. GKE is still far more stable and mature than EKS. AWS still beats gcp in most other ways though (imho), so it’s far from a slam dunk. But it has opened up a door for Google.
- pcnix 8y ago
  Interesting read on this topic by Stratechery - https://stratechery.com/2016/how-google-cloud-platform-is-challenging-aws/ https://stratechery.com/2016/how-google-cloud-platform-is-ch...

RIMR 8y ago

I think the issue here is that you're viewing the merit of open-source entirely based on the immediate profitability of the software. The benefits of FOSS are largely non-monetary. I know as entrepreneurs and professionals that might be a hard line-of-thought to default to, but I think it is extremely short-sighted (and borderline ignorant) to judge the merits of free software by its profitability.

blihp 8y ago

Note that none of the successful large companies are actually open sourcing their 'secret sauce'. There is no open source version of Google's search engine, Facebook's social network etc. It's only supporting tools and infrastructure they release (i.e. commoditization of their complements or dependencies.) A product company open sourcing their core product is committing suicide on the product front. Sure, there will be services companies who may benefit (Red Hat or providers like AWS etc.) but the company that actually produces the software rarely will.

AznHisoka 8y ago
To expand on this, these companies are not open sourcing their data. Facebook no longer gives you access to the social graph. Google doesnt have an open API for their search results or search volume.
- vishwajeetv 8y ago
  Providing an API doesn't mean open sourcing the data. Because the API provider can very well restrict who can use it, and how it is used, and throttle it.
ken 8y ago
I don't think Facebook has any "secret sauce". The integration and scale is certainly impressive, but there's no part of the functionality which is at all mysterious to me. Unlike, say, Google Search, everything on Facebook appears pretty straightforward. They did open-source HHVM, React, GraphQL, and Cassandra, which are the closest things I can see to a secret sauce.
- tonyarkles 8y ago
  Their ad-targeting infrastructure likely has some secret subtleties to it.
  - pm90 8y ago
    Meh, not really. Cookies all the way down.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

I'd say this is more of a problem with VC funded OSS companies treating a commodity as an investment that needs to be milked where a few individuals working efficiently might otherwise be able to make a very comfortable living doing e.g. support and consulting. Many smaller projects are surviving just fine like this. But when such projects take on tens/hundreds of millions of funding, it is inevitable that the technology becomes secondary to paying back the investors 10x, no matter what. Ironically most of that kind of funding seems to go towards sales and marketing rather than R&D. Usually core committers are only a minority of employees in such companies and things get worse when that no longer includes the C-level executives. This creates a lot of friction when inevitably somebody else undercuts such projects in terms of quality, features or price. This is inevitable because all software eventually becomes a commodity. Your fancy pants DB clustering solution might be shit hot this year but you can bet there will be half a dozen projects imitating what you did within years. This is basically what is happened to mongodb. It's all about diversifying, "adding value", proprietary extensions, etc. for their paying customers instead of doing what they were good at for all their users. And courtesy of the license, copyright transfers and outside contributions dry up and it's all on the company to do everything in house. Great, as long there's money but when that dries up it creates problems. Meanwhile projects like postgresql and others provide more or less drop in replacements, because they can and because there are users and developers in having that. Apparently they are still doing fine in terms of share price. Best of luck to them but I probably won't be using it. Most healthy OSS projects out there have licenses that are well understood from a legal point of view and battle-tested in years/decades of use. Some have quirks that need working around (e.g. the classpath exception for GPL v2), others are fine as is (e.g. Apache 2.0). They also have a plurality of copyright holders spread over many companies that makes re-licensing impractical. Most such projects have a core of developers that are typically employed by a big company taking an interest in the project. Having key people in key projects is of strategic importance to them and ensures their interests are taken care off. The whole point of OSS is commoditization and pooling resources between otherwise less likely to collaborate companies and individuals to get things done better than each of them would be likely to achieve by themselves. That's why most operating systems these days are largely made up of open source software, much of which has had multiple generations of developers working on it. Most of the build tooling around that, same thing. Apple, MS, Google, they all ship mixes of proprietary code and OSS code. Quite a lot of this stuff can be traced back to the early days of unix. Almost every big fortune 500 software company out there pays people to contribute to and represent them in OSS projects that are vital to their business. Even the less popular ones like Oracle actually contribute a lot. That's not charity; it's key to their success. MS just retired two generations of their in house browser in favor of an open source project primarily backed with Google and with significant portions of Apple contributions from back in the Webkit days. If you'd have to choose two competitors for MS, those would probably be at the top of your list. Why did they do this? Browsers are a commodity and they were negatively differentiating with their in house efforts (as demonstrated by world + dog installing something else). They tried to fix it (Edge) and it didn't work out. All of the surviving browsers are now built around open source projects. I think Edge is probably going down as the last non OSS browser to be widely used. I use open source components, libraries, and tools for almost everything I do. I love Github. I share code there myself. Most of the stuff I depend on has neither VCs nor much corporate funding behind it and its fine. Some of it does have VC funding and its also fine. My life would be hell if I had to reinvent all those wheels. I agree funding OSS development is key but I don't agree that that needs to primarily come from companies that own the software and sell licenses+support. That's not how most OSS software I use works; it instead thrives on companies using and paying for people to contribute. Nginx is one of many software packages that I use. I don't think I'll ever pay for licensing or support; because frankly they are relatively unimportant to me. As for the dozens of npm dependencies and their hundreds of transitive dependencies, nope. Not a cent. I would probably consider SAAS solutions when it makes sense; as I have done with e.g. Mariadb and Elasticsearch. But mostly OSS works because it is free as in speech and beer. In the case of nginx, there are dozens of OSS web servers out there. It's just one of many moving parts I need to worry about. I'll pick whatever is cheap and convenient.

ummonk 8y ago

Source-available commercial software might be a more viable route to go.

xorcist 8y ago

Obviously open source isn't going away. It's just that VC struggles to understand the implications, still, and the past half a decade has been imprinted deeply by all the cheap money. If your worst nightmare is that a big company like Amazon uses your software then perhaps your business model wasn't really for the cloud era. Selling licenses is to the VC crowd what sequels are to Hollywood, comfort food that everyone knows how to handle but simultaneously knows isn't going to be the future. Linux isn't worse off because it is used by AWS and Google. Quite the contrary.

benatkin 8y ago
I agree. Open Source software is not a good way to build a moat, and investors should take this into account. It's good for companies that focus on building employees, teams, and customer relationships, and keeping them strong at all times. They can't fall back on exclusivity of their code, hosting, or support offerings. The ideal Open Source company would probably be something like Red Hat.

paulddraper 8y ago

Gitlab and Hashicorp are going pretty strong. Maybe they get acquired though.

Ericson2314 8y ago

Or keep open source and do enough antitrust that businesses must compete on other axes.

pfarnsworth 8y ago

Enterprise open source is bleak. There aren't very many enterprise open source projects with pure intent anymore, they are all looking for the big payday, which unfortunately companies like Google and Facebook have encouraged. Look at Confluent/Kafka. The PMC is stuffed with Confluent employees and they behave that way. They aren't acting like an Apache project, they are only acting in their own self interest. Any new ideas get the run around, and only their ideas see the light of day. I don't even know why they bother being open source, except maybe to get the free development and bug fixes.

late2part 8y ago

* If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. * In the world I live in, far more commercially supported open source runs outside of AWS, then runs ON AWS, then AWS has copied and usurped.

marcotaves 8y ago

I honestly and personaly think is better and no snark here ok or affiliated thinking ok I think initially that in a business wise or business view stricly ok I think I would probably keep my core ´´pulo do gato`` logic on coding lines right for my sustainable material reality of sustainable way of living righ...with confort yah people enjoys it we all enjoy right... if you find hard to see how to keep your company afloat opening your main magic step of the code arquitecture that financialy monetarily strictly speaking gives you the bread of everyday and the building blocks of your little dreams right...then you as I would too my friend , not only have the freedom to do so , furthermore...An Conservatory approach is Always the best way...righ... I would keep usually probably 1 step above the open one a little ´omitted` yeah to use a more beautiful word...so, because of the bread of tomorrow right: The Old circus Master Edvar and this is absolutely TRUE! Said MAster Edvar that for a Circus Woman or Man, the Art of Blowing Fire, as impacting and beautiful as it is ( I , Marco Taves, have a picture of myself me blowing a meteor of 3 meters high or much more and 2 meters thick Ball Of Fire from my own mouth spitting lumpenõl(german)/querosene(portuguese) ) so... Edvar Master said that: Blowing fire is bread for today and hunger for tomorrow!!! SO! I open source what I in this example would could but keep 1 little step: Not for the bread of today, right...But mind you: The bread of tomorrow yeah... And this paragraph above is the important one in this comment ok I mean no much analogies with the pulo do gato, ok, we make good analogies, or we do not make any analogies, ok!!! Thats what I do but you have freewill, right! so... the story of the Onca[1] (Panthera Onca) and the pulo do gato[2] thanks 1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar 2- explain later or googlefu yeah... thanks!!!

fierro 8y ago

is there such a thing as available source, closed license?

black-tea 8y ago
Yes. Source code is copyrighted and you can make it available under any licence you like, including a proprietary one.

_pmf_ 8y ago

Yeah, it's almost as if it makes sense to copyright the API to prevent unlicensed usage of decade long investments. But apparently, Oracle is a bad guy for doing this, and Google is applauded for stealing Java. Can't have it both ways.

ec109685 8y ago

The company sold for 650 million so it isn’t a bad outcome. They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers, added their proprietary bits and were successful and sold the company. Isn’t this a great win?

snaky 8y ago
> They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers Had all the volunteers' impact being so big? Nginx was created by single developer who is NGINX, Inc CTO now, and then developed pretty much by Nginx employees only.
- mfjordvald 8y ago
  Very big yes! No doubt Igor deserves the majority of the honour for Nginx, but volunteer contributors were a big part earlier on, both in patches, investigations and community support. Search through the change log for "thanks to" http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES and you'll see a lot of contributions. Two people who stand out as frequent contributors are Piotr Sikora and Maxim Dounin (who went on to actually work at Nginx!). And this does not show the mailing list discussions and bug investigations or the documentation maintained by the community in the early days. [This post is not intended to mean this sale is bad, just to highlight some of the awesome community contributors]

rmc 8y ago

Or use copyright licences which the big tech companies are scared of. Affero GPL or some of the more radical "copyfarleft" licences.