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Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

• ekianjo 8y ago
  If you call it Open Source you miss the biggest point. It is Free Software and it is made for Software Freedom, which is the primary goal. Other goals such as making money, come second to that.
• collinmanderson 8y ago
  > Maybe this is why you can’t make money with open source: it’s a distraction. The question isn’t open-source-vs-proprietary, but open-source-vs-business-focused. > Another lens might be: who are you selling to? Classical scratch-your-own-itch open source software is built by programmers for programmers. Yes, open source works well for software written for programmers as an audience. If programmers aren't using the open source software, then there usually needs to be a business that's supporting the development of it.
  • astazangasta 8y ago
    This will become less true as a greater fraction of humanity learns to program.
    • usmannk 8y ago
      It sounds like you’re saying it’ll remain just as true; it just will become less meaningful of a distinction.
    • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      If you take "humanity" to mean "computer users" you'll find that the trend so far has been the exact opposite of what you suggest.
    • irrational 8y ago
      You mean when it goes from .001% of the population to .002% of the population? I don't think there will be any time that a large fraction of the world's population knows how to program. I've even tried to get my own kids interested in learning how to program to no avail. Some of my kids don't have the aptitude for it, but those who do have the aptitude just aren't interested.
      • zjaffee 8y ago
        Think about how many people know how to use SQL or Excel functions. While the number of people knowledgable about writing C++ or Java won't reach this high of a level, there will be tools that are widely understood that enable people to build pieces of technology as needed beyond what is available now.
        • krageon 8y ago
          I have literally heard this rhetoric for the 20 years I've been paying attention to this and I still haven't seen anything even approximating these grand promises. Software Development is a difficult field and expecting a big crowd to suddenly adopt it and start producing valuable content is not reasonable.
          • zjaffee 8y ago
            That's just not true, the thing to note is that no software engineers have been displaced to date in any clear way as a result of new tools. In the same exact way that software engineers are able to do far more complex work through the use of third party APIs, business users use increasingly more complex technology to augment their work. This ranges from sales and marketing tools, to legal research tools, to medical analysis tools. These tools generally speak in some amount of programatic language as well, which is why my point remains accurate.
    • rhn_mk1 8y ago
      That's not a given, seeing how the software people have access to is often specifically made to prevent people from wanting, or even realizing, that it could be changed. I'm thinking of iPhones, but also about what motivated me to start programming: games. Nowadays, consoles are the epitome of DRM, and many PC games are following on that path. Unless open source catches on soon, I am afraid only smaller and smaller proportion of humanity will be programmers, even without the compounding effect of the general population constantly increasing and diluting the existing programmer pool.
• pjc50 8y ago
  This is a very clear articulation of the common problems here. Intellectual property can only make money by preventing its use, otherwise it just spreads everywhere to everyone for free. Given this property of the Internet, and the decision of open source/Free Software to embrace rather than fight this property, what side-channels can be constructed to return some value to the developers? > Anything paired with a physical device. People will judge the value based on the hardware and software experience together. Not just embedded, but also SaaS. The fact that the physical device is off in a datacenter somewhere isn't so relevant. (Another implication of this is that open hardware will never behave quite like open software!)
  • simonh 8y ago
    This is precisely the thing, some things are valuable precisely because they are free and ubiquitous. It's a form of value that can't be measured directly in $. If you can measure it in $ at all, you can only do it indirectly, in the form of charges for services and ancillary products. There are no guarantees that's always feasible though. There's a threshold beyond which the cost of harvesting the value is higher than the value itself.
    • notduncansmith 8y ago
      It seems like a tragedy of the commons situation, which we have been able to fix in other instances with organized funding. We've seen some organizations spring up around funding open source projects, but if e.g. the US government authorized federal grant funding for open source projects, I think it would set an example for industry (and other governments) across the world. The challenge is getting historically scarcity-mindset institutions to recognize the value of letting the rising tide of free information lift every ship in the world. They don't like this on its face because they have divided the world into "us" and "not us" and open source provides more utility (in aggregate) to "not us" than to any "us" defined as narrowly as a single company or country. Until Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Manufacturing, and Big Government embrace a broader definition of "us" beyond their own conglomerates, they will continue to see open source as a threat. This gets at a broader cultural movement toward abundance, that in the US has strong roots in coastal western cities like LA, SF, and Portland, and strong opponents in the Midwest, South, and East. If the US federal government were to invest heavily in open source, it would send a message to the rest of the country that we are now in an age of abundance, where we recognize the value of lifting all ships, because we know that our strength is in the strength of all of us, not the strength of our few strongest players. It would signal a cultural shift toward collaborative ownership and, I believe, spur investment in many commons. It's difficult to speak the truth of this mindset to power, because incumbents recognize that there are real competitive threats. The hope is that governments will recognize that there are far fewer threats in a world where people have the basics covered, and companies will recognize that defining and advancing the state of the art makes you look pretty good to the best talent and best customers.
• StreamBright 8y ago
  > The question isn’t open-source-vs-proprietary, but open-source-vs-business-focused. I disagree. Some of the very successful FOSS projects are backed by businesses that benefitting using those. Linux, RocksDB, React, Tensorflow would be good examples.
  • slantyyz 8y ago
    Yeah, it seems like he's forgotten the about enterprise segment altogether. A lot of companies have OSS but make money charging for support and/or additional features (granted, some of those additional features may not be OSS). Examples: Liquibase, Pentaho, Flyway, etc.
    • whoopdedo 8y ago
      In that situation writing software is like cleaning dishes. No one in the restaurant business says, "We need to find a way to monetize our dishwashers."
• softwaredoug 8y ago
  Years ago open source was about companies collaborating on commoditizing an obvious solution AWAY from the market. The economic case for open source isn’t about value added product companies, but a kind of commercial pooling of resources to create cost reduction and easier software maintenance on stuff nobody wants to buy or maintain... Of course orgs have lost site of this. The sad reality is 99.999% of orgs are OSS freeloaders or way too conservative and hence want to in house everything. Or happy with modestly priced cloud hosted everything that ends up taking away some of OSSs maintenance savings upside.
  • skybrian 8y ago
    You say that like OSS "freeloading" is a bad thing when it's basically by design. If the result of previous pooling of resources is that there is a lot of open source software that you (or a vendor) can just pick up and use, isn't that just things working out as intended? Isn't this what users and vendors being free to do what they want really means? It seems like many of us are conflicted about whether open source software should come with obligations. It doesn't have any strings attached by design, but then we want to add fuzzy moral obligations instead.
    • pjmlp 8y ago
      Not everyone might feel comfortable to keep working on their pet project when life gets thought and there isn't any money getting in. Yes, others might pick it up, but it is seldom the case.
    • Crinus 8y ago
      That is what you get with two decades of brainwashing about how open source software being morally good and proprietary software being morally bad - at some point you have devalued everyone's work to nothingness and end up with both developers and users demanding your work and time to be free to them.
• tacostakohashi 8y ago
  I wonder what would happen if someone started an open source software "vendor" run along the lines of public radio / podcasts. Open source licensed (using a regular GPL or other license, nothing new or tricky), but a prominent encouragement to donate it you find it useful. Those donations could then be used to hire full-time developers, and work on the kinds of software that is currently not well served by open-source (TurboTax replacements, games, office software). Just as with public radio or podcasts, the price signal of donations would encourage certain kinds of products to be produced according to demand instead of enjoyment or itch scratching, but the end product would still have the benefits of open source, no license keys or DRM to worry about. I expect 99% of people would freeload as they do with public radio, but that's ok, even a small participation rate could result in new kinds of open source software being produced, and a sustainable career path for creators.
  • Already__Taken 8y ago
    Look at nuxt.js you get a funding update after you npm install it
  • est31 8y ago
    Godot engine has this model. They are getting donations from patreon [1], enough to pay 2 people full time at the center of the project. Wikipedia is another project which is doing this very successfully. But in general, those methods bring you much less money than if you were proprietary, because as you rightfully point out, most people are "freeloaders". [1]: https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://www.patreon.com/godotengine
    • Insanity 8y ago
      to nitpick, but to me the term 'freeloaders' has a negative connotation and I don't think it should in the case of FOSS. Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS. Apart from that, you make good points :)
      • est31 8y ago
• oweqruiowe 8y ago
  It recently dawned on me, in light of the Elastic / AWS battle, that Elastic's business model is kind of like GGG's 'free to play' game Path of Exile. Where the base game is free, but as you get more serious you end up spending money on quality of life things, stash tab upgrades and what not. That business model has proven to be very successful (in gaming), versus the buy once model with games like Diablo. Hopefully, by sharing that here doesn't result in a 'gray-at-the-bottom-comment'.
  • sanxiyn 8y ago
    Yup. Open-core model and freemium model are two different words for the same thing.
  • clarry 8y ago
    You mean games like Diablo weren't very successful?
    • sanxiyn 8y ago
      Freemium model is vastly more profitable. There is a reason every game company is switching to it.
      • YayamiOmate 8y ago
        I think you mean micro transactions. Freemium is base for this. I don't think its something bad. Even more, it can be absolutely voluntarily and vanity. Skins in LoL dont give you nothing except aesthetics, yet they cash in pretty hard. Imho the success of micropayments is based on two things. 1. It alows to adjust spending to capabilities, I.e. is easier to scale. 2. it drains wallet slowly, so it's easier to spend more. Like credit services.
      • nostrademons 8y ago
        For some numbers - Diablo 3 was one of the best-selling AAA titles with 12 million copies sold in its first year, about 30 million within the first 3 years. The entire Civilization franchise has sold about 40 million copies - Civ 5 & 6 each sold about 8 million copies. At $50/copy, that's about $200M per game, ranging up to about $1.5B for a bestseller over multiple years. By comparison, Wargaming (a mid-level F2P publisher of World of Tanks, World of Warships, and World of Warplanes) made about $600M in 2015. Fortnite (a bestselling F2P phenomena) made $2.4B in 2018. Pokemon Go (also a huge fad, but one now passe) made about $795M in 2018, and roughly $2B since launch. The playerbase for these F2P games is more than an order of magnitude bigger than traditional AAA titles, so even though a large percentage players never pay, they still pull in roughly 2-4x what the traditional business model does. (This is also what's driving the sky-high valuations of Twitch and Discord - all these players use related services even if they don't pay for the game itself. It's also interesting to compare this to movies - games are now comparable to or even exceeding blockbuster movies in revenue potential.)
• jerkstate 8y ago
  Open source software is infrastructure, not a commodity. Anyone has access to build on top of it. There is no question that open source enables enormous amounts of commerce, probably more so than equivalent closed-source software would. In that way, open source very much does make money in the same way that highways and airports make money.
  • jchallis 8y ago
    Tollroads and airports both have gate fees. OSS does not have gate fees. How are these the same?
    • jerkstate 8y ago
      You're torturing the metaphor. But OSS development on large important projects is now almost completely subsidized by the big and small companies that use it for their own ends and contribute much of their work back to the common good. So the companies that make use of it in the biggest ways do pay for it, but that effort and money contributes to a common that others can use (for only the cost of time in hobbyist cases).
    • solomatov 8y ago
      There's a problem. It's relatively easy to administer toll gates. It's not so easy to administer software licensing. We might get what it used to be with proprietary software 10-20 years ago, when there were no transparency about pricing etc, and it all resulted in "we will look at you and decide how much we will be able to make you pay" kind of pricing.
• kodz4 8y ago
  Wikipedia has managed to survive despite all kinds of threats, using donations and it's MediaWiki revenue stream.
• rburhum 8y ago
  I think doing the argument of "open source vs business focused" is incorrect. I would just make the comparison of "business focused vs not business focused". If it is open source or not, that is just a detail of the business strategy. One of the main problem that we technologist fail at is that a lot of the times we assume technology == product. When we do this, we completely overlook all the necessary infrastructure and processes that we need to have in place to capture the value that the technology provides. We need customer success to guide the customer through a continuous successful implementation, marketing to very clearly articulate value propositions that change in different verticals, a sales team to capture the value and turn it into dollars consistently, support to listen to the customer when things go wrong and hold their hand through the fixes or workaround, lawyers to prepare support contracts and cover procurement requirements, hr, etc etc. I could go on forever. I disagree that there are not examples of companies that show how to make money from open source. Beyond the obvious examples like "RedHat is a public company" and "MySQL sold to Sun", I can think of an absurd amount of businesses whose secret sauce is ElasticSearch. I would argue, that even though Elastic is a public company, they have not been capturing all the value they have brought. Although there are consulting companies like EnterpriseDB and CitusDB around projects like PostgreSQL, thinking that "consulting" is the one and only business model around monetizing an open source database is a gross over simplification that glosses over models that are evolving in various other areas, for example the one Jetbrains is doing with IntelliJ (basically a subscription service now). I can look at the current top 100 posts of HNs and point out quite a few of successful businesses that would not have been where they are right now without open source existing in its current form.
  • hodgesrm 8y ago
    I was going to write this comment but you did it already. ;) Another common criticism of OSS goes along the lines of "it does not monetize value fully." In other words it creates value but the authors don't collect on it completely. However, the same statement is true of proprietary software. Anybody who has sold proprietary products knows that what you recover is a fraction of the cost of your users doing it themselves. It might be a bigger fraction than OSS but not always--maybe you don't even get the sale in the first place because users are afraid of lock-in. It's therefore quite misleading to think in terms of different economic models for OSS and proprietary-based businesses. There are more points in common than differences.
• buboard 8y ago
  All software is designed to not make money. Duplication of software is free by definition, so the value of software is essentially free unless it is paired with something that is not duplicatable and thus more valuable. A legal license, a physical product, consulting, support, a website, those are all non-duplicatable.
  • svn120 8y ago
    Assigning a value to things that can be duplicated with zero cost (i.e. copyright and IP) is a great cultural achievement. Human creations (physical or non-physical) should rank higher than land (which no one created but still irrationally claims).
• adamnemecek 8y ago
  It's very easy to get people to pay for hosting. In Mozilla's case, I would love to see some sort of cloud hosting for Rust. I also wish I could write front end in Rust but maybe I'll just have to wait for webassembly. I can't imagine that some sort of rust to js compiler (kinda like kotlin) would be too hard and this would be a killer application. Matei Zaharia (of the Spark fame) and friends are working on weld, https://github.com/weld-project/weld https://github.com/weld-project/weld. There's going to be a lot of money there as well. A cloudera competitor of sorts. But yeah, go ham on Rust based paid solution.
  • sanxiyn 8y ago
    I am working on Rust to JS compiler based on Scala.js design. I plan to release it using Street Performer Protocol.
    • adamnemecek 8y ago
      You are doing God's work. Is it on github?
      • sanxiyn 8y ago
        Street Performer Protocol means the source won't be released until the fund is raised. (It's work-in-progress, so I am not fundraising yet. It will probably be on Kickstarter with a demo to prove the thing is real.)
        • adamnemecek 8y ago
          Are you doing this fulltime?
          • sanxiyn 8y ago
            Yes. 3 months in.
            • 8y ago
• sanxiyn 8y ago
  I always thought Street Performer Protocol is an obvious answer to fund open source software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_performer_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_performer_protocol Do not release the source until the fund is raised.
  • clarry 8y ago
    I'd like to see crowdfunding move in this direction, but it'd be too good, right? Calculate that a project takes $100k, amass the backing, then release the finished work for the benefit of the whole world. What happens instead of release is that the makers just keep it all closed and try to make further profit.
    • sanxiyn 8y ago
      mycli used this model, read about their experience here: https://www.mycli.net/kickstarter https://www.mycli.net/kickstarter
  • quadrangle 8y ago
    The RATIONAL Street Performer Protocol is even better http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/rspp http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/rspp And that's the closest of the various older theoretical models to the proposed solution of Crowdmatching being worked on at https://snowdrift.coop https://snowdrift.coop
• craigsmansion 8y ago
  Maybe Mozilla could do with a bit less money. They've been playing serious business for some time now, but it's pretty much been borrowed feathers. Firefox got big because of early enthusiasts who believed in a better web. That got them enough clout to get google interested, and google basically gave them large piles of money. Somehow that gave them the idea they were a "real business" now, and they started spending and reorganising themselves accordingly. Now it turns out they probably weren't a real business after all. Those piles of google money in the bank could have sustained pure Firefox development perpetually, probably even allowed for fun and useful side-projects like Rust, but no, Mozilla wanted to play serious business, except, of course, now they have to compete against actual serious businesses, which in this case would be Google and Microsoft, and so far their efforts haven't been a unanimously successful. > This is where the Free Software mission has faltered No, this is 1. where Mozilla has faltered, and 2. Focusing on money, marketability, and business friendliness is pretty much an open source objective. That's fine, but don't drag Free Software into this.
  • hinkley 8y ago
    From what I understand, a bunch of the long lived charities put their donations in the bank and live off of the interest. You get more donations by pretending like the money is for your new program, but it's only indirectly so (more assets equals more operating capital). If Mozilla didn't do that, their biggest opportunities for setting up and endowment are in the past and it won't go well for them in the future.
    • hinkley 8y ago
      Well, fuck. In 2017 they operated at almost 120% of income: > Overall, Mozilla invested $24M in this work in 2017. Total revenue and income support to the Mozilla Foundation in CY 2017 was $20.6M.
• jaabe 8y ago
  I think you can make money on Open Source, but I think you need partners to do so. I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven open source community called OS2. We’re around 60 members, and we’ve recently won a national award for tech-reuse issued by our ministry of digitisation and around 10 interest groups. We don’t build the code ourselves. We do own, review and manage the code. We handle the project management and we facilitate access to our business processes and employees, but the actual development is something we buy. Once things get build we often end up buying the various projects as SAAS solutions because we aren’t really geared to operate OS techs. We do have excellent federated authentication, network security and API services, but we genuinely don’t want to operate a horde of different tech stacks. This makes us a perfect match for anyone who knows how to do SAAS in the cloud though, and most of the things we build end up being run in Azure or AWS by a supplier. So far it’s been a really beneficial relationship. We get ownership, better quality and faster more agile development. Our local development houses still make money, both from development but also from SAAS. It has been especially good for our smaller dev houses, because a system isn’t locked down to a single supplier for years. This last bit is entirely my personal opinion, but I prefer buying software from a local shop and helping them build and expand their businesses. On the plus side of this, they co-operate a lot better too. Municipalities are trying partners who can’t make up our minds, and a small agile shop who doesn’t point to the 4 year old contract every time you want a tiny change, has just been so refreshing.
  • TheRealPomax 8y ago
    I'm not sure that solution works when you already have a product development model that relies on (literally) tens of thousands of people none of whom trust anyone but you with stewardship of that product. Plus, given the incredible number of partners Mozilla already has, and has had in the past, it feels like the partnership idea is a passed station.
  • phkahler 8y ago
    >> I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven open source community called OS2. We’re around 60 members, and we’ve recently won a national award for tech-reuse issued by our ministry of digitisation and around 10 interest groups. >> We don’t build the code ourselves. We do own, review and manage the code. We handle the project management and we facilitate access to our business processes and employees, but the actual development is something we buy. This sounds like you're treating the software like infrastructure, which is how I've been starting to view it. You contract out the work to maintain it just like roads. It's no surprise to me that you work for a municipality where that's how they get things done. I believe this is what the future of a lot of large software projects looks like. From the developer side people will look just like contractors and their specialization with be which OSS programs they are familiar with - i.e. how fast they can get the desired changes done and into the master branch. There will of course be cheaper guys who will make your changes in a fork that ends up costing you more long term. Big software is infrastructure which needs to be maintained but is not inherently profitable.
• bigbadgoose 8y ago
  I love that this has to actually be articulated. To be clear, open source _can_ make money, but it is not _designed_ to make money.
• krupan 8y ago
  It feels to me like there was a lot of social pressure over the last 10 years or so for open source projects to use the most permissive open source license they could. You were cool and "more free" if you used Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses. I wonder if this is coming back to bite us now. Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software. Would things be different for the companies we've been talking about lately (mongo, redis, elastisearch, etc.) if they had gone with a GPL license and a Red Hat-like business model from the start?
  • cperciva 8y ago
    RedHat's business is not selling GPL software. They probably sell more BSD/MIT/Apache software than GPL software, but they're not in the business of selling software at all. They're in the business of selling support.
    • krupan 8y ago
      Those are good points. As I think about it some more, it's not even just support that they sell (as in, you can call them up when there's a bug). The large enterprises they sell to value: - support - training - ease of install - ease of upgrade - indemnity (e.g., Red Hat promises to pay your court costs if someone sues for patent infringement) - stability (long term support releases) Those are all things that plain old open source by itself doesn't provide, but Red Hat does.
      • mistrial9 8y ago
        business in the US has stopped paying for training, generally..
      • pjmlp 8y ago
        Which are all things that usually no consumer pays for, hence the big failure of trying to sell FOSS desktop software.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software. Red Hat built a very successful business, AFAIK, selling support to enterprise customers. > Would things be different for the companies we've been talking about lately (mongo, redis, elastisearch, etc.) if they had gone with a GPL license and a Red Hat-like business model from the start? Probably not; there's lots of companies selling enterprise support around permissively-licensed software. It seems most of the ones at issue want to sell SaaS platform services, and would face the same problem with well established SaaS platforms beating them at that game with their own open source software if it was copyleft licensed as if it was permissively-licensed. OTOH if they close it off and make it exclusive it's going to be hard to keep a sufficient premium in software quality to make their platforms attractive over broader platforms with weaker lock-in, even if those other platforms require a more broadly-supportable second-choice alternative software package in place of the proprietary vendors secret sauce component.
• burtonator 8y ago
  I'm currently experimenting with this directly. Specifically trying to make Open Source sustainable but for a consumer project. I think Open Source really works for infrastructure projects and it's possible to do really well either working on a system like Kubernetes or Elasticsearch. Not so well for projects that are more focused on consumers. My app, Polar, is focused more on consumers and is an app for people to managed their reading and notes. Similar to Evernote but also has spaced repetition support like Anki and we're working on collaboration features too: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ I wanted Polar to be Open Source but we've had almost zero source code contributions in the last six months. Most of our contributions from users have been from people suggesting features, filing bugs, suggesting architecture changes or product/market fit issues. These have been very helpful of course. However, to date, we've only raised about $500. To be clear I'm working on Polar full time so I've probably made about $0.15 per hour... I think there's a lot of reasons for this actually but if I were to narrow it down. 1. Consumers hate paying for software. The plan with Polar is to go with a freemium model so we need 100k or so users. 2. There's a big of a 'tragedy of the commons' here with the donations aren't coming in because everyone assumes someone else will donate. This is really a bad situation in a lot of ways for the 'self hosting' crowd. They want quality apps but they're not willing to pay for them. We're polling our users about why they haven't donated and here are the current results: https://i.imgur.com/cOUy10f.png https://i.imgur.com/cOUy10f.png I think my next main goal is to do some sort of Kickstarter and try to raise $150k or so. Either that or focus on raising grants or VC.
  • dman 8y ago
    Thanks for doing this and sharing the survey results.
  • simonh 8y ago
    It looks like it works as a service. Aren’t you concerned someone could fork you, spin it up on AWS and compete you into the dust? What benefits do you think the project and users will gain from it being open source?
    • burtonator 8y ago
• pplonski86 8y ago
  The list of commercial open source software companies with revenue > 100M https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17nKMpi_Dh5slCqzLSFBoWMxNvWiwt2R-t4e_l7LPLhU/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17nKMpi_Dh5slCqzLSFBo...
  • scottlocklin 8y ago
    Short list. Includes many who have never made a profit, and at least one (Coinbase) which is completely not an open source software company.
  • calcifer 8y ago
    Most of these companies have paid, closed source products as well so it's not a given their revenue is attributable to open source. Is there a list of companies that are actually, completely, open source and still have revenue > 100M? I think that is the list OP would be interested in.
• 51lver 8y ago
  So open source is generic, and personalized interfaces are profitable. Well then. I guess now is a really good time to be running an app store.
  • sanxiyn 8y ago
    Mozilla should let people buy, say, Tree Style Tab, and split revenue with the author.
• jopsen 8y ago
  If Firefox for Android cost 10 USD / year some people would buy it.. Even if there was 100 free forks readily available. People would pay for the brand :) Honestly, I prefer bitwarden over "password store" because I pay and, thus, I know it's unlikely to go away or go unsupported.
  • sanxiyn 8y ago
    Even 10 USD / month would work. (This is roughly how much Reddit Premium costs.)
• anth_anm 8y ago
  Open source makes other people billions.
• amelius 8y ago
  Governments could fund Open Source, just like they fund academic research.
  • godelski 8y ago
    They do. At least in the US they do. I work with DOE labs in my academic research and everything I work on/with is open source.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• raspasov 8y ago
  “You can’t make a living making music. Or art.” This statement is too general and obviously false. Many artists make money. Of course many or most don’t but “can’t” is a very strong word.
• mythz 8y ago
  Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it to build out their multi-billion dollar infrastructure moats, ensuring a barrier to entry no other will be able to partake in. This is why cloud vendors have become so "OSS friendly" - they love the status quo as they've become the primary beneficiaries from everyone developing and distributing OSS for free as long as they're able to collect the rent when it gets hosted in the end. You're starting to see the conflicts as more companies like Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and MongoDB who realize this and start distributing their future investments under "OSS free that's free for everyone else but can't be used commercially by cloud vendors" as a way to force licensing so Cloud vendors are unable to use their own investments to compete against them - and force some revenue share back from when Customers pay for OSS, when they host it. So when you hear how much cloud companies "love OSS" and how their initiatives like "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" is to ensure it stays open, know that they're not doing it out of altruism, it's to repackage Elastic's OSS investments and make it available for free so they can be hosted on AWS without having to host with Elastic, it effectively lets them avoid licensing and revenue sharing back to the companies who've invested their time and resources into developing it.
  • bunderbunder 8y ago
    I'm starting to suspect that the major cloud vendors are well along on pulling a classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" gambit on that front. I'm sure there are a percentage of people operating in the cloud who stick judiciously to an open-source stack, and remain masters of their own future as a result. But it seems more common to spread some open source icing on top of a cake made out of ingredients like Beanstalk, Redshift, S3, Lambda, etc. (Or name your favorite non-Amazon cloud vendor's equivalent.) Those companies may be just as locked into their closed-source software vendor of choice as people were locked into Microsoft or IBM or whoever back in the 1990s.
    • 8y ago
• jordigh 8y ago
  I think it was designed to make money: sell the actual software. RMS used to sell free copies of Emacs: for 100 bucks, you'd get Emacs, the source code, the documentation, and the necessary scripts to compile it. This was always part of the definition of free software, which open source inherited. It's just that selling like this is more difficult now that there's a high-speed internet for everyone, but I think more people should be trying to sell this way. App stores are one example, if they didn't have those ridiculous GPL-incompatible restrictions, but Red Hat does outright just sell the software in a GPL-compatible way: you want access to their repos and nothing else, no support (I believe they call this self-service), they sell that too. It might not make you rich, it might not hockey stick, but I think if more people just tried to sell free software, we'd see more people being able to comfortably make a living.
  • krupan 8y ago
    Well said. I can't find the blog post, but patio11 once talked about how all you have to do is ask for people to pay you and you'll be surprised how many will. Also, most businesses have no budget for donations but they have plenty of budget for software purchases.
  • pard68 8y ago
    Another thing, so much of the FOSS world is nonprofit. It is very hard for a for-profit company to give money to a non-profit. I don't know the why, but I have witnessed a few instances and basically non-profit donations have to come from the donations budget and that budget is usually orders of magnitude smaller than budgets designated for purchasing and also usually shared by the entire company and thus quickly depleted. If there were either a intermediate broker or if FOSS companies elected to a for-profit status than they could easily accept donations. In the US, creating an LLC only takes the conscious effort of will to decide you want to make an LLC and is a for-profit model, so it isn't too hard to make.
• acolytic 8y ago
  One thing I'm not seeing here is people giving freely simply because you created something they value. You will never become a billionaire through this mechanism but I suspect you can probably earn a decent living. The problem with this mechanism is that now each project is out on their own to advertise their needs and get donations. I'm actually experimenting in this space with SeedAndDew (https://www.seedanddew.com https://www.seedanddew.com). My hypothesis is that if you can give people the ability to set a specific amount to open source that automatically goes to the right places, more people will contribute. Just went full-time to see this through so early days but I'm optimistic.
  • soulbadguy 8y ago
    Are the donations tax deductible ? How did you guys arrive at the 30% figure ? Seems quite high to me
    • acolytic 8y ago
      Donations are not tax-deductible for now. We might do that later if people ask for it. 30% includes all payment processing costs and other costs for both users and projects, so there is a flat 70% remaining for projects that doesn't get deducted further. We do this to keep things simple and make it clear how much projects can get. Payment processing alone costs $0.3 + 3% with Stripe, so at $10/month that's a fixed $0.6 out of the $3 we take. The other $2.4 needs to accommodate the fees to send money to each of the projects + infrastructure costs. Not sure how to account for that but assuming at scale around $0.4/user/month, we're looking at $2/user/month in profit. Assuming sustainability is reached at $200,000, that is approximately 8300 people giving to open source through this. That is high but seems approachable. Does that seem reasonable? My objective with this is to build something that increases the pool of people who contribute but also ensure the underlying project can stay afloat indefinitely with the right incentives.
      • soulbadguy 8y ago
        First thanks for doing this.I was actually looking for a good and efficient way to give back to OSS. 30 % seems more inline with apps store etc... which are closed, for profit entities. Other crowd founding venue charge around 5 % which is the level i would personally feel comfortable with. The way the donation are distributed is interesting and seem to be geared toward people wanted to give back to communities on which they are actually contributing (time spent on the documentation pages). Personally i am looking for a way to give to project i use the most, (firefox, vim , zsh etc...) and also project that i use and particularly need funding. Any plans for the entreprise market ?
• nicodjimenez 8y ago
  Open source doesn't make money for the same reason music doesn't make money. It's very hard to charge for content directly nowadays. What people do pay for is user experience. The money in open source flows to cloud hosted open source services on AWS / Azure, the money in music content goes to Spotify, the money in TV shows goes to Netflix, ... Agree / disagree?
• peter_retief 8y ago
  I want to emphasise this "Anything paired with a physical device. People will judge the value based on the hardware and software experience together." This is THE future growth market IMHO
• Kuraj 8y ago
  I've had this idea in my head for some time but I wonder when browsers will start suppressing address bar content changes while the input is active and it's in the "dirty" state. It's really annoying to make a typo, realize it, try to correct it, and ending up hitting return on a malformed url AGAIN because the site finished loading in the meantime.
  • Kuraj 8y ago
    Oh crap, wrong thread. Sorry about the off-topic.
• everdev 8y ago
  > Open Source Doesn't Make Money Because It Isn't Designed to Make Money What? RedHat - $34B MuleSoft - $6.5B Elastic - $5B Cloudera + Hortonworks - $5B Pivotal Software - $4.7B MongoDB - $3.5B
  • gnat 8y ago
    Those are businesses. Businesses are designed to make money. Open Source is a category of licenses designed to facilitate distribution of software. I feel like much of the problems mentioned in this thread come down to people wanting to be paid to write software but not building a business that lets them do that. They spent all their time working on the software and not the business. The book "The E Myth" about entrepreneurship tackles this. "You're a baker who loves to bake. You start a bakery. Now you're a business person first, not a baker." They say "you work ON the business, not IN the business." In business, you trade money for value. If it's high value they can't get elsewhere, you might get a lot of money in the trade. You work on your business by figuring out what value you'll sell, and to whom ... and design your business by choosing those parameters so you make a living. It's no different with musicians and photographers. You can love their craft, and be good at it, but not find something to sell that makes you a living. Wedding photographers generally don't like their job, but it pays great. It's generally not the art form they prefer, but it's the one that's easiest to make a living at. Business is this constant negotiation between supply (you, the programmer) and demand (the people you're hoping will give you money). Not every product sits at a profitable place on this curve. Open Source privileges the Creator, not the Buyer. I can make whatever I like and give it away for free. I might have one user or a hundred million. Because it's not a business model (an exchange of value for money), it isn't at all concerned with the financial viability of the programmer's lifestyle. That's why surveys repeatedly find that "most" "programmers" work for a company and are paid to produce open source (for some values of "most" and "programmers"). The companies handle the messy business stuff that isn't as much fun as coding, and programmers just get on with coding.
    • everdev 8y ago
      OK, following that logic then there isn't much money in anything besides business.
• bachmeier 8y ago
  IMO one of the problems with monetization is that the price ends up being too high. I'd love to have Pocket Premium. Just not enough to spend $45 a year for a bookmarking service. I see way too much focus on the value of whatever they're selling and no focus at all on what else I could do with that money. I'd gladly pay $8 or $10 a year for a good bookmarking service, but not $45.
• anigbrowl 8y ago
  The downside of this is that OSS can only be produced by people who have a sufficient degree of financial security. No matter how useful a given piece of OSS is, if the creator is not financially secure they're required to either beg for money, or beg for a job. Isn't it odd that a piece of software, could be widely deployed, forked, starred on Github etc. etc. and yet with all this infrastructure there is no mechanism to ensure that any money finds its way back to the creators unless they ask for it? Some kinds of business people praise the selfless creativity of the open source community while simultaneously conserving their own profits and often denouncing taxation as theft. When challenged, such people attribute all human progress to the profit motive, and thereby in part to themselves, in manifest disregard of the facts. Creative people don't like this but they need to eat and keep a roof over their head, which requires money. On the one hand, creative people with a mindset of mutual aid and consequent abundance, whose genius expands and structures much of our economy. On the other, well-resourced people who preach a gospel of scarcity and systematically give less than they take. These same people denounce any interference in their profit-making, and choke the unfortunate with externalities because they refuse to bear the cost of cleaning up their own waste, often going so far as to deceive the public about its existence. How are open source creators any different from blacksmiths, forging the very chains and weapons which bind and oppress them? How much life must be given away, how much filth heaped on heads, before creators will unstop their ears to the laughter of those who exploit and rule over them, mocking their generous spirits and diligent efforts?
  • int_19h 8y ago
    It would certainly be interesting to have some form of voluntary micropayments integrated with GitHub. Or, say, bounties for issues and feature requests, where multiple visitors can add their 2c into a shared pot (although that requires moderation to verify the result).
    • pard68 8y ago
      I have seen a few orgs that use bounties. Habitica comes to mind. There are tools to integrate this into github already even.
    • 8y ago
• anon1m0us 8y ago
  It's designed to make money for everyone EXCEPT the person writing the code. Especially business people who resell the code to their customers without ANY investment into actually creating something or paying people with talent who do things that make the world a better place. Why would the world properly value our contribution if WE don't value our contribution?
• robbrown451 8y ago
  The real problem is that our scarcity based economy wasn't designed to deal with intellectual property.
  • anticensor 8y ago
    Neither does post-scarcity economy. Even post-scarcity economy requires finite supply of goods.
    • robbrown451 8y ago
      Doesn't it depend on how it is set up? I could think of lots of ways to set up a post-scarcity economy that could work well, at least if population isn't growing wildly.
• skorbenko 8y ago
  Is there a way to make this work via cryptocurrencies? Just looking to start a discussion.
• csallen 8y ago
  > You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. First, this isn't true. Plenty of people make a living doing each of the above. (Art is somewhat of a special case, because some will say that what you're doing isn't art by definition if it's attached to some functional purpose like a business model. But you don't have to listen to those people.) Second, these things aren't cheap because they're not valuable. Water is cheap. Water is also necessary to life. It's immensely valuable. What makes it cheap is that it's easy to provide, so competition drives prices down. People aren't going to pay a lot of money to get something valuable if they can pay less to get the same value elsewhere. Value isn't the only thing that matters when determining price. > There are dozens (hundreds?) of successful open source projects that have tried to become even just modest commercial enterprises, some very seriously. Results aren’t great. Are results much better for normal people trying to start businesses that aren't based on open-source code? I'm not convinced they are. Businesses are hard.
  • SkyPuncher 8y ago
    I think a more apt description would be "You can't PLAN to make a living making music". Certainly, lots of people successfully make a living with music, arts, sports, etc. However, there's a lot out of the individual's control in those fields.
    • csallen 8y ago
      I disagree there, too. Attempting to make money makes you a business. As a business, your fate is in your hands. You're the one making the decisions. If you decide that the path you want to take in the business of music is to give control to record labels because all the business-y marketing production stuff isn't fun for you, that's your decision. You don't have to do it that way.
    • ken 8y ago
      You can't plan to be the next Beatles (just as you can't plan to be the next Microsoft), but you can absolutely plan to make a living in the arts (just as you can plan to make a living in software). When people look at a field from the outside, they only see the celebrities, but this is a completely unrepresentative sample. As Phil Greenspun once put it, "I can't decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson, a musician like Britney Spears, or an actor like Harrison Ford."
• abetlen 8y ago
  Very relevant is this old post by Joel Spolsky on tech companies using free and open source software to commoditize their complements. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ Basically, you can increase the demand for a product by decreasing the cost of it's complements. You can increase the demand for managed Redis services by investing in making Redis better. The caveat is that you can't control where that demand goes and you might end up helping out your competitors more than yourself.
• bad_user 8y ago
  The problem of open source is one of scarcity. People don't pay for value, if that value can be obtained for free and without effort. People pay for scarcity and our whole economic system is based on it. Open source unfortunately is the exact opposite. Note that there are open source projects making money. For example Wordpress is GPL, which forces all plugins and themes to be GPL-compatible as well. And there are plenty of commercial plugins and themes selling quite well, all of them open source. But that's not necessarily something Mozilla could emulate.
• RIMR 8y ago
  I think the most important take-away here isn't whether or not you can make a profit with Open Source solutions or not - the take-away is that whether or not a Open Source project is profitable or not is completely irrelevant when discussing the usefulness of said project. It's like complaining that insulin isn't fun enough. Nobody taking insulin was trying to have fun.
• ffn 8y ago
  What if the problem with open-source not making money isn't the open-source part, but the money part? Our current economic system focuses on money as a medium of "equivalent exchange", as in there's no free lunch and a dollar you spend on buying a piece of butter necessarily means you can't spend that same dollar on a gun (same thing for the butter merchant). This exchange is based on a contractual agreement that binds for a finite time, and stuff that happens outside that window is necessarily considered an "externality". In other words, money facilitates a social interaction that prioritizes focus on the costs/benefits of individual(s) involved while de-prioritizing the costs/benefits of the collective at large. But contributing to open-source is not that sort of social interaction, instead, it's one that prioritizes contributing to the collective over individual gain - i.e. a social interaction that focuses on externalities instead of on contractual time-based exchange. Money, with its focus on being loosely "conserved" (e.g. you can't double-spend the same dollar), is simply not a good medium for encouraging cooperation and discouraging free-riding to open-source (and other public-goods) In traditional villages, public-goods contributions were facilitated with some combination of reputation and gossip. Later, cities and states managed to come up with taxation, courts, and prison when reputation and gossip failed to scale. But the super-connected capitalist "globopolis" of today demands a new form of organizing cooperation and eliminating free-riding when it comes to public goods. To properly solve the problem of the economics of open-source, we need to solve this more general organization problem.
  • gunta 8y ago
    Perhaps form a global NPO where participant countries give x% of all their taxes to donate to OSS projects
• alexnewman 8y ago
  Sure it does, we just don't have much experience on how. I expect the next Microsoft will be OSS
• anth_anm 8y ago
  The answer is more aggressively copyleft licensing (AGPL, and others). If APIs are copyrightable that's a very unfortunate thing, but it would also make it possible to protect FOSS IP much more aggressively. Mongo wouldn't be getting destroyed by Amazon, for example.
  • quadrangle 8y ago
    That doesn't solve public goods funding dilemmas, that only works if you do the non-free/libre/open license option and you're making some upstream thing for use in proprietary products. Copyleft is only a business model if you tie it to non-FLO products, which defeats the point.
• godelski 8y ago
  And.... the website is marked as insecure...
• galaxyLogic 8y ago
  How about selling adds that are embedded into source-code? The target-audience of the adds would of course be coders because who else reads source-code. Maybe not a big audience but the adds could be permanent. And what would the donors be advertising? Maybe development tools but also themselves as a potential employer. It would be basically VERY targeted marketing because only coders would see it.
  • krageon 8y ago
    Except who wants to let that particular parasite poison another good thing? Certainly not the people most likely to actually work on OSS. I know I would stay away from any project that did this, even if I considered donating my time and energy to them.
• jszymborski 8y ago
  I'm tempted just to say dual AGPL-Commercial dual-licensing, and granting MIT-style licenses for non-profit/academic use on request... although I know that's not workable for all cases
  • gunta 8y ago
    Ive been thinking that this is really the current best solution to the problem. I want to try this, is there any project who has implemented this MIT/Apache licenses on request? Ideally we need first a system to do the request approval a la https://cla-assistant.io https://cla-assistant.io
• rb808 8y ago
  It also destroys good paying software jobs. Previously corporations paid big bucks to IBM, Oracle, Sun, Borland, etc for operating systems, databases etc, and those companies paid a lot of good technical people to write software. Now they get all that for free. Nice work guys!
• quadrangle 8y ago
  …and designing it to make money necessarily undermines the free/libre/open public-goods values. There's NO WAY OUT of this dilemma. The best we can do is to work within the dilemma. That's what https://snowdrift.coop https://snowdrift.coop is aiming to promote and support.
• amelius 8y ago
  I wish it were possible to scale the price of a piece of software with the amount of money that people make with it. Then you could make money from big companies, and let individuals and small startups use your software for free.
• pelasaco 8y ago
  not sure, lot of companies make Money with Open Source (redhat, SUSE, Gitlab) or companies like Github, which earns money with Open Source, without selling Open Source products... Maybe the problem isn't if the code is closed or not, but the product itself?
• anonytrary 8y ago
  > with an open source license it’s harder to force someone to pay for a product Most OSS business models don't try to sell the actual OSS. Usually a separate, commercial product is built on top of the actual OSS. > You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. For everyone else smashing their keyboards, I think his point is: It's hard to make good money as an average artist, whereas it's easy to make good money as an average software engineer. > This is where the Free Software mission has faltered despite so many successes: software that people actually touch isn’t free or open. The point is that those commercial applications almost always depend on FOSS. If you have a better idea, go and build a better commercial product. You'll probably depend on similar FOSS.
• innnzzz6 8y ago
  "love OSS" and how their initiatives like "Open Distro for Elasticsearch"
• innnzzz6 8y ago
  (nobody cares much, and it's not developed by some community bazaar style, Google calls all the shots, and the good stuff -google apps- are not Open Source). >And now the OSS worlds is a convoluted mess. Not really. >It costs way more to make Ruby on Rails work than just installing IIS and writing some C#. Yeah, no. If anything RoR is famous for its ease of development. And it costs nothing (besides programmers, which you need in any case), which is why cash-strapped startups prefer RoR and other FOSS solutions over MS. >Now those who said Microsoft was bullying them are the bullies. Non sequitur. >OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. Non sequitur. OSS is as free as ever (and better than ever). >No one wants to pay for code at all anymore. Less want to pay for code, though billions still buy software and pay for services.
• capkutay 8y ago
  The biggest hypocrisy is when a company that's actively and aggressively trying to monetize the open source project, with ambitions to go public, shame companies like Amazon and Microsoft for doing the exact same thing. And they talk about how it harms the development community...exactly how does it harm the average OSS developer if Amazon or Microsoft or Google are adopting the project and making it easier to deploy in cloud scenarios? Seems like a 'have your cake and eat it too' scenario. These companies benefitted from massive adoption thanks to open source being developer friendly and free, yet they want it to be just restrictive enough that only their company can monetize it.
  • antt 8y ago
    You can write a drop in replacement for that company because it is open source. Can you write a drop in replacement for Windows or even Word?
• _bxg1 8y ago
  > That’s what we think the world should be like, but we all know it isn’t. You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. I think this underlies many of this moment’s critiques of capitalism: there’s too many things that are important, even needed, or that fulfill us more than any profitable item, and yet are economically unsustainable. Great quote; tucking it away for later. This is why democratic socialism is essential. Money is a lossy codec for true value.
• carapace 8y ago
  Ever since I was a kid, I assumed that computers and robots would soon solve all production scarcity problems (or that we would make Star Trek-style "replicators" that worked by manifesting holographic images, whatever) and there would be a world of plenty, no one would have to go hungry or homeless or even work at bad jobs. I thought that all I had to do was write good software and give it away and sooner or later everything would take care of itself economically. Instead we have smartphones, computers that function as pocket strip-malls with addictive games and back-alley scams.
• jwildeboer 8y ago
  I’m finishing my 14th year at Red Hat as we speak. In that time Red Hat had two digit growth every single year. We employ around 13000 people. And in all those years I have read at least one article per week claiming that it isn’t possible to make money with open source. Weird.
  • teddyh 8y ago
    Except you don’t work for Red Hat anymore. You work for IBM.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      IBM has not completed the acquisition (and when it does,Red Hat may still exist as a subsidiary), so, no, people who work for Red Hat that haven't left and gotten hired by IBM still work at Red Hat, not IBM.
      • teddyh 8y ago
        That’s a technicality, and very much a matter of subjective opinion. How many people who worked for Sun Microsystems thought that they still worked for Sun after Oracle bought Sun? From what I understand, it was few enough to have people quitting in droves.
• deleted 8y ago
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• otikik 8y ago
  Maybe it will not make "Lamborghini collection" money, but I have been making "buy a house and raise a family" money from it for the last 8 years. I know I'm privileged in this regard. In my last 3 gigs, one of them was fully opensource (the Madrid City Hall decided to build a direct democracy platform) and the two others have been "open core", where there was an open-source component accompanied by an "enterprise offering" which was closed source, with extra features. Money was made by selling this "enterprise version", plus support, to other companies. This money pays for my salary, which involves mostly the open source side of things. The Open Source version is a "foundation" and a very good "marketing tool" amongst other developers. There's an ecosystem built on top of the open source version and we have some pull requests from the community. The main drive behind new features is still our internal dev team.
• tzakrajs 8y ago
  What I am hearing is “Hey corporations, we have this great open source project and everyone should adopt it (including you!) just don’t try to contribute your changes upstream because they are toxic and serve your dirty, corporate needs. This project should serve the needs of the indie developer first, non-commercial developers second and commercial developers last.”
• throwaway86576 8y ago
  I think you need to examine niches carefully. I was able to create an open source piece of software that allowed me to sell over $50,000 worth of ebooks (training manual) over the course of 5 years. Eventually I was able to sell the entire software for a small five figure sum. The money involved was not huge but it was great to have. Users did not care that the software was OSS. They cared that is solved a problem and the ebook I sold made it even easier. That is how OSS makes money - by solving problems. OSS is not a business strategy, it is just a software license. You do not "make money" by adopting a software license, whatever it's moral merits. You need a business that solves a problem and OSS can be part of that.
• peterwwillis 8y ago
  The whining about cloud vendors making money off OSS is sour grapes, plain and simple. OSS exists in the spectrum of a gift economy. Once you give it away, you don't get to expect something in return, or expect them to use it in a particular way. You gifted it away. In fact, the original OSS definition explicitly stated you could not discriminate against fields of endeavor. But I guess envy is stronger than idealism.
• microcolonel 8y ago
  Open source makes heaps of money... but the gains are distributed. It should be obvious why your single open source project didn't turn into even a small business: how would the money even get there?
• m3kw9 8y ago
  Add IP and services on top of it, look at Mongodb, Elasticsearch, Redhat
• andyferris 8y ago
  Something has to be both valuable (useful) and rare in order for people to pay for it. Useful by itself is not sufficient. A piece of open-source software can't be considered scarce if you are allowed to make a copy for microcents. Only through legally enforced IP protections do people even pay for classic proprietary software - it's a kind of artificial scarcity (there's no moral judgement there, just an observation). But yes, hosted services and so-on are also rare (it costs more than microcents for someone else to set up an equivalent hosted service).
• rbreve 8y ago
  Made tons of money installing and giving support for open source software
• miguelmota 8y ago
  One trend I see is the following timeline pattern of an early startup wishing to become a scalable SaaS platform with an open source core: Services > Support > Packaging > Subscriptions > Open Core > Managed > Cloud > SaaS Basically they open source a core component that doesn't compromise the business model. For example, only open sourcing an engine but not plugins, modules, or dashboards around it. They also open source the core once they've already gained traction which puts them way ahead of anyone trying to do the same thing they are.
• deleted 8y ago
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• schappim 8y ago
  The author should make the distinction between OS Software Vs OS Hardware. OS Hardware can very much make money (hear Adafruit, SparkFun, Pololu, Seeed Studio, of course Arduino and to an extent Raspberry Pi).
• ascotan 8y ago
  It's all about market segmentation. If you price your software at $0, you'll end up with a large user-base (in theory). You can then start pay-services like consulting/support. Eventually you can add new product lines based on OSS with additional bells and whistles. The reason this works is that once you have a large user-base you can get people to buy your services because you have now developed a stickiness with your customer-base. Exhibit A: Hashicorp. People started using Vagrant, the user-based expanded. When they moved onto other pay-services, people followed. The reality is that developers want 'free' stuff they can build with but IT/Ops wants 'pay' services where they get 24/7 support, consulting, etc etc. No company will be fully OSS because no money = no company. However I can see many orgs support OSS as a customer engagement tool to drive their brand and get a user base that they can drive towards other products.
• deleted 8y ago
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• mamon 8y ago
  The pattern that I see emerging now is that companies treat Open Source as a way of offseting software maintenance cost. They will create something for their internal use, and once product is feature complete and relatively stable, they will open source it, so that they can receive free bugfixes, which I guess they merge upstream. Some examples include Google with Kubernetes, Netflix with their cloud tooling (Eureka, Ribbon, etc.), LinkedIn with Kafka, Yahoo! with Hadoop, and many others.
• vortico 8y ago
  Plugin-hosting open-source software is great for money. If you build a platform and sell software that extends its functionality, you can may be able to sufficiently fund the platform. You have a huge advantage over third parties (which you shouldn't try to restrict) because customers prefer plugins developed by the original vendor of the platform. I did this with https://vcvrack.com/ https://vcvrack.com/ and it has been successful IMO.
• hyperpallium 8y ago
  Can you design a license that increases the proportion paid to Labor (as opposed to Capital)? NB: I don't mean more hours are required; I mean workers get paid more per hour. Labor prices only seem to change with supply and demand. If you're making lots of money, and labor is cheap, why pay more? That's where a minimum wage helps shift the allocation. You could shrink the Labor supply, perhaps artificially; or you could increase demand for Labor. You could directly legislate by license: the license available only to businesses that e.g. pay at least a minimum wage. Of course, businesses won't like that, so your software had better be something very useful.
• daveheq 8y ago
  It makes money if you charge for support, consulting, or for any work building something with it.
• x404 8y ago
  The purpose of open source may not making money. And maybe most of the open source developers are not good at making money. But if there is a infrastructure to help the developers to get money through their open source software, and still keep the open source free for personal learn and use, that will be fan.
• philipswood 8y ago
  Maybe software should be payed for per second usage? Implemented as a charge added to cloud usage costs. Terms of use and terms of agreement machine readable and included in public available source code. Code publically available, publically built and cryptographically tagged by usage and licensing Metadata. Like a smart contract. Anyone who used the code would automatically be billed by the cloud provider on the license holder behalf. This would align incentives better and enforce the openness of the source as a byproduct. (the licensing should ideally be built into the platform, which should be vendor neutral, e.g. K8s and maybe the license could waive cost collection for self hosted use on own hardware)
• gesman 8y ago
  Open or closed, free or not - the solution is as good as its capability to solve problems. Commercial software that is lousy and buggy is not. Free, open source software the requires an army of consultants to make use of it - is not.
• badsavage 8y ago
  One word: tokenization
  • badsavage 8y ago
    Most of the crypto world is open source
• z3t4 8y ago
  Everything can be sold if you can find the right buyer. When it comes to browsers Google is the customer, and users are the product. When doing free open source software, your product can not be the software itself. People don't pay for software, they pay for solutions. What problems are your software solving ? How can you package and sell that solution ? People less smart then you are packaging water and selling it in bottles. A lot have to do with branding. When going from free to paid, consider the probability that the only reason people use your service is because it's much cheaper then the alternatives.
• blablabla123 8y ago
  So many people make money with open source. Like with Basecamp, macOS is in part Open Source, Chrome is basically an Open Source Project. Of course there are bizillion of projects but they are just not as popular or not used for anything that generates a lot of money. I'm sure when you are a core contributor of some popular Open Source projects, you'll have no problem doing well-paied consulting work or get a good job that allows for Open Source work within working hours.
• abhaycircle 8y ago
  This is something that I am observing too.