19 ms·

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. Unfort

by 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.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  The lock in is far more complete than it ever was in the Microsoft era, with Microsoft of the 90s, you could mostly still choose to just stop buying their crap, and stick with what you had while you migrate, or work out an alternative. The minute you stop paying a cloud vendor, your entire infrastructure vanishes in a cloud of smoke, and if you relied on their "value add" proprietary services, you are left with basically nothing, not even the ability to run your own code, or in some cases even your data.
  - anon1m0us 8y ago
    schadenfreude for all! Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. The world thought programmers were just a bunch of nerds to be taken advantage of. Microsoft said no. The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. The nerds got their way. They got free everything. And now the OSS worls is a convoluted mess. It costs way more to make Ruby on Rails work than just installing IIS and writing some C#. Now those who said Microsoft was bullying them are the bullies. OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. No one wants to pay for code at all anymore. Why couldn't you all see this coming? It was so obvious.
    - anon1m0us 8y ago
      What? You downvote because it wasn't obvious to you?
      - coldtea 8y ago
        No, because it's random and mostly wrong ramblings. > Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Not really. They hated it for abusing their monopoly, and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. > Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. Not really. Some believed software must be free as in beer and speech, most didn't care. They certainly didn't hate MS for it. >The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. Not really. They hated MS for monopoly abuse, a bad OS, too many viruses and security holes, few ways to look under the hood, and fucking forever with IE 6. >The nerds got their way. They got free everything. They just got the server. And a lot of the enterprise server is still MS. The desktop is still 90% MS and 10% macOS (with some insignificant Linux percentage). As for mobile it's 40% iOS and 60% Android, which technically it's still OSS, but not in any sense that matters besides the license (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.
jjeaff 8y ago
I think you are mostly right, but I don't think the major cloud providers have much of an uncrossable moat. Cloud services are and will continue to become more and more commoditized. Sure, there is proprietary lock-in. But because of OSS, it is also becoming easy to avoid the lock-in. For example, rather than use a hosted elastic service, I was able to launch an elastic stack on k8s in less than an hour of configuration. It's able to scale up and down in the cluster and do everything I need. So if I need to easily change providers, all I need is someone who offers hosted k8s (or any provider if I decide to self manage down the line). We are in the process of doing the same with our DB and will migrate from a hosted Aurora instance. It looks like ovh is now offering managed k8s. DO just launched theirs, countless others have as well or are about to. I am running on gke right now because it was easiest. But there will be little keeping me from migrating down the road since k8s + helm + a few other tools are making it easier and easier to launch your own services. I imagine if it doesn't exist yet, someone will create a nifty little tool to connect up two separate k8s clusters and seemlessly migrate everything over. There are few barriers to keep that from happening.
- ifiri90pokn 8y ago
  I’d love a world where an ML chip is baked into phones, motherboards, and the like so we can move our data out of the cloud and get the same features. Honestly I can’t see the cloud making sense for another decade. NVidia’s new hobby board for $99 + open source has me imagining a future where someone like myself can offer similar experiences to Alexa or a number of Googley features to family and friends in a few years.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  Yes, but except at the micro level you need capital to compete, and getting hold of capital means paying rent to those who already have it. If you are clever you can make more than you pay back in rent, perhaps so much that you are in a position to lend out a surplus and collect rents of your own. But once you join the rent-collecting set, your economic incentives change drastically and you'll start getting lots of offers for moat digging services.
- mythz 8y ago
  Once you have your production systems running on a cloud vendor it becomes increasingly difficult to move off it regardless if you're only using OSS components, there's an inherent risk with every migration that grows the more services you use and years you host on it that needs to be offset with any migration and given the major cloud vendors are comparatively priced, there's little incentive to invest their time and energy doing that instead of focusing on their core business. The small players will always stay niche, a cloud is effectively a network monopoly (like iOS and Android) with most companies only wanting to invest in the cloud that's going to have everything they need when they need it, they'll still offer proprietary services to differentiate against the other 2 cloud vendors and additional way to lock you in and make it harder to migrate away. You could choose to build out your system to be completely cloud agnostic but that is generally regarded to be economically irresponsible in itself preventing you from leveraging the best features available in each cloud.
elpakal 8y ago
What about OSS as a talent acquisition and retainment strategy?
- anon1m0us 8y ago
  That's called "Check out the candidate's GitHub and see how willing they are to give away work for free and then hire that one and when they ask for a raise, say no and let them quit." Rinse and repeat.
reallydude 8y ago
> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors Why is that unfortunate? It has enabled a cycle of OSS to user AND OSS to vendor to vendor enrichment to user...since you can always modify the code at will. The best of both worlds, until you get into that special "extension" problem that GPL3 tried to lock down.
- mythz 8y ago
  Because none of the Indie OSS developers that have donated their free time and energy into creating it will be rewarded with any of the value they've created from their efforts. Because there will only ever be 3 major multi-billion tech companies that stand to benefit most from OSS. Because they own their markets, where they can wait to find out what OSS software has become successful and either just profit from it by hosting it directly or invest the paid resources into replicating it - an opportunity and reward not available to anyone else that doesn't have a large cloud market share. Because they're using their profits (made possible from hosting other's OSS investments) to finance their own OSS investments which will have infinite paid and support resources that Indie OSS developers will be unable to compete against, eventually leading to building a brand where there'll be customers that will only use OSS by the cloud vendors first, since they're commercially backed and dependable.
  - tzakrajs 8y ago
    It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. Open Source software was never meant to pay the bills of open source developers, it was meant to open source code to the public and allow free use. To somehow read this narrative that indie developers are losing because others profit from their work is facile and not helpful.
    - mythz 8y ago
      Right, so everyone should be happy working for the "exposure" so they can be snapped up by Cloud Companies using the wealth created from hosting their OSS efforts who will then be put to work on strengthening their cloud monopolies.
_dark_matter_ 8y ago
This is exactly the "Commoditize your Complements" strategy that Joel espoused all those years ago [0]. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
anon1m0us 8y ago
Why buy the cow if you get the milk for free?
djakjxnanjak 8y ago
> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors The amount of value generated by open source software running on cloud providers may be much greater than the fees those providers are charging. It’s not a zero-sum game.
- collinmanderson 8y ago
  Exactly, I think everyone down the line benefits from savings from Open Source software. If cloud vendors used proprietary software they'd have to charge more to their customers.
christophilus 8y ago
This just made me wonder: what if all of the major OSS companies joined forces, started a new cloud company whose purpose was to send revenue back to all of its underlying OSS projects. Each then promotes that cloud as its #1 recommended cloud, and use their collective visibility to grow that into a contender? One can dream...
- sytse 8y ago
  Maybe it won't be a new hyper cloud but an existing one https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-platform-and-confluent-partner-to-deliver-a-managed-apache-kafka-service https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-plat...
- mythz 8y ago
  Fair and equatable distribution wouldn't factor into any consideration for Companies paying developers and cloud hosting companies to run their businesses. IMO the best way would be for all OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to implement a system to revenue share back to the creators of OSS their hosting. I'm puzzled why Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and Mongo DB aren't already coming together to use the same standardized license as there's strength in numbers - instead they're each individually releasing their commercial efforts under their own individually branded license.
  - robocat 8y ago
    > puzzled why Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and Mongo DB aren't already coming together At some point would it be collusion? I think collusion needs consumers, but the consumers of the cloud vendors would be harmed?
    - mythz 8y ago
      Collusion is secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy in order to cheat or deceive others. As with any standardization efforts this is just cooperation, there's nothing secretive, illegal or deceitful about it - they'd just be coming together to standardize on a License to build a sustainable business model that prevents cloud monopolies from using their OSS efforts to compete against them.
amenod 8y ago
This, 1000 times. We need a good license in the spirit of Commons Clause: source available, feel free to use, but don't sell (just written better and hopefully supported by wider community). The most curious thing about this is that when a company behind a successful OSS project decides to change a license that would extract some of that value back to the actual creators and maintainers of OSS, they get the backlash from OSS community [0][1]. Ironic, given that the same authors openly post the donations received that amount to... well not peanuts exactly, but not something comparable to an average programmer's pay either. Not all feedback is like this, of course - some recognize the unfairness in the system and support the search for change. What I currently miss most is some viable 3rd option - not open source, not closed source, but something in between. Apart from GPL & co., and MIT / BSD / Apache, we need a sort of license that would allow creators to extract some part of money from their work. Or at least allow them to sell services, based on their product, without fear of being undercut by competitors who don't bother developing. Why develop when you can take the best OSS product, integrate it to your infrastructure and sell the service? Current situation with "middle-ground" licenses is: - Fair Source license is very well written, but is unfortunately only applicable to a very narrow use-case (user-facing apps), and bigtech can still undercut you at hosting (though you do get some royalties... probably) - Commons Clause seems a bit vague about the term "Sell", has a very unfortunate name, and their main proponent already chose another license... too bad, because the idea is great. - Zero License is too complex (for me at least) - Business Source License looks promising, though I am not thrilled about the prospect of turning my software to GPL after 3 years (AGPL with closed loopholes would be a better choice). If someone knows of a better license in the spirit of Commons Clause, I'm all ears. [0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fair-source-licensing-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-open-source-definitely-maybe/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fair-source-licensing-i... [1] https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will-destroy-open-source.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will-destr...
- mythz 8y ago
  Definitely agree that the best way to force cloud companies into revenue sharing back would be for OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to implement a system to revenue share back to the creators of OSS their hosting. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434427
rmk2 8y ago
Kyle Rankin gave a (very good) keynote at FOSDEM 2019 about this topic, harkening back to the Unix wars, Sun etc. He has some really nice one-liners. Video is available here: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/ https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/
- snaky 8y ago
  "The Eternal Mainframe" http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...
ako 8y ago
Cloud companies pay by hiring developers to improve opensource. This way everybody using opensource benefits. The original opensource contributers benefit twice: their software gets improved, and they have marketable skills as cloud companies will be interested to hire them to work on opensource projects.
- evanweaver 8y ago
  So you are saying they should do it for the “exposure”.
  - __blockcipher__ 8y ago
    This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert (exposure) and then capitalizing w/ a consulting business makes sense. The core issue is that consulting scales at O(n) where n is your personal time investment. It's not like offering a service where you spend all your time working on the service and get to experience exponential growth. Basically, if you choose to commit to free software / OSS, you can't expect to get directly paid for it. Now, I know that that's not always ideal and ends up in tragedy-of-the-commons situations where the OSS devs don't get paid enough, but that's the reality of the situation to me. Restrictive licenses don't solve the problem, because these same cloud behemoths can just pull an open distro on you.
    - ozim 8y ago
      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Free in software is not about getting paid. Money is not the problem. You can expect getting paid as much as you want, you just have to let other people access code, change and distribute it as they wish. Thinking it is "free as in free beer" is shallow. I don't need any of those crap android apps even if they are free, I want to have ability to see those apps code so I can see if they are sending my private data somewhere, and I have to have ability to remove that code. I can even pay license fee if I find some app useful, if price is to high I find alternative or just don't use it.
Justsignedup 8y ago
There is a huge cost. Maintainers have major time commitments, and we hear jobs looking for people's OSS contributions. Which is cool and all until you realize that some people work at Facebook on React and get to publish to OSS as their day job, and some people like myself have kids and a proprietary software job. So I fully support companies offering their software free, except to run commercially. To note, about 8 years ago I saw many companies and people open sourcing interesting software. This was for personal gains... They were a consulting company. ThoughtBot was a good example, they made tools, they made blogs about ruby on rails, they also sold their professional services. And it worked.
- deleted 8y ago
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- suls 8y ago
  Did you mean ThoughtWorks?
  - papa_bear 8y ago
    I had heard of ThoughtBot, but not ThoughtWorks. Seems like both are relevant examples: https://github.com/thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtworks https://github.com/thoughtworks
    - gbraad 8y ago
      ThoughtWorks and ThoughtBot are different companies, of which TW is well-known due to Martin Fowler, the many debates about the relevance of TDD, agile practices, etc, and they have offices all over the world. They started work on tools, like CruiseControl, and open sourced this. To me it never felt like they made tools open source first, but rather a need that came to have them stay relevant as other, often times better Open Source-first tools came around. The same happened with GoCD. ThoughtBot came around later, and feels much like a adhering to a lot of the similar cultural habits. Note: I worked for TW, currently at Red Hat. Note 2: Somne of TW's projects under the other pillars are open source first, but aren't related to this topic.
jahewson 8y ago
What you're describing is a situation where OSS isn't creating wealth. Hosting is.
keepper 8y ago
I could not agree more with this. The reality is that Cloud Computing is the biggest threat to OSS at the moment. ( as my comments on this show lol ). I'm a big proponent of the idea of elastic computing. My fear is that the current "cloud"/elastic computing providers are more akin to off-shore outsourcing than to real technological advance. A short term solution, that will have serious and major repercussions down the line. And yes, I do get all the benefits. I've been long enough in the industry ( and on most sides ), to have built both small and massive datacenters, and have built both public and private elastic infra. But this is way too much consolidation, and way too many possible harmful long term effects. We should have made running infra easier... not go the "lease" model 100%. :-/
tybit 8y ago
I think it’s interesting to speculate what would happen if there was a significant cost to running OSS as a cloud provider. I suspect what would happen is that they would look at the cost and wonder if it’s not worth building an alternate solution in house. They would be able to build it to work and scale as it works best for their technical setup. Lock in would be much worse even if it’s not ideal even with OSS and OSS would be less used in general. I think if you look at e.g Redis vs the Dynamo/Cassandra split the OSS ecosystem is much better off in the former.
donatj 8y ago
"Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors" I think you're forgetting the end users of the applications running on the open source regardless of cloud provider. The value they are reaping is near limitless.
- davidjnelson 8y ago
  Also those companies building those applications with open source for end users are reaping near limitless value.
  - donatj 8y ago
    And thus society is reaping near limitless value.
prepend 8y ago
“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” Why is it unfortunate. OSS developers are volunteering and donating their talent. Is it unfortunate that homeless people reap the benefit from patrons who sponsor charitable homeless shelters? Or is it unfortunate that students realize wealth from the nonprofit university? There’s lots of charities. I thought the whole point is for people to donate what others get value from.
- EduardoBautista 8y ago
  They are not all volunteering. The Linux kernel, for example, is maintained mostly by paid individuals from all sorts of companies such as Red Hat, IBM, and even Microsoft.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    All of which make good money selling support services and/or cloud infrastructure, and have decided to donate the fruits of the labor they are buying because doing so helps drive those businesses. So, again, the developer labor is donated, by parties that are not blind to the market impacts. Where is the problem?
    - _jal 8y ago
      No problem, if you stop your analysis at what's legal and what's not. If you care about where these trends are taking us, there's plenty to complain about, and you can easily find those problems by reading the conversation you're replying to.
    - filesystemdude 8y ago
      I don't think you understand the Linux vendor support model. The labor isn't "donated" in any sense of the word. It's not like these big companies just pay hundreds of kernel developers to sit around and make commits to whatever they're in the mood to do today. Clients pay Linux vendors to get the hardware support, features, etc. that they need written into the Linux kernel, and the vendors do that for them. They write the code, test it, harden it, and get it upstreamed so that the client isn't stuck carrying a patched kernel on their own in perpetuity. It's not the financial interest of Linux consumers (think: banks, airlines, healthcare systems, militaries, cloud platforms, entertainment producers, etc.) to pay millions of dollars a year to have their own in-house kernel development and support team when they can pay a vendor to do it. It's not just about support in the sense of someone to pick up the phone, it's about support in the sense of maintaining and developing mission-critical software for large enterprises. And with that, indemnity. Do your shareholders want to hear that you're working with a tried, tested, trusted vendor to make sure your systems that can never, ever, ever go down are in fact designed that way? Or do they want to hear, don't worry, Dave in IT's got it, he got a kernel patch accepted once? In many industries, IT is just a cost center and a risk. Corporations and governments are motivated to lower their IT-related risk in the most financially-prudent manner, which usually means a vendor.
StreamBright 8y ago
Those cloud vendors opensourced projects that made it possible for other companies to exist. How many companies are based on Tensorflow alone?
behringer 8y ago
actually this licensing source system will just harm OSS. We should be trying to get companies to use GNU licensing wherever possible, so we can continue to reap the rewards of truly FOSS software.
thstart 8y ago
OPERATIONS-365/24/7 - just try to it.
bigiain 8y ago
Was it ever any different? 20 years ago, large chunks of "the web hosting industry" sold access to Linux/Apache/Sendmail/Postfix/BIND/vsftpd/Perl/PHP/MySQL/etc - often (at least in my part of the game) using paid-for WHM/CPanel or Plesk to manage all those. While I sympathise with Mongo/Redis/Elastic et al, who're having their work packaged up and sold by Amazon/Microsoft/Google in their cloud offerings, I don't recall any outcry about all the open source projects local ISPs and CPanel/Plesk hosting companies bundled up and charged customers access for. I don't remember the authors of Linux, Apache/Sendmail et al complaining about "not getting paid" for their OSS. I get it that the world has changed, and companies building the OSS they're built on wasn't so much of a thing back then (although MySQL is an example of that from 20+ years back...), but I'm not sure a choice by founders to invest significant resources writing OSS is a reason other companies should not be able to use software with he same licenses in the same way companies have been using it for decades. I've super curious to see if these new category of licenses work out business-wise, I suspect if they do (which I'm not completely confident they will), that it'll allow development of software on a scale and complexity which the "scratch your own itch" OSS community couldn't tackle. There are almost certainly software project for which the initial coding curve is so steep and high that nobody is going to start working on them in their spare time or as an unofficial skunkworks project or 20% time project at work. It the _only_ people tackling large complex problems as "open source" (in a loose interpretation here) are PhD students, there'll be less amazing software created than if companies like Mongo/Redis/Elastic can pay teams of devs to work on software which while not "FSF certified open source", is still usable and understandable by others in ways that proprietary software is not. I could debug my not-technically-OSS Mongo problems, unlike my Oracle problems. That's not rms's vision of the future. But at least it's not Larry Ellison's either...
- solidasparagus 8y ago
  I can't imagine the new OSS license approach working. People seriously underestimate the ability and willingness of cloud providers to write entirely software, using existing OSS as nothing more than market research.
  - bigiain 8y ago
siwatanejo 8y ago
> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors Opensource can also exist outside the server side. There are opensource desktop&mobile apps and cloud vendors cannot do anything against them. Stop painting a narrowed view of reality, opensource is bigger than you think.
- swsieber 8y ago
  I don't think the intent was to say open source is limited to server side software, but was to instead illustrate a point about cloud vendors embracing open source.
  - siwatanejo 8y ago
    I didn't say the intent was to say opensource is limited to server side software. I'm just saying that talking only about cloud vendors killing opensource is short-sighted. Again, opensource is much bigger.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Kind of, one of the reasons of the failure of desktop FOSS business is that no average consumer is going to pay for consulting, trainings or books.
scirocco 8y ago
2011 @ Microsoft: "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches" 2019 @ Microsoft: "We are all in on open source"
pvorb 8y ago
This article talks about Amazon forking Elasticsearch in depth: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/15/cloud-open-source-powder-keg/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/15/cloud-open-source-pow...
mikhailfranco 8y ago
Interesting recent example is Unity3D v. Improbable: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/ https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improba... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-change-makes-cloud-based-spatialos-games-illegal/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan...
kgwxd 8y ago
Maybe all the major OSS players and FSF could get together and build a cloud company with the promise of only building on OSS and sharing the profits. I'd host anything I could at a place like that, even if I didn't really need hosting for it. It wouldn't even have to be the best in the business, just reasonably priced.

by mythz 8y ago

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.

throwaway2048 8y ago
The lock in is far more complete than it ever was in the Microsoft era, with Microsoft of the 90s, you could mostly still choose to just stop buying their crap, and stick with what you had while you migrate, or work out an alternative. The minute you stop paying a cloud vendor, your entire infrastructure vanishes in a cloud of smoke, and if you relied on their "value add" proprietary services, you are left with basically nothing, not even the ability to run your own code, or in some cases even your data.
- anon1m0us 8y ago
  schadenfreude for all! Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. The world thought programmers were just a bunch of nerds to be taken advantage of. Microsoft said no. The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. The nerds got their way. They got free everything. And now the OSS worls is a convoluted mess. It costs way more to make Ruby on Rails work than just installing IIS and writing some C#. Now those who said Microsoft was bullying them are the bullies. OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. No one wants to pay for code at all anymore. Why couldn't you all see this coming? It was so obvious.
  - anon1m0us 8y ago
    What? You downvote because it wasn't obvious to you?
    - coldtea 8y ago
      No, because it's random and mostly wrong ramblings. > Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Not really. They hated it for abusing their monopoly, and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. > Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. Not really. Some believed software must be free as in beer and speech, most didn't care. They certainly didn't hate MS for it. >The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. Not really. They hated MS for monopoly abuse, a bad OS, too many viruses and security holes, few ways to look under the hood, and fucking forever with IE 6. >The nerds got their way. They got free everything. They just got the server. And a lot of the enterprise server is still MS. The desktop is still 90% MS and 10% macOS (with some insignificant Linux percentage). As for mobile it's 40% iOS and 60% Android, which technically it's still OSS, but not in any sense that matters besides the license (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.

jjeaff 8y ago

I think you are mostly right, but I don't think the major cloud providers have much of an uncrossable moat. Cloud services are and will continue to become more and more commoditized. Sure, there is proprietary lock-in. But because of OSS, it is also becoming easy to avoid the lock-in. For example, rather than use a hosted elastic service, I was able to launch an elastic stack on k8s in less than an hour of configuration. It's able to scale up and down in the cluster and do everything I need. So if I need to easily change providers, all I need is someone who offers hosted k8s (or any provider if I decide to self manage down the line). We are in the process of doing the same with our DB and will migrate from a hosted Aurora instance. It looks like ovh is now offering managed k8s. DO just launched theirs, countless others have as well or are about to. I am running on gke right now because it was easiest. But there will be little keeping me from migrating down the road since k8s + helm + a few other tools are making it easier and easier to launch your own services. I imagine if it doesn't exist yet, someone will create a nifty little tool to connect up two separate k8s clusters and seemlessly migrate everything over. There are few barriers to keep that from happening.

ifiri90pokn 8y ago
I’d love a world where an ML chip is baked into phones, motherboards, and the like so we can move our data out of the cloud and get the same features. Honestly I can’t see the cloud making sense for another decade. NVidia’s new hobby board for $99 + open source has me imagining a future where someone like myself can offer similar experiences to Alexa or a number of Googley features to family and friends in a few years.
anigbrowl 8y ago
Yes, but except at the micro level you need capital to compete, and getting hold of capital means paying rent to those who already have it. If you are clever you can make more than you pay back in rent, perhaps so much that you are in a position to lend out a surplus and collect rents of your own. But once you join the rent-collecting set, your economic incentives change drastically and you'll start getting lots of offers for moat digging services.
mythz 8y ago
Once you have your production systems running on a cloud vendor it becomes increasingly difficult to move off it regardless if you're only using OSS components, there's an inherent risk with every migration that grows the more services you use and years you host on it that needs to be offset with any migration and given the major cloud vendors are comparatively priced, there's little incentive to invest their time and energy doing that instead of focusing on their core business. The small players will always stay niche, a cloud is effectively a network monopoly (like iOS and Android) with most companies only wanting to invest in the cloud that's going to have everything they need when they need it, they'll still offer proprietary services to differentiate against the other 2 cloud vendors and additional way to lock you in and make it harder to migrate away. You could choose to build out your system to be completely cloud agnostic but that is generally regarded to be economically irresponsible in itself preventing you from leveraging the best features available in each cloud.

elpakal 8y ago

What about OSS as a talent acquisition and retainment strategy?

anon1m0us 8y ago
That's called "Check out the candidate's GitHub and see how willing they are to give away work for free and then hire that one and when they ask for a raise, say no and let them quit." Rinse and repeat.

reallydude 8y ago

> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors Why is that unfortunate? It has enabled a cycle of OSS to user AND OSS to vendor to vendor enrichment to user...since you can always modify the code at will. The best of both worlds, until you get into that special "extension" problem that GPL3 tried to lock down.

mythz 8y ago
Because none of the Indie OSS developers that have donated their free time and energy into creating it will be rewarded with any of the value they've created from their efforts. Because there will only ever be 3 major multi-billion tech companies that stand to benefit most from OSS. Because they own their markets, where they can wait to find out what OSS software has become successful and either just profit from it by hosting it directly or invest the paid resources into replicating it - an opportunity and reward not available to anyone else that doesn't have a large cloud market share. Because they're using their profits (made possible from hosting other's OSS investments) to finance their own OSS investments which will have infinite paid and support resources that Indie OSS developers will be unable to compete against, eventually leading to building a brand where there'll be customers that will only use OSS by the cloud vendors first, since they're commercially backed and dependable.
- tzakrajs 8y ago
  It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. Open Source software was never meant to pay the bills of open source developers, it was meant to open source code to the public and allow free use. To somehow read this narrative that indie developers are losing because others profit from their work is facile and not helpful.
  - mythz 8y ago
    Right, so everyone should be happy working for the "exposure" so they can be snapped up by Cloud Companies using the wealth created from hosting their OSS efforts who will then be put to work on strengthening their cloud monopolies.

_dark_matter_ 8y ago

This is exactly the "Commoditize your Complements" strategy that Joel espoused all those years ago [0]. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

anon1m0us 8y ago

Why buy the cow if you get the milk for free?

djakjxnanjak 8y ago

> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors The amount of value generated by open source software running on cloud providers may be much greater than the fees those providers are charging. It’s not a zero-sum game.

collinmanderson 8y ago
Exactly, I think everyone down the line benefits from savings from Open Source software. If cloud vendors used proprietary software they'd have to charge more to their customers.

christophilus 8y ago

This just made me wonder: what if all of the major OSS companies joined forces, started a new cloud company whose purpose was to send revenue back to all of its underlying OSS projects. Each then promotes that cloud as its #1 recommended cloud, and use their collective visibility to grow that into a contender? One can dream...

sytse 8y ago
Maybe it won't be a new hyper cloud but an existing one https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-platform-and-confluent-partner-to-deliver-a-managed-apache-kafka-service https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-plat...
mythz 8y ago
Fair and equatable distribution wouldn't factor into any consideration for Companies paying developers and cloud hosting companies to run their businesses. IMO the best way would be for all OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to implement a system to revenue share back to the creators of OSS their hosting. I'm puzzled why Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and Mongo DB aren't already coming together to use the same standardized license as there's strength in numbers - instead they're each individually releasing their commercial efforts under their own individually branded license.
- robocat 8y ago
  > puzzled why Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and Mongo DB aren't already coming together At some point would it be collusion? I think collusion needs consumers, but the consumers of the cloud vendors would be harmed?
  - mythz 8y ago
    Collusion is secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy in order to cheat or deceive others. As with any standardization efforts this is just cooperation, there's nothing secretive, illegal or deceitful about it - they'd just be coming together to standardize on a License to build a sustainable business model that prevents cloud monopolies from using their OSS efforts to compete against them.

amenod 8y ago

This, 1000 times. We need a good license in the spirit of Commons Clause: source available, feel free to use, but don't sell (just written better and hopefully supported by wider community). The most curious thing about this is that when a company behind a successful OSS project decides to change a license that would extract some of that value back to the actual creators and maintainers of OSS, they get the backlash from OSS community [0][1]. Ironic, given that the same authors openly post the donations received that amount to... well not peanuts exactly, but not something comparable to an average programmer's pay either. Not all feedback is like this, of course - some recognize the unfairness in the system and support the search for change. What I currently miss most is some viable 3rd option - not open source, not closed source, but something in between. Apart from GPL & co., and MIT / BSD / Apache, we need a sort of license that would allow creators to extract some part of money from their work. Or at least allow them to sell services, based on their product, without fear of being undercut by competitors who don't bother developing. Why develop when you can take the best OSS product, integrate it to your infrastructure and sell the service? Current situation with "middle-ground" licenses is: - Fair Source license is very well written, but is unfortunately only applicable to a very narrow use-case (user-facing apps), and bigtech can still undercut you at hosting (though you do get some royalties... probably) - Commons Clause seems a bit vague about the term "Sell", has a very unfortunate name, and their main proponent already chose another license... too bad, because the idea is great. - Zero License is too complex (for me at least) - Business Source License looks promising, though I am not thrilled about the prospect of turning my software to GPL after 3 years (AGPL with closed loopholes would be a better choice). If someone knows of a better license in the spirit of Commons Clause, I'm all ears. [0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fair-source-licensing-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-open-source-definitely-maybe/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fair-source-licensing-i... [1] https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will-destroy-open-source.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will-destr...

mythz 8y ago
Definitely agree that the best way to force cloud companies into revenue sharing back would be for OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to implement a system to revenue share back to the creators of OSS their hosting. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434427

rmk2 8y ago

Kyle Rankin gave a (very good) keynote at FOSDEM 2019 about this topic, harkening back to the Unix wars, Sun etc. He has some really nice one-liners. Video is available here: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/ https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/

snaky 8y ago
"The Eternal Mainframe" http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...

ako 8y ago

Cloud companies pay by hiring developers to improve opensource. This way everybody using opensource benefits. The original opensource contributers benefit twice: their software gets improved, and they have marketable skills as cloud companies will be interested to hire them to work on opensource projects.

evanweaver 8y ago
So you are saying they should do it for the “exposure”.
- __blockcipher__ 8y ago
  This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert (exposure) and then capitalizing w/ a consulting business makes sense. The core issue is that consulting scales at O(n) where n is your personal time investment. It's not like offering a service where you spend all your time working on the service and get to experience exponential growth. Basically, if you choose to commit to free software / OSS, you can't expect to get directly paid for it. Now, I know that that's not always ideal and ends up in tragedy-of-the-commons situations where the OSS devs don't get paid enough, but that's the reality of the situation to me. Restrictive licenses don't solve the problem, because these same cloud behemoths can just pull an open distro on you.
  - ozim 8y ago
    https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Free in software is not about getting paid. Money is not the problem. You can expect getting paid as much as you want, you just have to let other people access code, change and distribute it as they wish. Thinking it is "free as in free beer" is shallow. I don't need any of those crap android apps even if they are free, I want to have ability to see those apps code so I can see if they are sending my private data somewhere, and I have to have ability to remove that code. I can even pay license fee if I find some app useful, if price is to high I find alternative or just don't use it.

Justsignedup 8y ago

There is a huge cost. Maintainers have major time commitments, and we hear jobs looking for people's OSS contributions. Which is cool and all until you realize that some people work at Facebook on React and get to publish to OSS as their day job, and some people like myself have kids and a proprietary software job. So I fully support companies offering their software free, except to run commercially. To note, about 8 years ago I saw many companies and people open sourcing interesting software. This was for personal gains... They were a consulting company. ThoughtBot was a good example, they made tools, they made blogs about ruby on rails, they also sold their professional services. And it worked.

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suls 8y ago
Did you mean ThoughtWorks?
- papa_bear 8y ago
  I had heard of ThoughtBot, but not ThoughtWorks. Seems like both are relevant examples: https://github.com/thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtworks https://github.com/thoughtworks
  - gbraad 8y ago
    ThoughtWorks and ThoughtBot are different companies, of which TW is well-known due to Martin Fowler, the many debates about the relevance of TDD, agile practices, etc, and they have offices all over the world. They started work on tools, like CruiseControl, and open sourced this. To me it never felt like they made tools open source first, but rather a need that came to have them stay relevant as other, often times better Open Source-first tools came around. The same happened with GoCD. ThoughtBot came around later, and feels much like a adhering to a lot of the similar cultural habits. Note: I worked for TW, currently at Red Hat. Note 2: Somne of TW's projects under the other pillars are open source first, but aren't related to this topic.

jahewson 8y ago

What you're describing is a situation where OSS isn't creating wealth. Hosting is.

keepper 8y ago

I could not agree more with this. The reality is that Cloud Computing is the biggest threat to OSS at the moment. ( as my comments on this show lol ). I'm a big proponent of the idea of elastic computing. My fear is that the current "cloud"/elastic computing providers are more akin to off-shore outsourcing than to real technological advance. A short term solution, that will have serious and major repercussions down the line. And yes, I do get all the benefits. I've been long enough in the industry ( and on most sides ), to have built both small and massive datacenters, and have built both public and private elastic infra. But this is way too much consolidation, and way too many possible harmful long term effects. We should have made running infra easier... not go the "lease" model 100%. :-/

tybit 8y ago

I think it’s interesting to speculate what would happen if there was a significant cost to running OSS as a cloud provider. I suspect what would happen is that they would look at the cost and wonder if it’s not worth building an alternate solution in house. They would be able to build it to work and scale as it works best for their technical setup. Lock in would be much worse even if it’s not ideal even with OSS and OSS would be less used in general. I think if you look at e.g Redis vs the Dynamo/Cassandra split the OSS ecosystem is much better off in the former.

donatj 8y ago

"Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors" I think you're forgetting the end users of the applications running on the open source regardless of cloud provider. The value they are reaping is near limitless.

davidjnelson 8y ago
Also those companies building those applications with open source for end users are reaping near limitless value.
- donatj 8y ago
  And thus society is reaping near limitless value.

prepend 8y ago

“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” Why is it unfortunate. OSS developers are volunteering and donating their talent. Is it unfortunate that homeless people reap the benefit from patrons who sponsor charitable homeless shelters? Or is it unfortunate that students realize wealth from the nonprofit university? There’s lots of charities. I thought the whole point is for people to donate what others get value from.

EduardoBautista 8y ago
They are not all volunteering. The Linux kernel, for example, is maintained mostly by paid individuals from all sorts of companies such as Red Hat, IBM, and even Microsoft.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  All of which make good money selling support services and/or cloud infrastructure, and have decided to donate the fruits of the labor they are buying because doing so helps drive those businesses. So, again, the developer labor is donated, by parties that are not blind to the market impacts. Where is the problem?
  - _jal 8y ago
    No problem, if you stop your analysis at what's legal and what's not. If you care about where these trends are taking us, there's plenty to complain about, and you can easily find those problems by reading the conversation you're replying to.
  - filesystemdude 8y ago
    I don't think you understand the Linux vendor support model. The labor isn't "donated" in any sense of the word. It's not like these big companies just pay hundreds of kernel developers to sit around and make commits to whatever they're in the mood to do today. Clients pay Linux vendors to get the hardware support, features, etc. that they need written into the Linux kernel, and the vendors do that for them. They write the code, test it, harden it, and get it upstreamed so that the client isn't stuck carrying a patched kernel on their own in perpetuity. It's not the financial interest of Linux consumers (think: banks, airlines, healthcare systems, militaries, cloud platforms, entertainment producers, etc.) to pay millions of dollars a year to have their own in-house kernel development and support team when they can pay a vendor to do it. It's not just about support in the sense of someone to pick up the phone, it's about support in the sense of maintaining and developing mission-critical software for large enterprises. And with that, indemnity. Do your shareholders want to hear that you're working with a tried, tested, trusted vendor to make sure your systems that can never, ever, ever go down are in fact designed that way? Or do they want to hear, don't worry, Dave in IT's got it, he got a kernel patch accepted once? In many industries, IT is just a cost center and a risk. Corporations and governments are motivated to lower their IT-related risk in the most financially-prudent manner, which usually means a vendor.

StreamBright 8y ago

Those cloud vendors opensourced projects that made it possible for other companies to exist. How many companies are based on Tensorflow alone?

behringer 8y ago

actually this licensing source system will just harm OSS. We should be trying to get companies to use GNU licensing wherever possible, so we can continue to reap the rewards of truly FOSS software.

thstart 8y ago

OPERATIONS-365/24/7 - just try to it.

bigiain 8y ago

Was it ever any different? 20 years ago, large chunks of "the web hosting industry" sold access to Linux/Apache/Sendmail/Postfix/BIND/vsftpd/Perl/PHP/MySQL/etc - often (at least in my part of the game) using paid-for WHM/CPanel or Plesk to manage all those. While I sympathise with Mongo/Redis/Elastic et al, who're having their work packaged up and sold by Amazon/Microsoft/Google in their cloud offerings, I don't recall any outcry about all the open source projects local ISPs and CPanel/Plesk hosting companies bundled up and charged customers access for. I don't remember the authors of Linux, Apache/Sendmail et al complaining about "not getting paid" for their OSS. I get it that the world has changed, and companies building the OSS they're built on wasn't so much of a thing back then (although MySQL is an example of that from 20+ years back...), but I'm not sure a choice by founders to invest significant resources writing OSS is a reason other companies should not be able to use software with he same licenses in the same way companies have been using it for decades. I've super curious to see if these new category of licenses work out business-wise, I suspect if they do (which I'm not completely confident they will), that it'll allow development of software on a scale and complexity which the "scratch your own itch" OSS community couldn't tackle. There are almost certainly software project for which the initial coding curve is so steep and high that nobody is going to start working on them in their spare time or as an unofficial skunkworks project or 20% time project at work. It the _only_ people tackling large complex problems as "open source" (in a loose interpretation here) are PhD students, there'll be less amazing software created than if companies like Mongo/Redis/Elastic can pay teams of devs to work on software which while not "FSF certified open source", is still usable and understandable by others in ways that proprietary software is not. I could debug my not-technically-OSS Mongo problems, unlike my Oracle problems. That's not rms's vision of the future. But at least it's not Larry Ellison's either...

solidasparagus 8y ago
I can't imagine the new OSS license approach working. People seriously underestimate the ability and willingness of cloud providers to write entirely software, using existing OSS as nothing more than market research.
- bigiain 8y ago

siwatanejo 8y ago

> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors Opensource can also exist outside the server side. There are opensource desktop&mobile apps and cloud vendors cannot do anything against them. Stop painting a narrowed view of reality, opensource is bigger than you think.

swsieber 8y ago
I don't think the intent was to say open source is limited to server side software, but was to instead illustrate a point about cloud vendors embracing open source.
- siwatanejo 8y ago
  I didn't say the intent was to say opensource is limited to server side software. I'm just saying that talking only about cloud vendors killing opensource is short-sighted. Again, opensource is much bigger.
pjmlp 8y ago
Kind of, one of the reasons of the failure of desktop FOSS business is that no average consumer is going to pay for consulting, trainings or books.

scirocco 8y ago

2011 @ Microsoft: "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches" 2019 @ Microsoft: "We are all in on open source"

pvorb 8y ago

This article talks about Amazon forking Elasticsearch in depth: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/15/cloud-open-source-powder-keg/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/15/cloud-open-source-pow...

mikhailfranco 8y ago

Interesting recent example is Unity3D v. Improbable: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/ https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improba... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-change-makes-cloud-based-spatialos-games-illegal/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan...

kgwxd 8y ago

Maybe all the major OSS players and FSF could get together and build a cloud company with the promise of only building on OSS and sharing the profits. I'd host anything I could at a place like that, even if I didn't really need hosting for it. It wouldn't even have to be the best in the business, just reasonably priced.