10 ms·

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to

Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize. Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can.

eanzenberg 7y ago
Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.
- staticassertion 7y ago
  So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no one will ever use your software. How do you see this working?
  - kristianc 7y ago
    > So how do you bootstrap your company? Services
  - moreira 7y ago
    You choose closed source and you get different early adopters. You don't get the same early adopters that try out every new open source project, and that's OK because you're not trying to run an open source project, you're trying to build a business. The people who would resent you for being closed source are just not your target market, and that's OK. Open source is a choice. You get a lot of early adopters, yes, but the project is also completely out of your control. There's nothing stopping anyone else from taking it, putting more resources into it, and stealing your thunder. If you're not happy with that idea, just don't make your code open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
    - capkutay 7y ago
      There's also companies that create open source projects and go on to build highly differentiated value-add products on top of it. E.g. Databricks (owners of Apache Spark) who built a great SaaS product for managing data science pipelines. That product is so valuable it's almost as if they don't even need to monetize the spark project by itself. What I don't like is the companies that create some open source project for the hype, then charge for a 'management console' or some marginal add-on.
  - busterarm 7y ago
    Elastic Cloud is far and away the best SaaS ElasticSearch offering. It's in every way a better product than the hosted AWS ElasticSearch service, which I find to be practically unusable. More importantly, I don't know anywhere that uses AWS ElasticSearch where ElasticSearch is a core component of someone's platform. The problem Elastic has is that their Cloud isn't remotely as good as self-hosting. Using their Cloud doesn't abstract away the domain knowledge needed to operate ElasticSearch at scale, so anyone who uses it and becomes competent will eventually self-host. If they can get better at abstracting away the arcane knowledge needed to operate ES, AWS won't be a problem for them.
    - jackbravo 7y ago
      Like algolia
      - busterarm 7y ago
        From where I sit, Algolia solves a very small subset of problems that Lucene-based search engines do. Often problems people don't actually have.
    - ousta 7y ago
      people that manage elastisearch configurations are not the same people managing hardware, purchasing, hardware admins. obviously you can save some $ reducing your people while moving to the cloud. I agree that for any complex application (and elastic is one when volume is there) there are still pros of the cloud you cant leverage i.e for search on demand infra is pretty much useless if you cant make it happens in microseconds.
    - coredog64 7y ago
      At my previous employer we used the AWS managed ES product for an ELK stack that was ingesting terabytes per day. It was painful, and we eventually moved off it, but it was still valuable for the training wheels it provided. If the developers had been better at logging it’s possible we would have been happy to continue on the managed product.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    Open core seems to be a good model that satisfies people that want open source stuff but still lets you charge for some features that your competitors can't easily steal. Gitlab is a good example.
    - ausjke 7y ago
      freemium/OSS the core, premium the plugins/enterprise-features is one business model. more attractively is the all code for free model, so those who are able can use it for free, and you charge a fee for people who are in need of professional support. a third one is still all code for free, but you can pay for hosted service instead of self-host the code, time is money for many people these days. in all cases, you're building a group of followers with OSS, and you sell the hard-to-grasp or time-is-money-for-some-user domain expertise. how to build your moat as far as competition goes? anyone that is smarter than you could copy all the code and do the same business model, the only thing might be a good license? however these days most OSS license are commercial friendly so I don't know how this works.
      - IshKebab 7y ago
        I think people overestimate the number of customers that need "support". Especially given that the users of projects like these are technically extremely skilled.
    - brunoqc 7y ago
      I'm not sure about open core. Why should we contribute to an open core project? What if I want to add a feature that is locked away in the enterprise version? I can't fork for one feature and they won't add it to the main product.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      I'm a fan of Open core... the issues come down to a lot of the time, projects will reject contributions, and have pulled features that allow competition with their non-core features. On the one hand, I really do understand the needs here, on the other I wish there was a better option. I wouldn't even mind seeing something like the new MongoDB license + open-core as a non-profit organization that funded the development of several shared projects, where what licensing it does get is directly towards development. It's much different when you are absolutely profit driven. There are a lot of software problems that are hard, but the results can be shared.
  - WalterSear 7y ago
    You choose closed source, recognize that people who won't pay weren't your target market anyway, and accrete the reputation for your product that wins people on the fence over to your paid product/service.
  - chongli 7y ago
    Why not use a dual license model? AGPL for all, commercial license for paying customers. I think a number of companies use this approach.
    - crdoconnor 7y ago
      The companies ive seen try this receive an ungodly number of complaints about how theyre ruining open source.
      - toyg 7y ago
        Business and the internet both require pretty thick skins in isolation; combined, they require a turtleshell-like thickness. At some point one has to learn to suck it up.
    - sovande 7y ago
      MongoDB used to use AGPL, but apparently that was not good enough. Not sure why?
      - jackbravo 7y ago
        From https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side... > AGPL meant companies who wanted to modify and run MongoDB as a publicly available service had to open source their software or obtain a commercial license from MongoDB With the new license: > The only substantive change is an explicit condition that any organization attempting to exploit MongoDB as a service must open source the software that it uses to offer such service Aaaaaaaaaaaand from the license text itself https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license: > “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.
  - Tsubasachan 7y ago
    Make stuff people want to pay for? If they don't want to pay for it its shit and you move on.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
paedubucher 7y ago
I'm reading Pieter Hintjens "Social Architecture" at the moment, and there he warns exactly about what just happened to Elasticsearch.
- postit 7y ago
  Gosh I miss this guy.
kemitchell 7y ago
> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise. When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, and then decry competitors for adopting, I haven't much sympathy, assuming they had the resources and wherewithal to make a better choice. But copyleft was also an available option, and copyleft is plenty open source.
- pieterh_estc 7y ago
  OSI is asleep at the wheel on this one IMHO https://sdtimes.com/os/osi-weighs-in-on-open-source-licensing-conflict/ https://sdtimes.com/os/osi-weighs-in-on-open-source-licensin... I wonder why aren't they standardizing an open source license that prevents hyperscale cloud monetization by someone other than the originators? Don't OSS communities hold the cards here? it's just a change to license.txt, broad OSS adoption and it's a very different type of cloud (picture nuclear mushroom cloud)
  - kemitchell 7y ago
    I no longer participate in the OSI process, largely for reasons laid out here: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/04/23/OSD-wontfix.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/04/23/OSD-wontfix.html I've read quite a bit from OSI stalwarts about why they take the positions they do, but I still don't understand them, and therefore shouldn't try to relate them. If I had to make one criticism of the OSI mailing list reaction to both my License Zero Reciprocal License, which later became Parity, and also MongoDB's Server Side Public License, it's that takes almost invariably focused on who was proposing the license, and the business model they seemed to have in mind, and ignored the extent to which older licenses had provided substantially the same functionality, as the basis of similar business models, before the software-as-a-service shift. It wasn't clear whether that was relevant criticism or not, since the process wasn't clear to begin with, and notional clarifications from OSI staff and eventually the board only muddied the waters. When literally anyone can object to a license, or block the approval process, for almost any reason, so long as they can phrase it in vague philosophical terms, then no new ideas in copyleft will ever get through. Even if those new ideas boil down to maintenance work on existing licenses now showing their age.
burtonator 7y ago
What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly.
- fossuser 7y ago
  I wish they offered that option. I'd sign up for ad free FB for $2-$3 a month if it made it easy to set retention periods on my data and opt out of the collection.
  - askafriend 7y ago
    Facebook made $118 per user in North America in 2018. So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now.
    - onion2k 7y ago
      That's the average. They definitely didn't make that much from my account that I log in to 5 or 6 times a year.
      - askafriend 7y ago
        You don't have to log in to the blue Facebook app for them to make money. https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/ https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/
    - munk-a 7y ago
      That sounds fine by me - in compensation for the lost revenue they would gain a bunch of public good will and lose some risk for a repeat of cambridge analytica. Also that seems way way up since in 2017 they made only 6.18$ in Q4[1]... so who's suddenly paying so much money for our user data? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
outside1234 7y ago
You are right, but on the other hand, Amazon shouldn't be surprised when project maintainers then focus their efforts on the platforms (Azure in particular) that cut them in as partners on a shared success model.
dredmorbius 7y ago
There's a busines model for high-fixed, zero-marginal cost economic public goods. It's taxes. The alternatives have all been found wanting: "intellectual property" (copyright and patents), patronage, religious commissions, advertising. Busking, performance, physical media sales, merch, loss-leaders, widget-frosting, service/support, and shingle-posting all bypass the HFZMC problem by monetising some alternative good, product, or service. Several of those specifically tie network-effect, rent-generating monopolies with FCZMC goods. Taxes socialise this process. What to tax is the next question. Adam Smith preferred wealth and land (means of production). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/Chapter_2 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...
vmchale 7y ago
> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can. You could GPL it...
Twirrim 7y ago
This may be taking it to an absurd exaggeration but the very cynical part of me thinks step 1 and 2 could well be phrased: Step 1: Launch company to take advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project, hoping to get rich in an IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon also takes advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project to get rich, only they also throw a bunch of expensive developer time at it to make it really shine.
- dman 7y ago
  You will be surprised how little user contributions most open source projects receive. I have a few friends who are maintainers of key projects in the Python OSS ecosystem, most of them are struggling with burnout.
  - Twirrim 7y ago
    The kinds of projects that spawn full companies or have that on their future path tend to be ones with a more active community contributing to the project.
    - dman 7y ago
      I highly encourage you to setup some time to talk to maintainers of open source projects that you think are doing well. Ask them how they are doing and how much help they receive.
shard972 7y ago
But if you go the GPL route your just a smelly old neck beard who harbors conspiracy theories about big business by refusing them a license permissive enough for a company to exploit to their liking.
sgift 7y ago
Additionally, I think it's a bit rich when a company that is based 100% on another open source project under a permissive license (Apache Lucene here) cries that someone else uses a permissive license in the same way they do.
piokoch 7y ago
Exactly, every software solution creator has a choice: be like MongoDB - free, open source to gain traction and users, hoping to monetize this somehow or be like, say, Datomic - fully commercial, less popular, less users, but with viable business model from day 1. Sometimes the "open" route works well for founders - see RedHat, but that's not easy. Prior to AWS there were also others who were trying to earn money on someone else free product. In the pre-cloud era those "unfair" competitors were easier to beat, AWS is indeed a game changer here.
pushpop 7y ago
I can see both sides of the argument here. On the one hand Amazon are just using open source literally as the license allows. But on the other hand it does feel a little underhanded that Amazon can incorporate these projects into their portfolio as their own and make large amounts of money from it while not giving anything back to the community. Maybe there needs to be a new software license. One that allows for commercial use when the project is included as a module or infrastructure but excludes it from being billed separately. So you can use an open source component as a language library, shared object / DLL or even stand alone daemon / service installed as part of your web application (for example) but you cannot make that open source project a product in its own right. Obviously a lawyer would need to write the terms rather than an engineer like myself but I wonder if that kind of software license would offer a happy middle ground?

eanzenberg 7y ago

Yes! You can't have it both ways. You can't have random people submit IP to your codebase and then own the monetization of the end result.

staticassertion 7y ago
So how do you bootstrap your company? You choose closed source and you throw away early adopters - people are way, way less likely to try out closed source software from what I've seen. They'll even resent you for it. You choose open source with a permissive license - you bootstrap, get users, and some larger company comes along and essentially takes it from you. You choose GPL3 or some less permissive license and no one will ever use your software. How do you see this working?
- kristianc 7y ago
  > So how do you bootstrap your company? Services
- moreira 7y ago
  You choose closed source and you get different early adopters. You don't get the same early adopters that try out every new open source project, and that's OK because you're not trying to run an open source project, you're trying to build a business. The people who would resent you for being closed source are just not your target market, and that's OK. Open source is a choice. You get a lot of early adopters, yes, but the project is also completely out of your control. There's nothing stopping anyone else from taking it, putting more resources into it, and stealing your thunder. If you're not happy with that idea, just don't make your code open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
  - capkutay 7y ago
    There's also companies that create open source projects and go on to build highly differentiated value-add products on top of it. E.g. Databricks (owners of Apache Spark) who built a great SaaS product for managing data science pipelines. That product is so valuable it's almost as if they don't even need to monetize the spark project by itself. What I don't like is the companies that create some open source project for the hype, then charge for a 'management console' or some marginal add-on.
- busterarm 7y ago
  Elastic Cloud is far and away the best SaaS ElasticSearch offering. It's in every way a better product than the hosted AWS ElasticSearch service, which I find to be practically unusable. More importantly, I don't know anywhere that uses AWS ElasticSearch where ElasticSearch is a core component of someone's platform. The problem Elastic has is that their Cloud isn't remotely as good as self-hosting. Using their Cloud doesn't abstract away the domain knowledge needed to operate ElasticSearch at scale, so anyone who uses it and becomes competent will eventually self-host. If they can get better at abstracting away the arcane knowledge needed to operate ES, AWS won't be a problem for them.
  - jackbravo 7y ago
    Like algolia
    - busterarm 7y ago
      From where I sit, Algolia solves a very small subset of problems that Lucene-based search engines do. Often problems people don't actually have.
  - ousta 7y ago
    people that manage elastisearch configurations are not the same people managing hardware, purchasing, hardware admins. obviously you can save some $ reducing your people while moving to the cloud. I agree that for any complex application (and elastic is one when volume is there) there are still pros of the cloud you cant leverage i.e for search on demand infra is pretty much useless if you cant make it happens in microseconds.
  - coredog64 7y ago
    At my previous employer we used the AWS managed ES product for an ELK stack that was ingesting terabytes per day. It was painful, and we eventually moved off it, but it was still valuable for the training wheels it provided. If the developers had been better at logging it’s possible we would have been happy to continue on the managed product.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Open core seems to be a good model that satisfies people that want open source stuff but still lets you charge for some features that your competitors can't easily steal. Gitlab is a good example.
  - ausjke 7y ago
    freemium/OSS the core, premium the plugins/enterprise-features is one business model. more attractively is the all code for free model, so those who are able can use it for free, and you charge a fee for people who are in need of professional support. a third one is still all code for free, but you can pay for hosted service instead of self-host the code, time is money for many people these days. in all cases, you're building a group of followers with OSS, and you sell the hard-to-grasp or time-is-money-for-some-user domain expertise. how to build your moat as far as competition goes? anyone that is smarter than you could copy all the code and do the same business model, the only thing might be a good license? however these days most OSS license are commercial friendly so I don't know how this works.
    - IshKebab 7y ago
      I think people overestimate the number of customers that need "support". Especially given that the users of projects like these are technically extremely skilled.
  - brunoqc 7y ago
    I'm not sure about open core. Why should we contribute to an open core project? What if I want to add a feature that is locked away in the enterprise version? I can't fork for one feature and they won't add it to the main product.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    I'm a fan of Open core... the issues come down to a lot of the time, projects will reject contributions, and have pulled features that allow competition with their non-core features. On the one hand, I really do understand the needs here, on the other I wish there was a better option. I wouldn't even mind seeing something like the new MongoDB license + open-core as a non-profit organization that funded the development of several shared projects, where what licensing it does get is directly towards development. It's much different when you are absolutely profit driven. There are a lot of software problems that are hard, but the results can be shared.
- WalterSear 7y ago
  You choose closed source, recognize that people who won't pay weren't your target market anyway, and accrete the reputation for your product that wins people on the fence over to your paid product/service.
- chongli 7y ago
  Why not use a dual license model? AGPL for all, commercial license for paying customers. I think a number of companies use this approach.
  - crdoconnor 7y ago
    The companies ive seen try this receive an ungodly number of complaints about how theyre ruining open source.
    - toyg 7y ago
      Business and the internet both require pretty thick skins in isolation; combined, they require a turtleshell-like thickness. At some point one has to learn to suck it up.
  - sovande 7y ago
    MongoDB used to use AGPL, but apparently that was not good enough. Not sure why?
    - jackbravo 7y ago
      From https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side... > AGPL meant companies who wanted to modify and run MongoDB as a publicly available service had to open source their software or obtain a commercial license from MongoDB With the new license: > The only substantive change is an explicit condition that any organization attempting to exploit MongoDB as a service must open source the software that it uses to offer such service Aaaaaaaaaaaand from the license text itself https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license: > “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.
- Tsubasachan 7y ago
  Make stuff people want to pay for? If they don't want to pay for it its shit and you move on.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

paedubucher 7y ago

I'm reading Pieter Hintjens "Social Architecture" at the moment, and there he warns exactly about what just happened to Elasticsearch.

postit 7y ago
Gosh I miss this guy.

kemitchell 7y ago

> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise. When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, and then decry competitors for adopting, I haven't much sympathy, assuming they had the resources and wherewithal to make a better choice. But copyleft was also an available option, and copyleft is plenty open source.

pieterh_estc 7y ago
OSI is asleep at the wheel on this one IMHO https://sdtimes.com/os/osi-weighs-in-on-open-source-licensing-conflict/ https://sdtimes.com/os/osi-weighs-in-on-open-source-licensin... I wonder why aren't they standardizing an open source license that prevents hyperscale cloud monetization by someone other than the originators? Don't OSS communities hold the cards here? it's just a change to license.txt, broad OSS adoption and it's a very different type of cloud (picture nuclear mushroom cloud)
- kemitchell 7y ago
  I no longer participate in the OSI process, largely for reasons laid out here: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/04/23/OSD-wontfix.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/04/23/OSD-wontfix.html I've read quite a bit from OSI stalwarts about why they take the positions they do, but I still don't understand them, and therefore shouldn't try to relate them. If I had to make one criticism of the OSI mailing list reaction to both my License Zero Reciprocal License, which later became Parity, and also MongoDB's Server Side Public License, it's that takes almost invariably focused on who was proposing the license, and the business model they seemed to have in mind, and ignored the extent to which older licenses had provided substantially the same functionality, as the basis of similar business models, before the software-as-a-service shift. It wasn't clear whether that was relevant criticism or not, since the process wasn't clear to begin with, and notional clarifications from OSI staff and eventually the board only muddied the waters. When literally anyone can object to a license, or block the approval process, for almost any reason, so long as they can phrase it in vague philosophical terms, then no new ideas in copyleft will ever get through. Even if those new ideas boil down to maintenance work on existing licenses now showing their age.

burtonator 7y ago

What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly.

fossuser 7y ago
I wish they offered that option. I'd sign up for ad free FB for $2-$3 a month if it made it easy to set retention periods on my data and opt out of the collection.
- askafriend 7y ago
  Facebook made $118 per user in North America in 2018. So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    That's the average. They definitely didn't make that much from my account that I log in to 5 or 6 times a year.
    - askafriend 7y ago
      You don't have to log in to the blue Facebook app for them to make money. https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/ https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/
  - munk-a 7y ago
    That sounds fine by me - in compensation for the lost revenue they would gain a bunch of public good will and lose some risk for a repeat of cambridge analytica. Also that seems way way up since in 2017 they made only 6.18$ in Q4[1]... so who's suddenly paying so much money for our user data? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...

outside1234 7y ago

You are right, but on the other hand, Amazon shouldn't be surprised when project maintainers then focus their efforts on the platforms (Azure in particular) that cut them in as partners on a shared success model.

dredmorbius 7y ago

There's a busines model for high-fixed, zero-marginal cost economic public goods. It's taxes. The alternatives have all been found wanting: "intellectual property" (copyright and patents), patronage, religious commissions, advertising. Busking, performance, physical media sales, merch, loss-leaders, widget-frosting, service/support, and shingle-posting all bypass the HFZMC problem by monetising some alternative good, product, or service. Several of those specifically tie network-effect, rent-generating monopolies with FCZMC goods. Taxes socialise this process. What to tax is the next question. Adam Smith preferred wealth and land (means of production). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/Chapter_2 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...

vmchale 7y ago

> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can. You could GPL it...

Twirrim 7y ago

This may be taking it to an absurd exaggeration but the very cynical part of me thinks step 1 and 2 could well be phrased: Step 1: Launch company to take advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project, hoping to get rich in an IPO. Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon also takes advantage of the countless hours of free labour provided by the open source community around your project to get rich, only they also throw a bunch of expensive developer time at it to make it really shine.

dman 7y ago
You will be surprised how little user contributions most open source projects receive. I have a few friends who are maintainers of key projects in the Python OSS ecosystem, most of them are struggling with burnout.
- Twirrim 7y ago
  The kinds of projects that spawn full companies or have that on their future path tend to be ones with a more active community contributing to the project.
  - dman 7y ago
    I highly encourage you to setup some time to talk to maintainers of open source projects that you think are doing well. Ask them how they are doing and how much help they receive.

shard972 7y ago

But if you go the GPL route your just a smelly old neck beard who harbors conspiracy theories about big business by refusing them a license permissive enough for a company to exploit to their liking.

sgift 7y ago

Additionally, I think it's a bit rich when a company that is based 100% on another open source project under a permissive license (Apache Lucene here) cries that someone else uses a permissive license in the same way they do.

piokoch 7y ago

Exactly, every software solution creator has a choice: be like MongoDB - free, open source to gain traction and users, hoping to monetize this somehow or be like, say, Datomic - fully commercial, less popular, less users, but with viable business model from day 1. Sometimes the "open" route works well for founders - see RedHat, but that's not easy. Prior to AWS there were also others who were trying to earn money on someone else free product. In the pre-cloud era those "unfair" competitors were easier to beat, AWS is indeed a game changer here.

pushpop 7y ago

I can see both sides of the argument here. On the one hand Amazon are just using open source literally as the license allows. But on the other hand it does feel a little underhanded that Amazon can incorporate these projects into their portfolio as their own and make large amounts of money from it while not giving anything back to the community. Maybe there needs to be a new software license. One that allows for commercial use when the project is included as a module or infrastructure but excludes it from being billed separately. So you can use an open source component as a language library, shared object / DLL or even stand alone daemon / service installed as part of your web application (for example) but you cannot make that open source project a product in its own right. Obviously a lawyer would need to write the terms rather than an engineer like myself but I wonder if that kind of software license would offer a happy middle ground?