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The root of the issue is that licensing costs, the only costs that open source is guaranteed to reduce, can be a small percentage of operational costs in practi

The root of the issue is that licensing costs, the only costs that open source is guaranteed to reduce, can be a small percentage of operational costs in practice. If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience, it can literally be economically uncompetitive with a closed source product that does optimize those other operational costs even if it has a license overhead or creates vendor lock-in. I see this dynamic more and more, companies have figured this out. Sure, buyers prefer open source infrastructure without vendor lock-in, but they don't prefer it enough to spend 2-10x the OpEx, which is often the case in these discussions. The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. Open source is a nice idea that most companies love, but they aren't going to spend mountains of extra money in operational costs to get it.

mehhh 7y ago
Reducing OpEx often requires cooperation and pooling of resources that a proprietary vendor can force on their users with little choice, while by default software like Mastodon, Pleroma, etc treat other instances as potentially hostile, replicating data (often) needlessly. Efforts like https://jortage.com https://jortage.com can reduce OpEx quite significantly.
henryfjordan 7y ago
> If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience I feel the opposite is true. There are many open source projects that are at least on par with their proprietary counterparts. Postgres is competitive with every SQL DB I've heard of except maybe in some niche use-cases. Redis is open source and incredibly performant. Same with Kafka (if you use it well). Linux sure runs better than Windows in my experience. There is also a whole class of open-source libraries like React that have taken over. I can't even think of a proprietary frontend framework. What software are you thinking of when you make these claims?
- 0xFACEFEED 7y ago
  Not the parent but I thought of AWS services like RDS and S3. I believe the point being made was the money you save on licensing fees are insignificant compared to the amount you spend on paying people to maintain your infrastructure.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I have used Postres during 4 years, Oracle and SQL server since 2000. Postgres is a nice database, but there are enterprise deployment use cases that it doesn't cover, which might be consired a niche, fair enough. What I don't consider a niche use case, is that its development tooling, meaning graphical DB management, graphical debugging of stored procedures, data modeling tooling, or integration of language runtimes into the database are all a bit behind of what those big DBs are capable of.
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  There are two major dimensions to the operational cost weaknesses of open source. Neither is guaranteed to be meaningfully exploited by proprietary software in any particular case. Since we are talking about operational costs, this is almost entirely about data infrastructure software, not things like React. First, there is a vast amount of supported operational tooling that is simply missing from open source ecosystems. PostgreSQL, which I still use extensively, is a perfect example of this. The code bases around this tooling are several times the size of the product they support, and it isn't the kind of code that most developers aspire to write despite its high value to the customer. Oracle and SQL Server have architectures that are as obsolete as PostgreSQL, they don't compete on the basis of being modern, efficient designs but on the basis of having dramatically better operational tooling. Cloud RDBMS attack a different aspect of this. Second, is the operational infrastructure costs i.e. how much hardware is required to run a given workload. This is the larger threat to open source, particularly as the data intensity of business increases. PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Redis (I've used all three operationally) have several times the hardware requirements to deliver a workload in practice than is required with a state-of-the-art architecture. This isn't hypothetical, I've designed engines that replaced them when warranted. An 80% reduction in infrastructure cost is attractive when you are already spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year on it. Some popular proprietary software is just as inefficient but that isn't guaranteed to remain the case (and I've replaced those systems too). Designing efficient software architecture isn't magic (see: ScyllaDB), you simply see very few examples of it in open source because it isn't a priority (see: use of managed languages for data infrastructure despite this being a known limitation). The reality is that I can guarantee data intensive businesses who make competent use of open source that I can reduce their infrastructure costs by 4x with ease. You can bury a massive amount licensing and engineering costs in those savings. Also, some companies are explicitly looking at this as a major "green" initiative. The wasteful infrastructure footprint to deliver a workload with open source is viewed as environmentally unfriendly, and this is pushing companies to consider proprietary solutions even if they are not sensitive to operational costs. That isn't a conversation open source is currently prepared to have but it is coming.
sgt101 7y ago
I disagree about the opex cost, as anyone who has had to pay for oracle consultants to come in and fix a borked dB would.. I think that a more accurate assessment is 2x-10x the claimed sticker opex cost that the vendors talk about. The problem bring that "boss my system has shat its pants and I need half the budget to g fix it" is a story that NO ONE in ANY corporate can tell twice.
- Noumenon72 7y ago
  How is it a different story if it was Oracle that shat its pants instead of OSS?
  - madez 7y ago
    You are not limited to Oracle engineers and access to proprietary source code and documentation to clean your systems pants. That makes individual fixes cheaper and the fixes can be shared publicly, leading to additional cost savings.
rstuart4133 7y ago
> The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. This is the developers perspective. In the time it takes to develop something the licence fees are indeed at tiny part of the cost. However, over the lifetime of the software itself it's usually a different outcome. Software typically lasts decades. Banks are still running cobol software written decades ago. Perhaps it's possible even over those long lifetimes the licensing costs still win. When it breaks down completely is when you deploy that software multiple times, paying those licence fees each time you do it. If you start paying for 1000 CAL's you have a problem. The other comment here that is a red flag to me is "all the tools that give you visibility into the database save you time". If it is development time then well and good, but if you are needing DBA's once the thing is deployed then just no. No matter how sophisticated those tools are, they still cost far more than needing no attention whatsoever. This is where open source usually wins, because it's lack of sophistication is usually an case of being pared back to the bare minimum to do the job.

mehhh 7y ago

Reducing OpEx often requires cooperation and pooling of resources that a proprietary vendor can force on their users with little choice, while by default software like Mastodon, Pleroma, etc treat other instances as potentially hostile, replicating data (often) needlessly. Efforts like https://jortage.com https://jortage.com can reduce OpEx quite significantly.

henryfjordan 7y ago

> If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience I feel the opposite is true. There are many open source projects that are at least on par with their proprietary counterparts. Postgres is competitive with every SQL DB I've heard of except maybe in some niche use-cases. Redis is open source and incredibly performant. Same with Kafka (if you use it well). Linux sure runs better than Windows in my experience. There is also a whole class of open-source libraries like React that have taken over. I can't even think of a proprietary frontend framework. What software are you thinking of when you make these claims?

0xFACEFEED 7y ago
Not the parent but I thought of AWS services like RDS and S3. I believe the point being made was the money you save on licensing fees are insignificant compared to the amount you spend on paying people to maintain your infrastructure.
pjmlp 7y ago
I have used Postres during 4 years, Oracle and SQL server since 2000. Postgres is a nice database, but there are enterprise deployment use cases that it doesn't cover, which might be consired a niche, fair enough. What I don't consider a niche use case, is that its development tooling, meaning graphical DB management, graphical debugging of stored procedures, data modeling tooling, or integration of language runtimes into the database are all a bit behind of what those big DBs are capable of.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
There are two major dimensions to the operational cost weaknesses of open source. Neither is guaranteed to be meaningfully exploited by proprietary software in any particular case. Since we are talking about operational costs, this is almost entirely about data infrastructure software, not things like React. First, there is a vast amount of supported operational tooling that is simply missing from open source ecosystems. PostgreSQL, which I still use extensively, is a perfect example of this. The code bases around this tooling are several times the size of the product they support, and it isn't the kind of code that most developers aspire to write despite its high value to the customer. Oracle and SQL Server have architectures that are as obsolete as PostgreSQL, they don't compete on the basis of being modern, efficient designs but on the basis of having dramatically better operational tooling. Cloud RDBMS attack a different aspect of this. Second, is the operational infrastructure costs i.e. how much hardware is required to run a given workload. This is the larger threat to open source, particularly as the data intensity of business increases. PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Redis (I've used all three operationally) have several times the hardware requirements to deliver a workload in practice than is required with a state-of-the-art architecture. This isn't hypothetical, I've designed engines that replaced them when warranted. An 80% reduction in infrastructure cost is attractive when you are already spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year on it. Some popular proprietary software is just as inefficient but that isn't guaranteed to remain the case (and I've replaced those systems too). Designing efficient software architecture isn't magic (see: ScyllaDB), you simply see very few examples of it in open source because it isn't a priority (see: use of managed languages for data infrastructure despite this being a known limitation). The reality is that I can guarantee data intensive businesses who make competent use of open source that I can reduce their infrastructure costs by 4x with ease. You can bury a massive amount licensing and engineering costs in those savings. Also, some companies are explicitly looking at this as a major "green" initiative. The wasteful infrastructure footprint to deliver a workload with open source is viewed as environmentally unfriendly, and this is pushing companies to consider proprietary solutions even if they are not sensitive to operational costs. That isn't a conversation open source is currently prepared to have but it is coming.

sgt101 7y ago

I disagree about the opex cost, as anyone who has had to pay for oracle consultants to come in and fix a borked dB would.. I think that a more accurate assessment is 2x-10x the claimed sticker opex cost that the vendors talk about. The problem bring that "boss my system has shat its pants and I need half the budget to g fix it" is a story that NO ONE in ANY corporate can tell twice.

Noumenon72 7y ago
How is it a different story if it was Oracle that shat its pants instead of OSS?
- madez 7y ago
  You are not limited to Oracle engineers and access to proprietary source code and documentation to clean your systems pants. That makes individual fixes cheaper and the fixes can be shared publicly, leading to additional cost savings.

rstuart4133 7y ago

> The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. This is the developers perspective. In the time it takes to develop something the licence fees are indeed at tiny part of the cost. However, over the lifetime of the software itself it's usually a different outcome. Software typically lasts decades. Banks are still running cobol software written decades ago. Perhaps it's possible even over those long lifetimes the licensing costs still win. When it breaks down completely is when you deploy that software multiple times, paying those licence fees each time you do it. If you start paying for 1000 CAL's you have a problem. The other comment here that is a red flag to me is "all the tools that give you visibility into the database save you time". If it is development time then well and good, but if you are needing DBA's once the thing is deployed then just no. No matter how sophisticated those tools are, they still cost far more than needing no attention whatsoever. This is where open source usually wins, because it's lack of sophistication is usually an case of being pared back to the bare minimum to do the job.