7 ms·

I think to truly appreciate FOSS as a model, one needs to shift away from thinking software as an asset to be monetized to more of a liability that needs to be

by zokier 6y ago

I think to truly appreciate FOSS as a model, one needs to shift away from thinking software as an asset to be monetized to more of a liability that needs to be managed and maintained. Then the benefit of FOSS becomes clear: by publishing your software there is possibility of sharing that burden with others instead of carrying it alone yourself.

taneq 6y ago
I agree. I can't see how you can 'sell free software' as a standalone product. You build and evangelise free software while selling feature requests, services and support to the users.
- dalke 6y ago
  You can sell a proprietary product, right? With a restrictive software license? That means customers are willing to pay $base + $yearly renewal for the product. Why aren't they willing to pay the same price for the same product but with an open source license? I really don't understand why they don't. I'll go one further - how much will people pay for an open source license over a source available license with a right to modify, no time limits/renewal requirement, but no distribution right? Answer: all but one of my customers jumped at the chance to reduce the cost by switching from the MIT license to a not-quite-open-source license. Which means they don't really value the redistribution right. And I saw this at one small conference about industry use of open source. The organizers - who use chemfp! - stated at the start that the biggest reason they love open source is because it's "free" (meaning no cost), not the principles of software freedom nor the improved development methodology of open source. I tried selling feature requests, services and support to the users. That was my original plan, and it worked so long as those feature requests were easy and there were enough of them. But consider that the upgrade to Python 3 took two months. Who pays for that? The first customer who wants Python 3 support 5 years ago, who pays $20K for a feature request which everyone else gets for free? Then there's inventive to wait for a feature request in hopes that someone else will pay it. While the sales model - even as free software - lets me split the cost among multiple customers who need that feature, and across a few years. I also pointed out that selling services is a disincentive to developing good document and good APIs. I feel like there's a sweet spot where if I were to skimp on the documentation some then there's an increased chance of getting consulting work.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    >the biggest reason they love open source is because it's "free" (meaning no cost), not the principles of software freedom nor the improved development methodology of open source. I'm a cheapskate but that's still pretty weird to me. Open source software is free because the entire idea behind it is users don't get excluded. It's more about being accessible than not charging money. There was a dual licensed HTML component that I was going to use at work but the commercial licensing conditions (not the price) were pretty bad. Per user licensing with a strict upper limit for both active users and the number of apps even though we don't know how many people are going to use the software and most users are only going to use it for one hour per month and we would probably integrate it into a library that will be automatically included in every of our applications to maintain consistency even if the commercial component is not actively being used in every project. Paying $100/month or maybe a little more for a commercial license with few restrictions that I can just plop in would have been a no brainer but since I'd have to constantly play license tetris it's going to cost my company more time than the product is worth in the long run. It's not a lack money that forced me to go with an open source project that also happens to be free. It's the massive headaches caused by the commercial one.
    - dalke 6y ago
      My running hypothesis is that many people see open source as a way to avoid dealing with upstream developers. If I "pip install" a package which brings in a lot of other packages, I don't need to have any relationship with any of those developers. It Just Works. I don't have to know about their projects, find their web sites, read their calls for funding, learn their licensing options, etc. I don't have to worry about billing. It Just Works. Even if the price is $100, the fact that it doesn't Just Work means the effective price is far higher. I decided to focus on industrial customers who were used to software in the EUR ~5-20K/yr range (rather than the ~$1000/yr range) so the overhead costs are proportionally smaller. And why I try to make the code fit into the "Just Works" framework, eg, on Linux-based OSes: pip install chemfp -i https://chemfp.com/packages/
    - WJW 6y ago
      > Open source software is free because the entire idea behind it is users don't get excluded. It's more about being accessible than not charging money. The reason for the creator of the software to make it open source does not have to be the reason that the users decide to use it. Even at work, I don't think a single person has ever had the source code of Redis, Postgres or even most of their NodeJS modules open on their machine. The reason they use it is because they can `apt/brew/npm install redis` and off they go. They wouldn't care at all if npm only installed binaries. Zero price enables this kind of easy distribution because every form of money transfer is more difficult (especially in corporate setting where you have to pay for it) than "not paying at all".
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  I agree too. Free software definitely doesn't work as a "product". Software has always been a service. Software as a "product" was an aberration. That model isn't sustainable. The fact the largest software companies are moving to subscription-based models is proof-enough that software as a product is unsustainable.
  - dalke 6y ago
    Why isn't it proof that a subscription model produces more revenue than a sale model, rather than proof the sale model is essentially unsustainable?
    - taneq 6y ago
      I'd guess they were going with a theory such as "The subscription model out-competes the sales model on a few axes, therefore (all else being equal) a company relying on the sales model can't compete with a company relying on the subscription model. Sales companies fail, leaving only subscription companies."?
      - dalke 6y ago
        I thought about it some more, and realized a different issue. I charge a fee to get the software, and renewal fee for support and upgrades. That's essentially a subscription, right? The main difference is that once my customer has the software, even under the proprietary license, there's no time limit to their continued use of their old versions. So is EvanAnderson's point that only time-based subscription renewals are sustainable?
        taneq 6y ago
        That's how I'd read it. For a while, computers and software were advancing so fast that anything over ~3 years old was obsolete and essentially useless anyway. The whole software industry is built around everyone throwing their computer in the bin every 3 years and starting over, buying all their software and hardware again. Somewhere in the mid 2000s we reached a point where computers were "good enough" and so that upgrade cycle started stretching longer and longer. I'm still using a computer I built 5 years ago and (barring the spinning hard disk which died last year) there's no reason I shouldn't keep using it for another 5, along with all the software I run on it. Hence the industry-wide switch to subscription models (and especially to cloud-based subscription models as they're essentially impossible to pirate). They had no other way to maintain their revenue streams.
dalke 6y ago
As a revenue-generating project I was able to share the burden by paying people to work on parts of it. I think that was a more effective way than waiting for others to join in. Note that my paying commercial customers are pharmaceutical companies, where employees must present their presentation materials to their legal department before they give a talk. In some cases I've heard that that extends to non-trivial code changes, which reduces the number of people who can help out. Even setting that aside, I've been working on FOSS project for 20+ years. Outside code contribution is rare, and substantial code contribution is like hen's teeth. Bear in mind that most people in my field are chemists-who-program, not software developers. One major exception is the RDKit, which was primarily funded by in-house R&D. Open sourcing it benefited the company because 1) it was primarily pre-competitive (the internal version included competitive features not in the FOSS version), 2) it lowers the price of commercial tools in the area, and 3) the differential cost of organizing the FOSS distribution was a net benefit. This is similar to other successful FOSS projects. However, this model implies that one must be an employee of a large company in order to work on FOSS projects. Which is not for everyone. Clearly small profitable proprietary development shops exist, so why not FOSS ones?
WJW 6y ago
In this viewpoint it should also become immediately clear why for-profit companies interact so poorly with FOSS communities: they are not interested in taking on unnecessary burdens and would prefer the original developer(s) contributing more free labour over having to pay for it.

by zokier 6y ago

taneq 6y ago

I agree. I can't see how you can 'sell free software' as a standalone product. You build and evangelise free software while selling feature requests, services and support to the users.

dalke 6y ago
You can sell a proprietary product, right? With a restrictive software license? That means customers are willing to pay $base + $yearly renewal for the product. Why aren't they willing to pay the same price for the same product but with an open source license? I really don't understand why they don't. I'll go one further - how much will people pay for an open source license over a source available license with a right to modify, no time limits/renewal requirement, but no distribution right? Answer: all but one of my customers jumped at the chance to reduce the cost by switching from the MIT license to a not-quite-open-source license. Which means they don't really value the redistribution right. And I saw this at one small conference about industry use of open source. The organizers - who use chemfp! - stated at the start that the biggest reason they love open source is because it's "free" (meaning no cost), not the principles of software freedom nor the improved development methodology of open source. I tried selling feature requests, services and support to the users. That was my original plan, and it worked so long as those feature requests were easy and there were enough of them. But consider that the upgrade to Python 3 took two months. Who pays for that? The first customer who wants Python 3 support 5 years ago, who pays $20K for a feature request which everyone else gets for free? Then there's inventive to wait for a feature request in hopes that someone else will pay it. While the sales model - even as free software - lets me split the cost among multiple customers who need that feature, and across a few years. I also pointed out that selling services is a disincentive to developing good document and good APIs. I feel like there's a sweet spot where if I were to skimp on the documentation some then there's an increased chance of getting consulting work.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >the biggest reason they love open source is because it's "free" (meaning no cost), not the principles of software freedom nor the improved development methodology of open source. I'm a cheapskate but that's still pretty weird to me. Open source software is free because the entire idea behind it is users don't get excluded. It's more about being accessible than not charging money. There was a dual licensed HTML component that I was going to use at work but the commercial licensing conditions (not the price) were pretty bad. Per user licensing with a strict upper limit for both active users and the number of apps even though we don't know how many people are going to use the software and most users are only going to use it for one hour per month and we would probably integrate it into a library that will be automatically included in every of our applications to maintain consistency even if the commercial component is not actively being used in every project. Paying $100/month or maybe a little more for a commercial license with few restrictions that I can just plop in would have been a no brainer but since I'd have to constantly play license tetris it's going to cost my company more time than the product is worth in the long run. It's not a lack money that forced me to go with an open source project that also happens to be free. It's the massive headaches caused by the commercial one.
  - dalke 6y ago
    My running hypothesis is that many people see open source as a way to avoid dealing with upstream developers. If I "pip install" a package which brings in a lot of other packages, I don't need to have any relationship with any of those developers. It Just Works. I don't have to know about their projects, find their web sites, read their calls for funding, learn their licensing options, etc. I don't have to worry about billing. It Just Works. Even if the price is $100, the fact that it doesn't Just Work means the effective price is far higher. I decided to focus on industrial customers who were used to software in the EUR ~5-20K/yr range (rather than the ~$1000/yr range) so the overhead costs are proportionally smaller. And why I try to make the code fit into the "Just Works" framework, eg, on Linux-based OSes: pip install chemfp -i https://chemfp.com/packages/
  - WJW 6y ago
    > Open source software is free because the entire idea behind it is users don't get excluded. It's more about being accessible than not charging money. The reason for the creator of the software to make it open source does not have to be the reason that the users decide to use it. Even at work, I don't think a single person has ever had the source code of Redis, Postgres or even most of their NodeJS modules open on their machine. The reason they use it is because they can `apt/brew/npm install redis` and off they go. They wouldn't care at all if npm only installed binaries. Zero price enables this kind of easy distribution because every form of money transfer is more difficult (especially in corporate setting where you have to pay for it) than "not paying at all".
EvanAnderson 6y ago
I agree too. Free software definitely doesn't work as a "product". Software has always been a service. Software as a "product" was an aberration. That model isn't sustainable. The fact the largest software companies are moving to subscription-based models is proof-enough that software as a product is unsustainable.
- dalke 6y ago
  Why isn't it proof that a subscription model produces more revenue than a sale model, rather than proof the sale model is essentially unsustainable?
  - taneq 6y ago
    I'd guess they were going with a theory such as "The subscription model out-competes the sales model on a few axes, therefore (all else being equal) a company relying on the sales model can't compete with a company relying on the subscription model. Sales companies fail, leaving only subscription companies."?
    - dalke 6y ago
      I thought about it some more, and realized a different issue. I charge a fee to get the software, and renewal fee for support and upgrades. That's essentially a subscription, right? The main difference is that once my customer has the software, even under the proprietary license, there's no time limit to their continued use of their old versions. So is EvanAnderson's point that only time-based subscription renewals are sustainable?
      - taneq 6y ago
        That's how I'd read it. For a while, computers and software were advancing so fast that anything over ~3 years old was obsolete and essentially useless anyway. The whole software industry is built around everyone throwing their computer in the bin every 3 years and starting over, buying all their software and hardware again. Somewhere in the mid 2000s we reached a point where computers were "good enough" and so that upgrade cycle started stretching longer and longer. I'm still using a computer I built 5 years ago and (barring the spinning hard disk which died last year) there's no reason I shouldn't keep using it for another 5, along with all the software I run on it. Hence the industry-wide switch to subscription models (and especially to cloud-based subscription models as they're essentially impossible to pirate). They had no other way to maintain their revenue streams.

dalke 6y ago

As a revenue-generating project I was able to share the burden by paying people to work on parts of it. I think that was a more effective way than waiting for others to join in. Note that my paying commercial customers are pharmaceutical companies, where employees must present their presentation materials to their legal department before they give a talk. In some cases I've heard that that extends to non-trivial code changes, which reduces the number of people who can help out. Even setting that aside, I've been working on FOSS project for 20+ years. Outside code contribution is rare, and substantial code contribution is like hen's teeth. Bear in mind that most people in my field are chemists-who-program, not software developers. One major exception is the RDKit, which was primarily funded by in-house R&D. Open sourcing it benefited the company because 1) it was primarily pre-competitive (the internal version included competitive features not in the FOSS version), 2) it lowers the price of commercial tools in the area, and 3) the differential cost of organizing the FOSS distribution was a net benefit. This is similar to other successful FOSS projects. However, this model implies that one must be an employee of a large company in order to work on FOSS projects. Which is not for everyone. Clearly small profitable proprietary development shops exist, so why not FOSS ones?

WJW 6y ago

In this viewpoint it should also become immediately clear why for-profit companies interact so poorly with FOSS communities: they are not interested in taking on unnecessary burdens and would prefer the original developer(s) contributing more free labour over having to pay for it.