11 ms·

Also note that we’ll cover the open source version of the Nginx, not its commercial version with additional features. It always kills me when very successful c

• SaveTheRbtz 6y ago
  The subject of monetizing opensource software is a tricky one. Some companies pursue the Open-Core principle, others monetize through the consulting services or cloud infrastructures. As for investing into opensource, Dropbox is trying to do that when possible, for example we (along with Automattic) did sponsor HTTP/2 development in Nginx.
  • gitgud 6y ago
    Personally I think that monetisation of open-source goes against the consumer of the OSS in practically all cases. - Open-Core::: Features are not added to core, as they want people to upgrade. - Consulting::: Ease of use is ignored, as if it's too easy people won't need consultants. - Sponsoring Goals::: Software is almost held at ransom, until goals are reached. The best way to help open-source software is to donate or contribute code... if you're trying to maximise profits, then just make it propitiatory
    • JoshTriplett 6y ago
      > - Consulting::: Ease of use is ignored, as if it's too easy people won't need consultants. Some problems can only be made so easy. Some problems require custom work. Sometimes you need paid support not because the product is low-quality but because you need to know that you can call someone at 3am because your service is down. There are lots of reasons to have consulting. > - Sponsoring Goals::: Software is almost held at ransom, until goals are reached. You're assuming the work would get done one way or another. Sometimes people have many other things they could be doing, and they need to justify spending more time on a project than they already do. Or sometimes, people have a fixed amount of time but they're happy to prioritize things people want and will pay for. (No argument about open-core; that definitely has problems.) Other great approaches include hosting the software as a service. Depending on the nature of a project, many people may want a service whose primary value proposition is "we'll host this for you so you don't have to maintain and administrate it".
      • mfontani 6y ago
        From my (admittedly) limited experience, paid support isn't consulting. Paid support surely is, as you say, about calling someone at 3am and having them look into an incident. From my experience, that's not about helping you get the most out of the product, and a hand in tailoring it to your needs - that's the consulting part, and is usually paid for separately (and at much higher rates).
    • PopeDotNinja 6y ago
      Do you have an example of sponsorship goals actively gating software development? I haven’t seen this one. “I’m not patching this zero day until I get to $1,000,000!”
      • mehrdada 6y ago
        Isn't that what RHEL is, in different words obviously.
        • PopeDotNinja 6y ago
          I suppose, but you know you’re what you’re buying when you sign up for RedHat. I was trying to imagine a scenario where free OSS project does that, like Kubernetes or React.
          • freedomben 6y ago
            Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but opinions are my own I totally disagree. Red Hat patches/maintains things regardless of whether people pay for it. Everything is always available open source. There are numerous derivatives of RHEL that get these for example. The money you pay for Red Hat stuff is for support. There are always free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer alternatives of red hat products.
            • mehrdada 6y ago
              It might very well be my misunderstanding, so I apologize, but doesn't RHEL get security updates that are unavailable to the "rest of us" for a bit?
    • StavrosK 6y ago
      You can just charge companies that make over a certain amount of annual revenue. Then OSS and small companies can use your software fine, but when they get big they have to pay you.
    • Bombthecat 6y ago
      Since when does blender 3d offer consulting?
• Angostura 6y ago
  In the case of buying from a small company this can make sense. If they fold it is good to know that the software will still be around.
• P4wl0w 6y ago
  Isn't this simple economic reasoning? If you buy something or worse you have to pay license fees on a regular base your earnings will be smaller. We live in a world that is driven by economic growth so the ultimate goal is to maximize profit. Of course this has a moral aspect to it as well and I see it but in this case I think it is not outraging enough to be something on the scale of a scandal. Many businesses use ideas or products for free to start a successful enterprise that earns a lot of money.
• badrabbit 6y ago
  You have a good problem. What sucks is when you sell a foss solution and they want paid support and SLA but the foss maker does not want free money in form of closing out issues/bugs/features they might anyways workon without getting paid for it.
• nrmitchi 6y ago
  I think a part of this is that engineers in particular have a preference to use software which can be treated as a transferable skill if/when they move on. They would rather use the OSS version of Nginx, of Envoy, because they know they will have access to it in the future. I think there is some aversion to becoming familiar with the features, functionality, and characteristics of a piece of software that your current employer is paying a non-trivial amount for, when you know that chances are your next employer will refuse. This may not be in the best interest of the current company, but it's a bias that I think impacts a lot of engineers.
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    It is a generation thing, back when I started the only free beer software was my own. Even for code listings I had at very least to buy the medium where they came.
  • FireBeyond 6y ago
    You can purchase the commercial version of Nginx and not use its specific paid feature subset. Alternatively, "I am familiar with this, and we can do x% of what we need with the OSS version, but we had to pay to get the last part."
    • nrmitchi 6y ago
      I see what you're saying, but this is basically suggesting that Dropbox should have made a donation to F5 (a public company with an $8B market cap). I think there is a valid point you're making for smaller companies that are providing both open-source and commercial versions of software, but I don't think Nginx is a great example of that.
• JoshTriplett 6y ago
  In a business context, I'd definitely consider paid support for an Open Source product. But I'm not interested in a proprietary version that I can't modify or get third-party support for or otherwise work with in a pinch; I'm certainly not going to make a business dependent on it. Push the proprietary version hard enough and I'll reconsider whether I even want to use the Open Source version, or if it might be on more tenuous ground that might get undermined in the future (pushing back on improvements to the Open Source version to maintain differentiation, or worse, deciding to switch to a non-FOSS license in the future).
  • nyanpasu64 6y ago
    > Push the proprietary version hard enough and I'll reconsider whether I even want to use the Open Source version Qt is pushing hard for commercial licensing (which I heard prevents you from using the open-source version), putting L/GPL FUD on their websites, and trying to track users of their installers more.
    • JoshTriplett 6y ago
      The model of "copyleft if your project is open, pay us if your project isn't open" is one where I have no problems or concerns, and will happily use the open version and recommend that people building something proprietary purchase a paid license. Nor will I typically worry about the motives or future of the project unless I have some other reason to. And the KDE Free Qt Foundation means I never have to worry about Qt going proprietary.
      • account42 6y ago
        Qt is more and more trying to get away with restricting the open source version as much as they can without triggering KDE's escape rights.
      • StavrosK 6y ago
        Does anyone know a good license for that? Maybe the Prosperity license? EDIT: I've just realized that I want a revenue-limited trial, rather than a time-limited one. I basically want the Prosperity license, but with the ability to say "you have to pay me if your company makes more than $100k in annual revenue". Is there a license like that? I've emailed the License Zero people, hopefully they'll do something for that.
• crawsome 6y ago
  Reminds me of private companies who profit from public resources. Like selling tap water in bottles.
  • adolph 6y ago
    Is tap water not sold for commercial use at market rates? The public resource steward is leaving money on the table if they aren't.
• Johnny555 6y ago
  I don't see what's surprising -- companies that earn money selling product can make even more money by cutting costs. And if OSS software gives them an equivalent (or even better) solution, why wouldn't they use it? For any sizable production deployment, the cost of nginx licenses could be applied to hire a number of engineers to help maintain the OSS software. I don't know what their volume licensing is like, but at $2500/server list price, costs add up quickly.
• PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  I’m increasingly concerned about being screwed by non-OSS vendors. Imagine a use case like Slack. Say you have an employee that goes to visit a family member in Venezuela & connects to the company Slack. Slack has been given a mandate to terminate accounts for people in Venezuela by the Trump administration, and now your key employee is cut off from communication, or perhaps your Slack account gets flagged.
  • C1sc0cat 6y ago
    HR/ The company should be providing advice on going to "at risk" areas. Also if your going to china take a disposable phone and a laptop that is clean ands can be wiped on return.
  • randompwd 6y ago
    That not a non-OSS issue. That's a SAAS issue. Even if your SAAS was OSS, they could still deny you access as you're inhibiting their server, not your own.
    • PopeDotNinja 6y ago
      Fair point.
• neximo64 6y ago
  Makes sense actually. Your motives are conflicted so you can't see it. Also if I can ask, is your product also closed source (in any nature at all), but made with open source components?
• ganfortran 6y ago
  This ain't mind-blowing by any means IMO. If the said company has unknown track record, then doing business with them is risky. What if the company goes out of business in near future? Or get acquired (actually I think A lot of infra companies's end goal is to get acquired)? What if they raise the price out of sudden? How extensible/customizable their solution is? The trust is the key here. If I am in the position to buy software from somewhere and cost isn't the primary concern, the money would goes to a known/stable figure in the industry.
• move-on-by 6y ago
  Just speculation, but there are motives to not use the closed source version beyond purely profits driven point of view. One of the prime benefits of OSS is that you have the power to change it whenever necessary. If something is breaking bad- you might not have the luxury of waiting on support to track down and fix your problem. If you don’t need the features of the paid version- then using the paid version is actually limiting your options.
• apexalpha 6y ago
  In my company thousands of CentOS servers were running, we still had the support license though.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Bombthecat 6y ago
  In germany its the opposite, no free software in production! Only software with enterprise support! We Germans are very risk adverse (i hate that sometimes)
  • organsnyder 6y ago
    That's true in many US companies as well. People like having a vendor they can fire when things go awry, rather than they themselves getting fired.
• rebelnz 6y ago
  Exactly my thoughts when I read the article - a hugely successful company not contributing to an open source project which enabled them to succeed in the first place ...
  • dmicher 6y ago
    There are different paths companies take. Some buy and it really works for them and their business, since overhead is small and everything just works. The other set of companies have more sophisticated requirements: when they want to have full control on what is going on, understand what the code is doing to better optimize everything else around it, faster shipping cycles and being able to implement what you want with out waiting for the next shipping cycle with commercial software, community and knowledge base around it etc.
    • rogerdonut 6y ago
      > when they want to have full control on what is going on, understand what the code is doing to better optimize everything else around it, faster shipping cycles and being able to implement what you want with out waiting for the next shipping cycle with commercial software, community and knowledge base around it etc. I'm a bit confused by this - I work for HAProxy Technologies and we do have an enterprise product. Many of our customers contribute code directly into the community and we backport those features into the latest enterprise stable version. This means they do not have to wait until the next shipping cycle to take advantage of a new feature. There's also a large community & knowledge base around HAProxy. Your reasoning may be right when dealing with "closed source enterprise software" but it doesn't line up when we start talking about open source/open core.
      • dmicher 6y ago
        Shipping cycle is one of the reasons mentioned. And as you can imaging, unfortunately, contributing to Nginx open source is not an easy thing (but they have a great product for sure). If HAProxy is different in terms of contributions - it is great!
    • 6y ago
• mehrdada 6y ago
  Why does it blow your mind? Various obvious and sane reasons for this, including cost. I bet many of those companies you have in mind “buy” Windows and macOS, and if they are sufficiently big, most certainly buy Oracle or SAP for their corporate operations, finances, and accounting. It’s usually only the production side of sufficiently large internet-scale companies that is biased towards building. Most of the time you can easily explain it with “it’s cheaper than the contract with supplier”. Often, it is strategic ownership over your fate and not being locked into the vendor that comes into play as well. The vendor positioning in the market and its leverage may also change over time and pose a risk down the road (getting acquired, changing focus, abandoning the product, going out of business, etc.) Many times it is just that their problem is so unique to their scale that the generic solution does not technically work for them or the pricing model is not designed to be a fit. In the particular case of nginx, I can tell you their reputation is not great in adapting to the users’ needs.
  • rebelnz 6y ago
    I think the point was a financially successful company not contributing to an open source project even after making a bunch of money just seems un-ethical? Maybe I'm old-school but I still think we should be supporting each other in this type of situation especially if one of us strikes it big? Sure - move away from Nginx but maybe throw some $ their way for the service they provided even if you don't legally have to ...
    • mehrdada 6y ago
      I did not infer that from the OP’s comment, but in any case, I don’t know the specifics of their arrangement or whether they had been a commercial customer or not. Last time I checked Nginx had been doing fine selling itself for half a billion. But more abstractly, I don’t actually agree with that sentiment. I see more of a responsibility to give back in the form of patches and collaboration than throwing $ at the problem. I see the nginx approach of open source simply as a business tactic no different from Windows Home/Pro customer segmentation except Home is free for tactical reasons to kill off other competition. It is a calculated business move; if your business model sucks-—which it obviously did not in nginx case—-does not imply others are acting less than ethically or they should pay you out of pity. (That said it might be strategically important for them to keep your head above water and survive for their own benefit as their vendor, but that’d be a different angle.) I suppose the difference between free software vs open source is also relevant to this discussion, and I could relate to your sentiment when facing the former much more than the latter.
• holografix 6y ago
  This also rubbed me the wrong way. As an individual I think that shows selfish and opportunistic behaviour and it raises a red flag about that organisation in my mind. However, for profit companies are not here to do what’s “correct” they’re here to make money for its investors. If I had decision making abilities at Nginx I’d be conducting a comprehensive review of the free OSS offering and redacting the features and overall value with extreme prejudice. Dropbox never paid because it COULD not pay. If you have an enterprise, paid version of your OSS product it has to be impossible for an enterprise to use it for free.
  • dwaltrip 6y ago
    > However, for profit companies are not here to do what’s “correct” they’re here to make money for its investors. While partially true, this is overly reductive. Companies can and often do take actions that serve goals beyond "increase upcoming quarterly profits".
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > If you have an enterprise, paid version of your OSS product it has to be impossible for an enterprise to use it for free. Why? Most enterprises, especially ones that aren't tech firms, are going to shell out for enterprise support even if there are no additional features. Crippling the community version doesn't necessarily help enterprise sales, it can reduce overall mindshare reducing enterprise traction or, worse yet, mean that a third-party downstream edition with richer open-source features becomes dominant and it's creator gets “your” enterprise support contracts.
    • chii 6y ago
      > shell out for enterprise support even if there are no additional features. i don't feel this to be true. Also, an enterprise that's large would want some features that are irrelevant to a small shop. For example, single-sign-on integration with various providers.
      • aliswe 6y ago
• tinganho 6y ago
  I fully agree. One other good point with paid software is that is more long term. It will be supported as long as there is money involved. Just look at the JS ecosystem. Everything is for free. But also shitloads of crap. A lot of libraries left unmaintained.
• edw 6y ago
  It's not necessarily about money. An engineer can burn through tens of thousands of dollars per month in cloud spend because they have access to the AWS [or] GCP console, but that same engineer may not have the first idea about how to get the CFO's sign-off to purchase a license that will facilitate a halving of that spend. And that same CFO can institute a policy against using credit cards for recurring payments that prevent that engineer from expensing the purchase through a corporate card. And the software company may not offer a bill-via-invoice option — or they may only offer it for amounts greater than the amount the engineer wants to spend. So much of what happens in sufficiently large organizations has nothing to do with profit maximization. Think confederacy of dunces, not a conspiracy of greedy evil geniuses.
• organsnyder 6y ago
  Not sure what nginx is like, but in my experience, the developer/operator experience of commercial software tends to be subpar. For instance, when I worked at a shop that used a ton of Red Hat software (millions of $$ per year in licensing), the commercially-supported versions often were a pain, with requirements like phone-home (that didn't play well with the mandatory corporate proxy), documentation behind a paywall and hard to discover (yes, we had login accounts, but Google couldn't index it), and other disadvantages. The OSS equivalents were easier to access, had better (or at least better-indexed) documentation, and we didn't need to worry about per-seat licensing (again, we were paying for it, but we still had to track it). If you're going to sell software that has an OSS variant, make sure the commercial experience actually outshines the free one.
  • freedomben 6y ago
    I agree, we (at Red Hat) try so hard to make awesome documentation but then put it in hard-to-reach places. I really wish we didn't do that. I'd like to see us publish it all widely. That said you'd be amazed at how much of man pages is written by Red Hat but isn't attributed, so nearly everybody on every distro benefits from our documentation without realizing it.
• nickdothutton 6y ago
  Business is motivated to avoid anything which is a tax. Said another way, they are motivated to avoid or escape from anything that grows in line with earnings. If their infrastructure grows, their bill from nginx will grow, modulo the skills and efficiency of their infrastructure teams and the speed of whatever servers they are buying.