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My PoV: a bunch of startups chose to do open source because it’s good PR and marketing. Then it proved to be bad for their business model so they moved to somet

by jchw 6y ago

My PoV: a bunch of startups chose to do open source because it’s good PR and marketing. Then it proved to be bad for their business model so they moved to something much closer to shared source. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything immoral or shameful about selling proprietary software or shared source or whatever. However, SSPL and TSL and friends are just not open source licenses. They’re more restrictive than AGPL. They are designed to protect a business model, not your rights as an end user. So it irks me that the only perspective I see reliably is that Amazon is screwing everyone and not how startups are willing to take advantage of the good will and marketing bonus and then switch it up when they realize it can’t be reconciled with their business model. Continuing to call it “open source” is just insult to injury, imo.

pjmlp 6y ago
Basically shareware is back, they just keep calling FOSS.
api 6y ago
> not your rights as an end user. I'd love to have a license that grants FOSS rights to people but not to corporations. There are end users and then there are corporations monetizing FOSS and giving nothing back. On top of that the monetization is via SaaS which is a more closed computing model than commercial software. With SaaS you don't even have the data and everything you do is subject to total surveillance.
- liveoneggs 6y ago
  creative commons has many such licenses but then it's not Open Source
- motives 6y ago
  The point about not giving back is not valid in the case of AWS which has upstreamed many of its changes to elasticsearch owned repos under the onerous elasticsearch CLA. This is also true of many FOSS projects which AWS, Microsoft, Google et al contribute to under the most liberal license conditions(such as MIT licensing which you'll find in 95% of Microsofts contributions for example). Furthermore, I do not believe FOSS should concern itself with who is using the codebase, as fully open source software is about opening the code indiscriminately, whether individual dev or large corporation. As soon as you begin to discriminate between small and large corporation you are no longer truly free (and fwiw elasticsearch itself is a large corporation that has arguably exploited the good will of individual dev PRs with relicensing under a non-FOSS license).
judge2020 6y ago
Shouting 'FOSS' is also a great way to acquire talent.
majormajor 6y ago
I think you're painting it as more cynical and malicious than it was. There was probably too much naivety, but "open source your software and charge for support and operations" was promoted pretty heavily for a while not just by these companies, but by people who wanted to enjoy those projects being open source. And then it got torpedoed...
mrkurt 6y ago
"Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous power. It wasn't just a series of bad choices by the startups that got them here, it was concentration of an emerging market over 10-15 years. Amazon dominates conversations because they extract the most value from open source projects. They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason. Startups OSS their work because it helps them get users and figure out what to build. Amazon has the benefit of watching which projects become most viable (frequently because the startup threatens their revenue somehow) and packaging them up as their own services. I want to live in a world where smaller startups _can_ OSS their work and also monetize it. And I'd like them to be able to do it without raising $100mm in VC.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >"Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous power this goes to the question of history, are things structurally so determined that if you remove someone or something from history another would rise to take their place. If Amazon had not existed to take advantage of open source like this would someone arise to do it? I have to think yes, it would be bound to happen eventually, it's a weakness in the model and would be exploited by someone, and when it was exploited people would respond by doing sort of like what is happening now. If Amazon was not here, someone would be making the history of open source exploitation rhyme.
- 015a 6y ago
  > They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason. They make more money selling EC2, with this software installed on top of it. If Amazon did not sell RDS, their customers would buy EC2 instances and install it on there. Which of these realities would you prefer: 1. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have a cloud offering, which runs on metal they maintain. Naturally, the reliability and performance is worse. Amazon loses some money. Customers pay more for a worse product. 2. "Open source has failed, there's no way to monetize it", so we get DynamoDB and Aurora and S3. Amazon wins, Customers (mostly) win (unless Amazon takes the gun they've now loaded and decides to point it at them) 3. "Its open source, but you still have to buy it" lol ok, all the negatives of closed source with few of the positives of open source. No one wants the source code so they can read it and hack on it, they want it only as a signal for their ability to move hosting providers should they need to, or self-host. Source code usually lasts longer than the people who wrote it. 4. "We'll sell support packages" so now your revenue stream isn't aligned with customer success, because you're financially incentivized to build a product which needs support. Nope. 5. AWS does not have RDS, but does have EC2. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have their own "cloud" offerings, which are really just re-vendored EC2. They tack on a 30% upcharge so they can survive and develop the product. Well, that's what both ES and Mongo do, today. AWS loves this. They make the same amount of money from selling cheaper metal without all the expensive upkeep of RDS. Its the customers who hurt, not Amazon. You miss out on integration points in the cloud platform. You miss out on centralized IAM. You pay more for a worse product. People keep acting like AWS is a big bully who got big for no reason, it doesn't make sense, the cloud is a monopoly and AWS is strong-arming other companies to get bigger. Maybe to some small degree, but by far the reason why AWS is big is because They Build What Customers Want. End of story. There's no philosophical debate between AWS Product Development and their Customers concerning whether they should build an open source ES. There's just "Jeeze, Elastic has been really screwing us over lately, is there anything you can d--" "Say no more, we've got you, by the way your two hundred thousand dollar bill is due." "Wow, thanks Amazon, no problem we'll pay that right away." The real thing that's killing these database companies is that databases are a dime-a-dozen. You pick one, who cares which one it is. There's some minutia here and there, do you want SQL, NoSQL, time series, ok you get past that and the rest falls into place. I've sat in the decision making room on this for two or three companies. No one analyzes what the database can do. The discussions surround "where are we hosting it". What options does Azure have, AWS, oh that company has their own hosting platform, etc etc. HackerNews makes a big fuss about how MongoDB has no transactions; I've literally NEVER heard this brought up once as a negative against the product (though, sure, in some very specific industries or use-cases it matters). Version 4.whatever adds a new query operator; who gives a fuck, 99% of database usage is "write thing, read thing back, query for things in a way that SQL could do in 1992, update thing, delete thing." Databases are boring, and the success of the companies who tried to build billion dollar businesses on top of one (Oracle as well) reflects how boring the software actually is.

by jchw 6y ago

pjmlp 6y ago

Basically shareware is back, they just keep calling FOSS.

api 6y ago

> not your rights as an end user. I'd love to have a license that grants FOSS rights to people but not to corporations. There are end users and then there are corporations monetizing FOSS and giving nothing back. On top of that the monetization is via SaaS which is a more closed computing model than commercial software. With SaaS you don't even have the data and everything you do is subject to total surveillance.

liveoneggs 6y ago
creative commons has many such licenses but then it's not Open Source
motives 6y ago
The point about not giving back is not valid in the case of AWS which has upstreamed many of its changes to elasticsearch owned repos under the onerous elasticsearch CLA. This is also true of many FOSS projects which AWS, Microsoft, Google et al contribute to under the most liberal license conditions(such as MIT licensing which you'll find in 95% of Microsofts contributions for example). Furthermore, I do not believe FOSS should concern itself with who is using the codebase, as fully open source software is about opening the code indiscriminately, whether individual dev or large corporation. As soon as you begin to discriminate between small and large corporation you are no longer truly free (and fwiw elasticsearch itself is a large corporation that has arguably exploited the good will of individual dev PRs with relicensing under a non-FOSS license).

judge2020 6y ago

Shouting 'FOSS' is also a great way to acquire talent.

majormajor 6y ago

I think you're painting it as more cynical and malicious than it was. There was probably too much naivety, but "open source your software and charge for support and operations" was promoted pretty heavily for a while not just by these companies, but by people who wanted to enjoy those projects being open source. And then it got torpedoed...

mrkurt 6y ago

"Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous power. It wasn't just a series of bad choices by the startups that got them here, it was concentration of an emerging market over 10-15 years. Amazon dominates conversations because they extract the most value from open source projects. They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason. Startups OSS their work because it helps them get users and figure out what to build. Amazon has the benefit of watching which projects become most viable (frequently because the startup threatens their revenue somehow) and packaging them up as their own services. I want to live in a world where smaller startups _can_ OSS their work and also monetize it. And I'd like them to be able to do it without raising $100mm in VC.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>"Bad for their business model" because Amazon has tremendous power this goes to the question of history, are things structurally so determined that if you remove someone or something from history another would rise to take their place. If Amazon had not existed to take advantage of open source like this would someone arise to do it? I have to think yes, it would be bound to happen eventually, it's a weakness in the model and would be exploited by someone, and when it was exploited people would respond by doing sort of like what is happening now. If Amazon was not here, someone would be making the history of open source exploitation rhyme.
015a 6y ago
> They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason. They make more money selling EC2, with this software installed on top of it. If Amazon did not sell RDS, their customers would buy EC2 instances and install it on there. Which of these realities would you prefer: 1. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have a cloud offering, which runs on metal they maintain. Naturally, the reliability and performance is worse. Amazon loses some money. Customers pay more for a worse product. 2. "Open source has failed, there's no way to monetize it", so we get DynamoDB and Aurora and S3. Amazon wins, Customers (mostly) win (unless Amazon takes the gun they've now loaded and decides to point it at them) 3. "Its open source, but you still have to buy it" lol ok, all the negatives of closed source with few of the positives of open source. No one wants the source code so they can read it and hack on it, they want it only as a signal for their ability to move hosting providers should they need to, or self-host. Source code usually lasts longer than the people who wrote it. 4. "We'll sell support packages" so now your revenue stream isn't aligned with customer success, because you're financially incentivized to build a product which needs support. Nope. 5. AWS does not have RDS, but does have EC2. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have their own "cloud" offerings, which are really just re-vendored EC2. They tack on a 30% upcharge so they can survive and develop the product. Well, that's what both ES and Mongo do, today. AWS loves this. They make the same amount of money from selling cheaper metal without all the expensive upkeep of RDS. Its the customers who hurt, not Amazon. You miss out on integration points in the cloud platform. You miss out on centralized IAM. You pay more for a worse product. People keep acting like AWS is a big bully who got big for no reason, it doesn't make sense, the cloud is a monopoly and AWS is strong-arming other companies to get bigger. Maybe to some small degree, but by far the reason why AWS is big is because They Build What Customers Want. End of story. There's no philosophical debate between AWS Product Development and their Customers concerning whether they should build an open source ES. There's just "Jeeze, Elastic has been really screwing us over lately, is there anything you can d--" "Say no more, we've got you, by the way your two hundred thousand dollar bill is due." "Wow, thanks Amazon, no problem we'll pay that right away." The real thing that's killing these database companies is that databases are a dime-a-dozen. You pick one, who cares which one it is. There's some minutia here and there, do you want SQL, NoSQL, time series, ok you get past that and the rest falls into place. I've sat in the decision making room on this for two or three companies. No one analyzes what the database can do. The discussions surround "where are we hosting it". What options does Azure have, AWS, oh that company has their own hosting platform, etc etc. HackerNews makes a big fuss about how MongoDB has no transactions; I've literally NEVER heard this brought up once as a negative against the product (though, sure, in some very specific industries or use-cases it matters). Version 4.whatever adds a new query operator; who gives a fuck, 99% of database usage is "write thing, read thing back, query for things in a way that SQL could do in 1992, update thing, delete thing." Databases are boring, and the success of the companies who tried to build billion dollar businesses on top of one (Oracle as well) reflects how boring the software actually is.