11 ms·

Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations

196 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

ngc248 6y ago
When did open source become a business model? A lot of newer developers confusing open source saying companies should not be using code for free etc. If that is the case dont open source it or use a dual licensing mechanism.
outsomnia 6y ago
> Maybe blindly adopting permissive open source licenses to invite more corporate ownership isn't the right answer. What's the question exactly? Sustainable FOSS development? Earning nothing while working on a FOSS project that has no way to ever make a developer salary because it can't be used by the people with the money, due to the copyleft license does not seem to be the "right answer" either.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  It seems like in some sense, there's no right answer. The hard thing here is truly free / open source software relies on generosity. And the more generosity, the more sustainable it is (on behalf of the developer(s), the corporations using it, etc.). Generosity is not a winning strategy in corporate board rooms, though.
  - Jeff_Brown 6y ago
    Sometimes generosity isn't needed. If a project (including the language it's written in) is simple* enough, casual users can add features they want for themselves. But for complex projects those barriers will probably always be quite high. * "Simple" is a slippery concept. I find hacking Haskell easier than hacking Python, because the type signatures and other features make it much easier to see what's going on with a minimum of investigative work. But difficulty is a big part of Haskell's reputation, and ease a big part of Python's.
  - coldpie 6y ago
    > The hard thing here is truly free / open source software relies on generosity. (I make a living working on an open source project.) I don't agree. The view of the value of software is just different. The software itself is valueless. This is true of all software: bits are free to copy. What is valuable is the work put into making it. In other words, you get paid for making something, not for having made something. If a company wants some feature implemented in some piece of OSS, they can go find a dev to pay to do it, and contribute it back to the world. There's no generosity there, it's just an accurate reflection of where value is actually generated in the software world, instead of the broken view that proprietary software tries to force. Where it starts to get tricky is kind of a tragedy of the commons situation: if you wait long enough, then maybe someone else will pay to implement the feature, but if everyone does this, then the feature will never exist.
    - jsdwarf 6y ago
      Agree. In the end commercial and open source software aren't that different: the more dollars you put into it, the more say you have on the roadmap.
- tw04 6y ago
  I'd argue short term there is no good answer. Long term I think the story changes quickly. I still can't shake the idea that we as a human race are going to have to adopt a universal basic income of some sort. As we automate more and more things we're eventually going to get to the point that there are not enough jobs for humans to do unless we intentionally stop automating some industries. Assuming we can find a way to get to a UBI, programming becomes just another art. If you already have your basic needs met (housing/food/education/transportation) and have the choice to either pursue an art, or pursue a career making more money, people will have options. I have no doubt there are a lot of people that will value the freedom to decide what they want to do every day of their life over making more money in the rat race, and some of them will spend that time programming/donating their time to FOSS projects. Between now and then, your guess is as good as mine.
- sidlls 6y ago
  I’m not sure permitting enterprises to pick and choose which developers on an open source project get paid (as by hiring them or funding a salaried foundation staff) is a good answer to this problem. In fact I’m pretty sure it has contributed to the rise of the celebrity/“influencer” dev who uses open source as a vehicle for self promotion rather than a means to improve software.
  - serial_dev 6y ago
    I don't see anything bad with the "celebrity" devs using open-source for their own "selfish" purposes. For the most part they do improve software, and help coding get more popular. Their work can help those devs go independent in some shape or form (or the least, it helps them get their next job more easily or put them in a stronger negotiating position). The fact that they do a far bit of self-promotion should not be hold against them, in the end we are all working to achieve something in life, and for some, a necessary ingredient is some self-promotion through open-source.
    - sidlls 6y ago
      I’m gonna say something controversial: the vast, vast majority of open source software is garbage. Partly that is due to the rise of developers just writing slop to promote themselves with. The existence of “Celebrity” devs isn’t necessarily a problem, but the culture that has evolved over the last few years seems more focused on the celebrity part than the dev part.
jka 6y ago
Open source governance seems to be a key question here; in other words, how does a corporation communicate with their community of customers and users, and how are decisions about the software made as a result of those discussions?
williesleg 6y ago
H1B cracks.
EdwinLarkin 6y ago
The only reason corporate embraced open source is that it saw it as a way to drive the small and medium sized businesses out of the market. Why pay for an editor when the good guy Microsoft gives it to you for free? People have been delusional about FOSS for way too long.
- antixuser 6y ago
  @EdwinLarkin: "The only reason corporate embraced open source is that it saw it as a way to drive the small and medium sized businesses out of the market. Why pay for an editor when the good guy Microsoft gives it to you for free? People have been delusional about FOSS for way too long." Is that you billg ;] https://www.debian.org/ https://www.debian.org/ https://getfedora.org/ https://getfedora.org/ https://antixlinux.com/ https://antixlinux.com/ .. systemD free :]
- indymike 6y ago
  This isn't what happened at all. No one went "Mwah-ha-ha-ha let's put it to the small businesses." What happened is free and pretty good beat more expensive. Microsoft has lost a huge amount of server license revenue to open source. The open source I've written - be it a program or a patch was always open sourced because I wanted to make my program available to others because I thought it might be useful.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
I think one conclusion is that venture capital backed open source companies are a oxymoron. Open source will never be able to give the huge returns that VC firms expect. However, open source can provide the basis for what is often derided as a “lifestyle business” that provides a sometimes very good income to a small group of people that are passionate about a project. SQLite comes to mind as an example. Elastic is definitely bringing enough revenue for the “lifestyle” business without changing their license, however it is not enough for VC. Be very wary of open source backed by VC.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Red Hat got VC money and went public working on open source software. Perhaps the exception that proves the rule of the difficulty, but not an oxymoron.
  - zokier 6y ago
    Red Hat IPOed over 20 years ago in the middle of one of the most spectacular bubbles we've seen. The world is very different now. On top of that, yes I'd argue Red Hat is an outlier and exception whose success is as much result of good luck and timing than anything else.
    - vlovich123 6y ago
      MongoDb then?
tyingq 6y ago
The trend where there's a split offering of a community open source product coupled with non-open source premium offerings is sometimes a crack as well. Especially when relatively essential features aren't in the community editions.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  MySQL/MariaDB split went fine. People will build or fork the software they need.
- jsdwarf 6y ago
  GitLab comes to my mind, where an issue can either be open or closed in the community edition. You literally have to pay for "work in progress".
relaunched 6y ago
I see FOSS as more of a marketing tool for profit-motivated entities / founders. It's the modern, marketing equivalent of a limited, free trial for software. But, ultimately, if your company is owned by shareholders, their motives are your motivations. When the money matters more, this is what you get. FOSS is all about idealism. It's hard to retain your idealism when someone is waiving $1+ billion dollars in your face with one hand and holding a loaded gun to your head with the other.
- nytgop77 6y ago
  Not only idealism. There is plenty of "I scratch my itch" kind of thing. (sharing can be done for self markeeting purposes, bragging rights)
linuxftw 6y ago
I think the problem boils down to 'product' vs 'project.' Elastic search is very much a product, it's owned by a company, not a foundation. FOSS developers should contribute to projects and not products. Non-copyleft licenses seem to just be code for corporations to build upon, providing them free labor while getting little in return. At least with the GPL, you are getting a promise that they will make available their sources. Consider carefully your expectations when you license your software. An example where a project/product hybrid somewhat works is web browsers. Generally speaking, there are several competitors trying to achieve something similar, and there are some attempts (however nebulous) to create standards bodies. The Elastic Search community could have done something similar and formed a standards body around some sort of specification.
markbnj 6y ago
> First, how can we make sure developers who build open source software are compensated for their work in a just way? Honest question: isn't this a fundamental contradiction? If you are building a thing that by definition is given freely to anyone who wants to use it, how does compensation for that work become part of the formula? You can't be monetarily compensated for it, because you chose to give it away. There are other forms of compensation but that seems clearly not what we're talking about here. The author goes on to ask how you can build a business around open source? But isn't the answer that you can't? If its really open source then the software itself is not a business. That, to me, seems consistent with the original idea of open source: that it was the cool things you could build with code, not the code itself, that had value. None of the iconic success stories in tech over the last decade have sold code, have they? They've built things on FOSS code that never existed before, and most of them have contributed a lot of FOSS code back. But they haven't sold databases, reverse proxies, and key/value stores, right? I've paid six-figure annual licenses to Oracle. Is that the world we're trying to preserve here?
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  I think the point is, how can we make it so the companies that build profitable products using open source code can support the developers who build those open source libraries? There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent example) supported by a team of developers in the single digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking in millions if not billions in annual revenue. Finding ways to give back and keep the developers motivated is important in the long term, unless you plan on rewriting all the software you depend on. Currently the two sustainable answers for that are: 1. Hope some company is generous in hiring said OSS developer and paying them a salary to continue working on that OSS work (ideally without too much pressure to modify it for that one company's use case). 2. Make that developer spend a lot of time doing marketing to generate donations/sponsorships to a level where the developer can pay for things like food, shelter, and insurance.
  - the_other 6y ago
    Playing devil's advocate here (because I have weakly held opinions and no good answers of my own): > There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent example) supported by a team of developers in the single digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking in millions if not billions in annual revenue. But they gave it away for free. That would be the same whether there were big, small or zero companies using the software. I think probably the problem is framed wrong: - maybe giving software away free was a bad idea (I don't believe this; just putting it on the table for conversation) - maybe those giving away their software free should make better calls _for themselves_ about how they spend their time - maybe use different licensing - stop calling it free; instead call it "free a the point of consumption" and consciously build a model to support that at the outset (this is my current personal opinion, but I grew up in the Uk when it had a functional NHS so I'm biassed) - dig deep on what both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" mean to you and how they relate and what you want to do about that Open source came out of a joyous utopianism that hasn't been backed up the wider societal changes needed to sustain it. This is understandable because that work is ridiculously hard (and I'm aware some people _are_ trying to make those changes. I just day-dream about it). Currently, most of the world works on capitalism, for better or worse. I'm not trying to defend or attack capitalism here, but when you work in a capitalist system and _all_ your other interests and life support systems use capitalism, you have to factor that into your thinking. Open source makes more sense in a post-scaricity society and we're not there yet. FOSS might even help us get there, and the problems we're seeing in the past 3-4 years might be the signs of things changing. I know this message sounds like victim blaming, and that's a real problem in some situations, but I don't think this is the situation here. Everyone working in tech is at a higher than average level of privilege than their immediate peers; working in FOSS is a choice you make from that position of privilege.
krspykrm 6y ago
Corporate sponsorship of open source is entirely dependent on top talent caring about open source and thus being more willing to tolerate working for EvilMegacorp if major pieces of the infrastructure they work on are open. When top talent just accepts the big money contract regardless, corporations see little incentive to sponsor open source. Software development is the only industry that has large portions of infrastructure free and open for anyone to use, and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a generation or so ago. It's up to us to carry that torch, or we will become like every other industry.
- ericb 6y ago
  > and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a generation or so ago. Is it? I think it has more to do with companies realizing that [1]commoditizing their complements is a sound strategy, and [2] using open source as a growth strategy. When you get to the "harvesting" stage or the "entrenched monopoly stage", the FOSS license doesn't make sense if you were using it merely as a growth strategy. [1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement [2] https://www.gwern.net/Complement#open-source-as-a-strategic-weapon https://www.gwern.net/Complement#open-source-as-a-strategic-...
  - sounds 6y ago
    Many of the companies that appear to be "harvesting" their entrenched customers have not switched away from a FOSS license. Examples: • Apple • Amazon • Facebook • Google • Microsoft • Netflix • Red Hat
    - ericb 6y ago
      The open source from your list largely falls under #1. They didn't open source their primary product, but rather their complements. That is sustainable, whereas #2 is not when a permissive license is involved. Strategy #1 is self-interested and doesn't require any real zealotry and survives the harvesting stage just fine. Open sourcing your core product with a permissive license is generally going to be at odds with business goals at some point, and if you're in business, often the thing to give is the license.
nimbius 6y ago
A rather alarmist preface frankly. >redhat killed cantos Primarily a profit driven motive. Open source doesn't always mean free as in beer. >elastic killed elasticsearch For companies like amazon who are fundamentally incompatibl with truly open source yes, this is a killing blow. For everyone else its just a change in ToS. In 2021 what's changing is many companies and devs are getting rightly upset about multinationals ripping off their code without so much as an attribution. These companies are saying that not only is your code not worth money, it isn't even worth the exposure on your resume.
Spooky23 6y ago
The premise is wrong. The consolidation of computing to a few mega platforms or companies is the big issue open source is where you are seeing the symptoms. Elastic is just another app/database platform. Open source is a side issue with Amazon... the real problem is that ultimately, their ability to exist as a platform is ultimately in the hands of a few companies.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  I disagree. Not to say that the consolidation is a good thing, but it's not the core problem. If I spend a year of my life and savings to write a new database, how do I make money? Can I make money and open source my work? How? There isn't an easy answer. Open Source isn't always the right answer, and a whole lot of naive software developers are learning this the hard way.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    That's always been a challenge; usually the model is to sell features or certification if you go open source. Alot of people buy RHEL for FIPS 140-2 validation, for example. Even in closed source, some of these business models are dumb with or without open source being in the mix. Think about companies like Citrix or VMWare who are essentially selling their customer book to Microsoft and to a lesser extent Amazon for virtual desktops, and to Microsoft, Amazon and Google in the server space. ISVs used to compete with each other to sell their stuff to run customer desktops or datacenters. There was no aggregation of their runtimes Now for most of the market they are competing with each other to rent their software on big platforms, which may opt to strangle them at any time. On the open source side, people who need FIPS still buy RHEL. Frugal people who need FIPS buy Oracle. RHEL is still open source, and the cheapskates who rely on CentOS can still do so, they just don't get to ride on RHEL's engineering work backporting new fixes to old software. Elastic never had a sticky business model.
Railsify 6y ago
When I see articles like this I think back to Neo4j, when we adopted the product the enterprise features were open source, which turned out to be a long con bait and switch, enterprise features are now closed. We rewrote our app using another DB and are closely watching more recent entries into the GraphDB space such as Agensgraph ( a new apache project) built atop postgres.
WaitWaitWha 6y ago
meh. There is nothing new under the sun. There have been several identical losses in FOSS. The bigger they are the better when this happens because there is enough volume and momentum to force a new FOSS branch. If it is a "tiny" FOSS piece, there are not enough champions to fight. > So AWS was directly competing with Elastic, but *not taking the same responsibility for the open source project or investing in it as heavily as Elastic was*. Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes. They chose to branch, and contribute it back. Several of the fixes and improvements are from AWS. Did the author want an IBM/CentOS takeover? Or, deny AWS to use Elastic but pretend to be FOSS?
- aynyc 6y ago
  > Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes. I don't understand this part. AWS doesn't have anything internally that would compete against ELK. Unless you are taking about AWS buying ELK flat out. But then Azure and GCP can fork ELK and keep selling the service. Is my assumption incorrect?
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    Yes: AWS has launched many "native" offerings to compete with the market's open source product, only to give in to demand and launch a managed version of the open source product (CloudSearch/ElasticSearch, ECS/Kubernetes, SQS/ActiveMQ, DynamoDB/MongoDB, etc)
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Before a couple years ago (when elastic started digging deeper into the paid addon realm), I don't think they could've forked and been able to keep enough compatibility / community around their fork to make it as useful and compatible with everything Elasticsearch did. But today, I think they have a 50/50 shot of the Amazon-forked ES version becoming the de-facto standard, and Elastic's fading into obscurity.
Proven 6y ago
> One way is to become more restrictive in licensing, choosing only copyleft licenses that were originally created to offer more protections to individuals than corporations. I would disagree with how you made that characterization. Licenses apply equally to everyone, and corporations are made of individuals. If you meant end users vs. service providers, that's what Elastic did and to end users their new license looks more permissive than GPL 3.0. Yes it does have "a major restriction", but it doesn't force individual users and even those who redistribute Elastic software to release their modifications, whereas GPL 3.0 would have that effect. To me - a user - the new Elasticsearch license is more permissive (because before some Elasticsearch add-ons were restricted) and I can live with that. Amazon - thanks to a more permissive license that Elasticsearch used to release under - can still do their thing. Good luck to them. If that license wasn't permissive they wouldn't be able to do this. And the Fedora community and other busybodies ... I don't care what they say :-)
stereolambda 6y ago
> But maybe they're onto something. Maybe blindly adopting permissive open source licenses to invite more corporate ownership isn't the right answer. I do think this is the answer. Try to use LGPL, GPL or AGPL as appropriate. I also agree with some people that there's an issue with framing the question as defending the right of developers to get paid for open source. This was never much of a thing by default. People have been trying to build FOSS companies, with varying success. But I would guess most end user-facing things, like GNU, Linux, VLC etc. were built by academics or hobbyists, or foundations. Commercial FOSS tries to sell infrastructure to enterprises. It's not things you and I would use if we weren't IT professionals. (Linux is a peculiar beast here. The kernel is largely developed by big corps, but playing by the copyleft rules, because it's such a fundamental infrastructure. Big distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are the middle ground where they can be freely used by individual people, but are a side effect of Canonical and Red Hat's development processes.) The correct framing of FOSS is benefit of the users and the society at large. We use .?GPL to ensure that the software that people use is inspectable, and modifiable if the vendor does something bad. Thus we serve people's, and our own, interests in the long term. We reduce the area where companies can damage the public for profit, when hiding behind closed source, unchangeable dark patterns, "hai we ban you there is no appeals" etc. etc. That the essential software can be had free of charge in practice is also a nice thing... to some extent. The answer to the problem of compensating the developers was never much directly solved by FOSS. (Of course, you can try to use it to also get hired, to sell hosting or support.) This is a social/political/economic problem. Trying to solve it with licensing (a.k.a. copyright law hacking) is and understandable effort, but very likely a dead end. EDIT: I see under the sibling comments that the OP is more specifically concerned about the fundamental and "invisible" projects like sudo. I can't add much on that, but I do think there's value in getting (some) signaling and (some) bargaining power by choosing copyleft. Especially if there would be solidarity and consensus among developers in doing this.
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
  You are completely right. But the answer to this is always the same: off-topic Stallman ad hominem > Linux is a peculiar beast here. The kernel is largely developed by big corps, but playing by the copyleft rules, because it's such a fundamental infrastructure. Not quite. linux is the success of the past! but already corrupted by "tainted" kernel... linux adopted GPL, which was *unthinkable* by corporate back then. But because devs didn't cave in to "permissive license fallacy", they had to eat it up. The thing is, GPL is severely outdated. It does nothing to force Google, Amazon to open source their code that they profit from because of an OSS base work. GPL, with tainted kernel, merely force them to open source irrelevant parts of Android. The drivers and spyware-DRM can all remain proprietary. And does *absolutely nothing* to their bread and butter, which is hosted services on top of OSS software. until we stick to GPLv3 like linux stuck with GPL, opensource is point less.
draw_down 6y ago
> Elastic effectively killed Elasticsearch Good grief, what a way to put it. You could just as well say Amazon killed it. But of course we can't say that
thinkingkong 6y ago
These are two completely different issues and situations. The only thing they have in common is that theyre open source projects controlled by for-profit entities. The moment cooperation is no longer in their best interest they will stop. In elastics case they were between a rock and a hard place. The world changed around that project and they got sherlocked. It happens. AWS has done it so many times its shocking they didnt anticipate it in the first place. Being venture backed sours the batch a lot faster. The CentOS issue is unique. The maintainers gave control to the company that owned the licensed distribution of the software. Did they get a whole promise in return? Of course theyll cut support for it. Even in IBMs own portfolio its a conflict on a balance sheet alone. But its not the fault of enterprise open source. Open source works in this situation: there will be a fork just like centos was a fork of redhat.
- zokier 6y ago
  > In elastics case they were between a rock and a hard place. More like rock and a very soft place cushioned by wads of cash. Elastic so far has been doing very well fincially. And this isn't some new development from AWS side that Elastic needed to react upon, AWS have been offering ES for over 5 years.
adamc 6y ago
There is a fundamental problem, in that open source makes it easy to take and not give. It has many advantages, but that means that it is hard to give it high quality support and development (which generally requires paying people) if you cannot monetize something about the software -- be it support, or hosting, or selling some close-source product that depends on it. If the licensing terms let someone else monetize your investment to the detriment of your own revenues, that's a problem. Even if you would be satisfied with break-even, you have to pay your own developers. Amazon may be "within their rights", but the pattern is unsustainable as-is.
- gspr 6y ago
  > There is a fundamental problem, in that open source makes it easy to take and not give. The GPL licenses address this problem. It's just a shame that the trend nowadays is towards BSD-like licenses.
  - adamc 6y ago
    It does address the problem. However, it also scares away users and fractures the market.
    - pmontra 6y ago
      I never understood what is there to be scared about. People buy Microsoft Word knowing they won't be able to change it, because it's closed source. However it sells well. Do people use LibreOffice because it's Mozilla licensed and not GPL? Do all those people that don't dream about modifying Word really want to add secret proprietary features to LibreOffice? Similarly, Oracle (the database) vs MariaDB (GPL) vs PostgreSQL (its own license, basically MIT / BSD.) There are definitely people that patch databases but I wonder how many people here decided to use one and not the other because they thought "what happens if I ever want to add something to MariaDB and nobody else must get it?"
      - adamc 6y ago
        No, where is scares them is at the copyleft level, when they are writing software. You're quite right that it probably doesn't scare many when they are just using it as an appliance (e.g., a database).
caniszczyk 6y ago
cracks? we are nothing in a boom time for enterprise open source... more companies are contributing than in the past and hiring engineers to work on open source, we have open source alternatives to every project you mentioned
BossingAround 6y ago
Doesn't Jeff work for Red Hat?
vrtx0 6y ago
Projects that change from Apache or GPL-like licenses to SSPL are still open source. This doesn’t mean you have to release your source code if you use these projects — only if you start selling a hosted platform that offers the software as a service. Every company I’ve seen do this was been backed into a corner by Amazon, who almost never contributes to these projects. This is nothing more than Amazon trying to kill these projects by causing fragmentation. *Yes, I’ve read the OSI link AWS-fans always refer to.
- SXX 6y ago
  Have you read SSPL? It's literally apply restriction to SaaS that impossible to comply with. Also it's not some "everyone, but Amazon license". Terms they use are very fuzzy and can easily apply to more than just SaaS companies. If Elastic wanted to stay open source they would use BSL: proprietary for N years and then code became GPL / APLv2. Anti-SaaS clause of SSPL is here: > The “System Libraries” of an executable work include anything, other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an implementation is available to the public in source code form. A “Major Component”, in this context, means a major essential component (kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system (if any) on which the executable work runs, or a compiler used to produce the work, or an object code interpreter used to run it. > The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work. https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license
louwrentius 6y ago
Given this new trend, how long will Ubuntu (Server) last...
c0l0 6y ago
If anything will ever kill established "Enterprise Open Source" or Open Core business models, it's because of cloud service consumers and cloud platform customers that prefer the seamless and often convenient integration of FOSS services and technologies their preferred cloud platform (be it Azure, AWS, GCP, or whatever other player that reaches a sufficient size to be able to) provides. That happens to the direct financial detriment of the companies that actually created these free tools, while (perhaps naively) hoping to be able to sell services based on them to enterprise customers themselves. And it's going to be a real pity and for the FOSS community when it happens. Software may be eating the world, but managed software platforms are eating (free) software.
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znpy 6y ago
meh, elastic should have gone with the affero gpl since the beginning imho. something like a dual license: you want the free stuff? here's the affero gpl license. you don't want the affero gpl license? contact sales and a custom license for the current version will be arranged. RIP elasticsearch, I guess.
staunch 6y ago
Cloud services like Amazon's AWS, Google's GCP, and Microsoft Azure are the proprietary operating systems of the modern day. Today, they're doing many of the bad-for-the-world things that Microsoft did with Windows in the 90s.
jrochkind1 6y ago
I'm not sure this model ever worked. "form a company whose principle thing is creating open source licensed software." That is not the model that was used to create open source in the "golden age" (although that model may not work anymore either).
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carapace 6y ago
> Third, if I want to earn a living or build a company around open source, what are my options? Don't. The very idea that you should have to "earn a living" is now bogus and should be thrown out. I believe computers, software and technology in general should be used to bring about a post-historical Golden Age of peace and prosperity.[1] Programs especially are a kind of wealth that can be copied for effectively zero cost. So I would say that the urge to "earn a living or build a company around open source" is misguided. If you want to write software and give it away for free, that's awesome! My advice is either be comfortable being really poor, or be wealthy already. If you want to go from being poor to being wealthy by giving away copies of software, I don't know what to tell you, to me that seems like an oxymoron. It just seems like a weird idea. Instead, let's use the technology we already have to construct a new economy that provides a good quality of life for everyone automatically. [1] Otherwise, what's the goddamned point!?
- er4hn 6y ago
  The problem with saying that "earning a living" is bogus is that it doesn't jibe well with the real world. Being poor is not a good mindset since it is tied to insecurities and uncertainty around food, shelter, and healthcare. Relying on the benevolence of the rich is likewise a plea to the morals of people who historically have not felt the need to behave in a way that fits your specific morals. The problem is how does one get to a point where the golden age arrives? FLOSS treats this as being incentivized by legal and social means, i.e. software licenses for use and education by orgs such as GNU. This doesn't always solve the issue (as recent events show) but it has been more effective to work within the system and push things forward than to take a stance and live on a hill for it. Politically, you can see similar events be carried out. China has an explicit governmental goal of eventually entering full Communism. I'm not going to debate if that is a _real_ goal of theirs, but they believed that it could be achieved and people could be given opportunities to achieve that by first opening up to world markets at large. This was after the Great Leap Forward plans failed. Judging by the difference between the GLF and China today it went well for them to operate within the system as well.
  - carapace 6y ago
zelon88 6y ago
I completely disagree that cracks are showing and I think you used two very weak examples in CentOS and Elastic. These were and always have been losing bets. Elastic has always bemoaned being open source, so everyone should have seen that coming. And CentOS died when they were bought by RHEL. Anyone who put their weight into these programs after those red flags went up were taking a risk. And that's exactly why OSS is not cracking. Not even close. So CentOS and Elastic aren't open source anymore. Who cares. "But my workflow! How will I do xxx or yyy now?" Do what you did before CentOS and Elastic. Find an open source alternative. If there aren't any and it's important enough make your own. The world will go on people. Just like Gitlab jacking the price. They want you to assume that your choices are to either pay more or go without source control. It's up to you to be smart enough to say "I'll just find another source management solution that fits my budget."
- dralley 6y ago
  >So CentOS and Elastic aren't open source anymore. CentOS is still open source. Nothing is happening to the sources themselves. It's the work of taking those sources, stripping trademarks, building artifacts and distributing them as a near identical-clone of RHEL which is ending. Or at least, Red Hat doing that work at their own expense is ending. "Rocky" and "Alma" linux are picking up that work themselves, nothing prevents that from happening.
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  To your point, there are already two alternatives for CentOS users: * AlmaLinux: https://almalinux.org/ https://almalinux.org/ * Rocky Linux: https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/ This looks like business as usual in open source.
  - _-david-_ 6y ago
    Neither of which have ISOs yet.
a13n 6y ago
> But the Fedora community has publicly stated that "to consider the SSPL to be 'Free' or 'Open Source' causes a shadow to be cast across all other licenses in the FOSS ecosystem." My takeaway from all this isn't that "enterprise open source" is no longer a viable business model. It's that if you want to start an enterprise open source company, start with SSPL. It works great as an open source license. People and businesses can use, modify, and redistribute the product for free. The only thing they can't do is package the product and sell/host it as a service. This is extremely reasonable. AWS shouldn't be able to take the technology that your team built, without asking/paying/contributing, and quickly turn it into a $100m+ business. Sure "true" open source champions will balk at the license. But at the end of the day, the technology only flourishes because of the business built around it (eg. Elastic around Elasticsearch). SSPL goes a long way to protect your business, and therefore the underlying technology, from big tech. What would Elasticsearch be without Elastic? What would MongoDB be without MongoDB Inc?
- SXX 6y ago
  Where Elasticsearch would be without Apache Lucene? Too bad Lucene doesn't use SSPL because it's would be so nice to not let company like Elastic to make billions of dollars on it. /s Don't want someone to profit from your code? Just use EULA and call it a day.
hnarn 6y ago
From my perspective, which admittedly is subjective and might be missing glaring examples to the opposite, open source has increasingly become a free marketing gimmick for startups looking to be bought out. I feel like this would explain why so many open source projects these day seem surprised when confronted with the expectations of being an open source project. All things being equal, a piece of software will become more popular if it's open source. If it's open source and worse than the proprietary alternative, it will still pick up steam, while a proprietary competitor would be largely ignored. In fact, I would claim that a proprietary competitor will even be ignored if it's just as good, and even if it's a bit better: because there is a cost of adoption of new technologies, being a bit better isn't enough. An example of something that wasn't open source but succeeded anyway is Splunk. As far as I know, they have never leveraged open source, but their selling point was so unique that they didn't need to. However, most ideas aren't that game changing. Most projects don't have the luxury of an idea that has an elevator pitch so attractive it will attract both investors and customers right away. By 2007, Splunk had raised US$ 40M. The initial release of Elasticsearch was in 2010. How would ES have been received if they went to market with a proprietary product? I think the reason why it was open sourced from the start is quite obvious: noone would have cared otherwise, or they would have been overshadowed by an open source alternative. There was a demand for new, flashy, modern log monitoring among those that didn't want to buy Splunk, so it didn't have to be as good. What seems to happen more frequently though is that cloud services pick up these open source alternatives, make money off them, and/or buy up the company holding the IP. They move in and "embrace, extend and extinguish", killing two birds with one stone: on the one hand they damage the primary free alternative, while at the same time improving it while owning the full rights to the improvements. I don't have an answer to what to "do" about this but it seems like an increasing trend ever since the cloud industry started swallowing up most of what IT is about. In a way I suppose it's unavoidable, and maybe we need to see the beauty in the inherent resilience of open source: even when it's bought off and killed, they can never kill the previously freely licensed code. The "idea" if you will can live on, and must live on if we're going to avoid a complete dystopia in the long run. So turn the frustration of your favorite project being killed off into action: realize that no code comes for free, behind every open source success is usually an unsung and unpaid hero, and if you can't pick up the torch yourself, at least throw a few bucks to those who do. What else is there?
jitendrac 6y ago
I disagree with it, OSS ecosystem heavily rely on individual contributions at first. Both Elastic and CentOS cases are successful just because they are opensource, otherwise there would way little buzz around it, I strongly believe they would not have been successful if they were not licensed under Opensource license.
zby 6y ago
I don't know about Open Source - but Free Software is about users having the right to understand and modify the software that they use. This is my understanding of 'the printer story': https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201d-redux-a-testimonial-about-the-injustice-of-proprietary-firmware https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201.... With hosted solutions the software runs on the supplier servers - so if the user wants to modify it he has to resign from the hosted solution (or maybe negotiate a special case - this does not seem very realistic). This is a fundamental limitation. If the software is Open Source the user still can copy it, modify and run it on their own servers (or on some other cloud supplier who would agree to the change) - but it is a lot of hassle (and hassle is important - after all with enough work you can always decompile a binary so it is only the hassle that differentiates source code from binary). Maybe if there was enough competition between cloud providers - then this could work - but I think the economy is against it.
Jkvngt 6y ago
Dual-licensing with a "free" tier for non-commercial use and a paid tier for corporate users could solve this. In fact in the future, I believe many companies will do this with software and not just SAAS behind a cloud where this model is dominating today.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
I think a windfall tax on FAANGs would get us 80% of the way there - with governments around the world appropriating a suitable levy and then pouring that levy back into "grassroots OSS". The how part is a bit troublesome - it should have a VC style flavour (effectively setting up hundreds of software foundations with old school grey beards helping the selection process) and providing summer of code style grants to just get things off the ground. Governments (imo) should be almost exclusive users of OSS - and if the code they want is not put there, seed it. I am not fond of governments do it all for us, But it is hard to imagine how else to extract money from corporations resting their profits on the commons.
ohazi 6y ago
A lot of software that was once innovative is now mature. 20 years ago, the bar for what you could sell was really low, because there just wasn't a lot of software available, full stop. If you had something that was even a little bit useful, somebody would probably want it. People who bought software from you once were also eager to pay you for updates, because annual improvements could be dramatic. So what happened? Features that were once unique selling points of one commercial application were copied by other vendors and by open-source implementations. Clever techniques were studied carefully and are now well understood. Smart people looking for a challenge would study every publicly available implementation of some algorithm and then come up with one that beat them all. But why did the rate of software improvement seem to slow down? Don't we have more people working on software than ever before? Don't they have better building blocks than ever before? Consider that everything that has ever been published as open source remains in the public commons forever. This body of work grows without bound. Both improvements and regressions continuously show up, but (eventually) the improvements are identified and the regressions are cast aside. So this pile of software theoretically improves without bound as well. Yes, we have more people writing software than ever before, and yes, they have better building blocks than ever before. But they're not competing with other software developers and other companies -- they're competing with every piece of software ever written by anyone. So it shouldn't be surprising or controversial that the bar for marketable software is going to keep getting higher forever. These licensing shenanigans and the steady march towards "Everything as a Service" is a result of companies pivoting from attempting to innovate to rent seeking.
hugs 6y ago
Stories about enterprise open source are so frustrating. They never mention Selenium & the ecosystem of companies making millions of dollars. Selenium basically doesn't exist at all whenever anyone asks "BuT wHeRe aRe tHe OpEn sOurCe sUcceSs StorRies?!" Selenium and Appium are Apache 2 licensed. I started a SaaS service based on them. So has Amazon. The sky has not fallen. The licenses will not change. But apparently this story DOES NOT EXIST.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
As someone who watched the "birth" of the "Open Source Movement" I can say with some certitude that we have proven, once again, that the theories of communism don't work in software just like they don't work in state governance. The same mechanism, which is that the benefits of the work accrue more forcefully to the user than to the worker, are the same. I first saw this in action[1] when Ward Christensen found out that a company was selling "Xmodem" (software that let you easily transfer files over a modem while in a terminal session over that same modem) to the government for big $$. To understand the value here, prior to this invention you needed two connections to a computer to both have a human interaction with it and a second connection between the source of your files and the computer in order to transfer data to it. In UNIX and elsewhere you could type 'cat -> foo' but that forced all of your data through the terminal driver and if it happened to contain 0x04 (^D on UNIX) you would log out! So Ward's big idea was a "modal" connection where you could put the computer in "data transfer mode" and either send or get a file. It was really useful in dial up BBS days and even in the early days of computers things like "LapLink" did similar sorts of things. The key here was this capability had value and while Ward had invested time writing the software he felt the approval of his peers was sufficient payment for his work. The deal here was that Ward had made his code "public domain", he literally disclaimed all rights to it, because he, like other enthusiasts, held the viewpoint that "We are all a big club and we share stuff all the time." But a vendor saw that the Government had a need for this capability, and like many such organizations was used to paying people to provide and support the capability. So the vendor took Ward's software, and sold a product to the US Government that provided this capability. Since Ward had disclaimed his rights, the vendor had no further obligation to Wayne and delightfully pocketed all the money that the Government paid them. When this was discovered there was some outrage. After all it was Ward's work and he should have been compensated right? This turns out to be a really interesting question for surfacing how various people feel about both the "value" of digital goods (which can be copied for nearly zero marginal cost) and the "value" of implementation. Stallman's response was that once Ward had created the software his "right" to any value was exhausted. The original GPL manifesto was about making it explicit that no one else had a right to any value from the work either. Even if people were willing to pay $1 each for a software work product, a person who provided them with that work product was forbidden from capturing that value. They were entitled to "reasonable copying costs, and any monies that might make supporting the software." Period. When you constrain a market in that way, it inhibits the market mechanisms that incentivize the creation of new goods, and the ability to fund the creation of new goods with the sale of successful goods. It depends on finding an supply of workers who will work once and give away all downstream value for nothing. This is great for customers but it really impoverishes the people who are actually writing code. The communism corollary is that you provide the needs for all of the workers, food, shelter, etc. And transfer all the downstream value of their work to the state. Where, historically, bad actors at the nation state have plundered that value and lived like decadent kings. A good current analogy is Google. Google couldn't exist the way it exists if it had to pay for the value it extracts out of the work the Linux community puts into that ecosystem. Fortunately for Google, thanks to the FOSS rules, it doesn't have to! As long as it isn't selling Linux it gets all that value for free, and it pockets all the profits from the services it offers which are derived in part by the value of having a "free" operating system. I believe that because you cannot connect the economic value of the work someone has done, to the worker(s) who did it, you create an opportunity to take that value for yourself. For me, that will be the bitter legacy of "free" software. If, for some reason, we were able to reverse the ability to take this value without compensation it would make being a software engineer a much better job. Seriously. As a result "Enterprise Free Software company" is unlikely to ever be a 'thing.' While it can make money in the short term as you translate a moment in time to a change in value. Long term it is doomed. This becomes especially evident when the additional new work needed to be done on software goes to zero. [1] And FWIW so did Stallman.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
I have said this before, and I'll keep saying it: A corporation controlling an open source project is antithetical to the purpose of Open Source, which is a project designed for the collaboration of a community of users. Licensing issues are just a tiny part of the problem. Open Source is a license type and philosophy, but that license type exists solely so that users can get fixes for their bugs/problems incorporated into upstream. Corporate Open Source doesn't give a shit about a user's problems. The corporation only exists to further its own interests, and it uses Open Source as a tool to do so. Its sole motivation is profit, and so it is unwilling to accept the changes that users want to make if they're not directly benefiting the corporation. Community-driven Open Source is about the users. Sometimes the project leads are a little too dictatorial and micromanage the project, preventing user fixes for stupid reasons. But most of the time, if you have a useful thing to contribute or change, they will accept it, even if it doesn't benefit them personally. I think the current trend with Corporate Open Source was natural given the selfish nature of corporations. It's only going to get worse from here. In 10 years, most Corporate "Open Source" projects will go one of two ways. In one, they're donated to Corporate-aligned "Foundations" and all the development is done by the corporation, but "management" is done by some generic board [of people in corporations]. In the other, it's just a thin API layer over a proprietary system, like kernel drivers. I think the only real Open Source left will be the old school variety. The projects led by a random chick in her garage who just needs a tool that solves her problems. Nobody's going to pay her for it, and she's fine with that, because she just needs this damn code. And that will be how Open Source survives: the hobbyist who donates their work to the world, just because it's a good thing to do. The only salvation I can see in all of this is a new form of Open Source that enables corporations to safely donate their work. Note that I said donate. They can't have any expectations of holding onto IP or copyright. But perhaps they can find some way to use it as a tax write-off? So the project is run by a chick in her garage, but she takes patches from corporations, or maybe even a small yearly "donation" just to keep managing the project. In this way you could actually have a thriving community, even if that community is made up of corporations.
einpoklum 6y ago
I don't know about all that... ElasticSearch I don't have experience with, but CentOS is an example of a project I don't like in a bunch of ways - and I believe (on faith and anecdotal evidence mind you) that developers didn't like it nor choose to use it unless, for some reason, they needed the RHEL compatibility, which means that they need some tie-in to a corporate-commerical-only flavor of Linux. So, I would argue, CentOS doesn't have an organic raison d'etre. If had one, it would be very difficult to "kill" it.

196 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

When did open source become a business model? A lot of newer developers confusing open source saying companies should not be using code for free etc. If that is the case dont open source it or use a dual licensing mechanism.

outsomnia 6y ago

> Maybe blindly adopting permissive open source licenses to invite more corporate ownership isn't the right answer. What's the question exactly? Sustainable FOSS development? Earning nothing while working on a FOSS project that has no way to ever make a developer salary because it can't be used by the people with the money, due to the copyleft license does not seem to be the "right answer" either.

geerlingguy 6y ago
It seems like in some sense, there's no right answer. The hard thing here is truly free / open source software relies on generosity. And the more generosity, the more sustainable it is (on behalf of the developer(s), the corporations using it, etc.). Generosity is not a winning strategy in corporate board rooms, though.
- Jeff_Brown 6y ago
  Sometimes generosity isn't needed. If a project (including the language it's written in) is simple* enough, casual users can add features they want for themselves. But for complex projects those barriers will probably always be quite high. * "Simple" is a slippery concept. I find hacking Haskell easier than hacking Python, because the type signatures and other features make it much easier to see what's going on with a minimum of investigative work. But difficulty is a big part of Haskell's reputation, and ease a big part of Python's.
- coldpie 6y ago
  > The hard thing here is truly free / open source software relies on generosity. (I make a living working on an open source project.) I don't agree. The view of the value of software is just different. The software itself is valueless. This is true of all software: bits are free to copy. What is valuable is the work put into making it. In other words, you get paid for making something, not for having made something. If a company wants some feature implemented in some piece of OSS, they can go find a dev to pay to do it, and contribute it back to the world. There's no generosity there, it's just an accurate reflection of where value is actually generated in the software world, instead of the broken view that proprietary software tries to force. Where it starts to get tricky is kind of a tragedy of the commons situation: if you wait long enough, then maybe someone else will pay to implement the feature, but if everyone does this, then the feature will never exist.
  - jsdwarf 6y ago
    Agree. In the end commercial and open source software aren't that different: the more dollars you put into it, the more say you have on the roadmap.
tw04 6y ago
I'd argue short term there is no good answer. Long term I think the story changes quickly. I still can't shake the idea that we as a human race are going to have to adopt a universal basic income of some sort. As we automate more and more things we're eventually going to get to the point that there are not enough jobs for humans to do unless we intentionally stop automating some industries. Assuming we can find a way to get to a UBI, programming becomes just another art. If you already have your basic needs met (housing/food/education/transportation) and have the choice to either pursue an art, or pursue a career making more money, people will have options. I have no doubt there are a lot of people that will value the freedom to decide what they want to do every day of their life over making more money in the rat race, and some of them will spend that time programming/donating their time to FOSS projects. Between now and then, your guess is as good as mine.
sidlls 6y ago
I’m not sure permitting enterprises to pick and choose which developers on an open source project get paid (as by hiring them or funding a salaried foundation staff) is a good answer to this problem. In fact I’m pretty sure it has contributed to the rise of the celebrity/“influencer” dev who uses open source as a vehicle for self promotion rather than a means to improve software.
- serial_dev 6y ago
  I don't see anything bad with the "celebrity" devs using open-source for their own "selfish" purposes. For the most part they do improve software, and help coding get more popular. Their work can help those devs go independent in some shape or form (or the least, it helps them get their next job more easily or put them in a stronger negotiating position). The fact that they do a far bit of self-promotion should not be hold against them, in the end we are all working to achieve something in life, and for some, a necessary ingredient is some self-promotion through open-source.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    I’m gonna say something controversial: the vast, vast majority of open source software is garbage. Partly that is due to the rise of developers just writing slop to promote themselves with. The existence of “Celebrity” devs isn’t necessarily a problem, but the culture that has evolved over the last few years seems more focused on the celebrity part than the dev part.

jka 6y ago

Open source governance seems to be a key question here; in other words, how does a corporation communicate with their community of customers and users, and how are decisions about the software made as a result of those discussions?

williesleg 6y ago

H1B cracks.

EdwinLarkin 6y ago

The only reason corporate embraced open source is that it saw it as a way to drive the small and medium sized businesses out of the market. Why pay for an editor when the good guy Microsoft gives it to you for free? People have been delusional about FOSS for way too long.

antixuser 6y ago
@EdwinLarkin: "The only reason corporate embraced open source is that it saw it as a way to drive the small and medium sized businesses out of the market. Why pay for an editor when the good guy Microsoft gives it to you for free? People have been delusional about FOSS for way too long." Is that you billg ;] https://www.debian.org/ https://www.debian.org/ https://getfedora.org/ https://getfedora.org/ https://antixlinux.com/ https://antixlinux.com/ .. systemD free :]
indymike 6y ago
This isn't what happened at all. No one went "Mwah-ha-ha-ha let's put it to the small businesses." What happened is free and pretty good beat more expensive. Microsoft has lost a huge amount of server license revenue to open source. The open source I've written - be it a program or a patch was always open sourced because I wanted to make my program available to others because I thought it might be useful.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

I think one conclusion is that venture capital backed open source companies are a oxymoron. Open source will never be able to give the huge returns that VC firms expect. However, open source can provide the basis for what is often derided as a “lifestyle business” that provides a sometimes very good income to a small group of people that are passionate about a project. SQLite comes to mind as an example. Elastic is definitely bringing enough revenue for the “lifestyle” business without changing their license, however it is not enough for VC. Be very wary of open source backed by VC.

vlovich123 6y ago
Red Hat got VC money and went public working on open source software. Perhaps the exception that proves the rule of the difficulty, but not an oxymoron.
- zokier 6y ago
  Red Hat IPOed over 20 years ago in the middle of one of the most spectacular bubbles we've seen. The world is very different now. On top of that, yes I'd argue Red Hat is an outlier and exception whose success is as much result of good luck and timing than anything else.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    MongoDb then?

tyingq 6y ago

The trend where there's a split offering of a community open source product coupled with non-open source premium offerings is sometimes a crack as well. Especially when relatively essential features aren't in the community editions.

linuxftw 6y ago
MySQL/MariaDB split went fine. People will build or fork the software they need.
jsdwarf 6y ago
GitLab comes to my mind, where an issue can either be open or closed in the community edition. You literally have to pay for "work in progress".

relaunched 6y ago

I see FOSS as more of a marketing tool for profit-motivated entities / founders. It's the modern, marketing equivalent of a limited, free trial for software. But, ultimately, if your company is owned by shareholders, their motives are your motivations. When the money matters more, this is what you get. FOSS is all about idealism. It's hard to retain your idealism when someone is waiving $1+ billion dollars in your face with one hand and holding a loaded gun to your head with the other.

nytgop77 6y ago
Not only idealism. There is plenty of "I scratch my itch" kind of thing. (sharing can be done for self markeeting purposes, bragging rights)

linuxftw 6y ago

I think the problem boils down to 'product' vs 'project.' Elastic search is very much a product, it's owned by a company, not a foundation. FOSS developers should contribute to projects and not products. Non-copyleft licenses seem to just be code for corporations to build upon, providing them free labor while getting little in return. At least with the GPL, you are getting a promise that they will make available their sources. Consider carefully your expectations when you license your software. An example where a project/product hybrid somewhat works is web browsers. Generally speaking, there are several competitors trying to achieve something similar, and there are some attempts (however nebulous) to create standards bodies. The Elastic Search community could have done something similar and formed a standards body around some sort of specification.

markbnj 6y ago

> First, how can we make sure developers who build open source software are compensated for their work in a just way? Honest question: isn't this a fundamental contradiction? If you are building a thing that by definition is given freely to anyone who wants to use it, how does compensation for that work become part of the formula? You can't be monetarily compensated for it, because you chose to give it away. There are other forms of compensation but that seems clearly not what we're talking about here. The author goes on to ask how you can build a business around open source? But isn't the answer that you can't? If its really open source then the software itself is not a business. That, to me, seems consistent with the original idea of open source: that it was the cool things you could build with code, not the code itself, that had value. None of the iconic success stories in tech over the last decade have sold code, have they? They've built things on FOSS code that never existed before, and most of them have contributed a lot of FOSS code back. But they haven't sold databases, reverse proxies, and key/value stores, right? I've paid six-figure annual licenses to Oracle. Is that the world we're trying to preserve here?

geerlingguy 6y ago
I think the point is, how can we make it so the companies that build profitable products using open source code can support the developers who build those open source libraries? There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent example) supported by a team of developers in the single digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking in millions if not billions in annual revenue. Finding ways to give back and keep the developers motivated is important in the long term, unless you plan on rewriting all the software you depend on. Currently the two sustainable answers for that are: 1. Hope some company is generous in hiring said OSS developer and paying them a salary to continue working on that OSS work (ideally without too much pressure to modify it for that one company's use case). 2. Make that developer spend a lot of time doing marketing to generate donations/sponsorships to a level where the developer can pay for things like food, shelter, and insurance.
- the_other 6y ago
  Playing devil's advocate here (because I have weakly held opinions and no good answers of my own): > There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent example) supported by a team of developers in the single digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking in millions if not billions in annual revenue. But they gave it away for free. That would be the same whether there were big, small or zero companies using the software. I think probably the problem is framed wrong: - maybe giving software away free was a bad idea (I don't believe this; just putting it on the table for conversation) - maybe those giving away their software free should make better calls _for themselves_ about how they spend their time - maybe use different licensing - stop calling it free; instead call it "free a the point of consumption" and consciously build a model to support that at the outset (this is my current personal opinion, but I grew up in the Uk when it had a functional NHS so I'm biassed) - dig deep on what both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" mean to you and how they relate and what you want to do about that Open source came out of a joyous utopianism that hasn't been backed up the wider societal changes needed to sustain it. This is understandable because that work is ridiculously hard (and I'm aware some people _are_ trying to make those changes. I just day-dream about it). Currently, most of the world works on capitalism, for better or worse. I'm not trying to defend or attack capitalism here, but when you work in a capitalist system and _all_ your other interests and life support systems use capitalism, you have to factor that into your thinking. Open source makes more sense in a post-scaricity society and we're not there yet. FOSS might even help us get there, and the problems we're seeing in the past 3-4 years might be the signs of things changing. I know this message sounds like victim blaming, and that's a real problem in some situations, but I don't think this is the situation here. Everyone working in tech is at a higher than average level of privilege than their immediate peers; working in FOSS is a choice you make from that position of privilege.

krspykrm 6y ago

Corporate sponsorship of open source is entirely dependent on top talent caring about open source and thus being more willing to tolerate working for EvilMegacorp if major pieces of the infrastructure they work on are open. When top talent just accepts the big money contract regardless, corporations see little incentive to sponsor open source. Software development is the only industry that has large portions of infrastructure free and open for anyone to use, and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a generation or so ago. It's up to us to carry that torch, or we will become like every other industry.

ericb 6y ago
> and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a generation or so ago. Is it? I think it has more to do with companies realizing that [1]commoditizing their complements is a sound strategy, and [2] using open source as a growth strategy. When you get to the "harvesting" stage or the "entrenched monopoly stage", the FOSS license doesn't make sense if you were using it merely as a growth strategy. [1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement [2] https://www.gwern.net/Complement#open-source-as-a-strategic-weapon https://www.gwern.net/Complement#open-source-as-a-strategic-...
- sounds 6y ago
  Many of the companies that appear to be "harvesting" their entrenched customers have not switched away from a FOSS license. Examples: • Apple • Amazon • Facebook • Google • Microsoft • Netflix • Red Hat
  - ericb 6y ago
    The open source from your list largely falls under #1. They didn't open source their primary product, but rather their complements. That is sustainable, whereas #2 is not when a permissive license is involved. Strategy #1 is self-interested and doesn't require any real zealotry and survives the harvesting stage just fine. Open sourcing your core product with a permissive license is generally going to be at odds with business goals at some point, and if you're in business, often the thing to give is the license.

nimbius 6y ago

A rather alarmist preface frankly. >redhat killed cantos Primarily a profit driven motive. Open source doesn't always mean free as in beer. >elastic killed elasticsearch For companies like amazon who are fundamentally incompatibl with truly open source yes, this is a killing blow. For everyone else its just a change in ToS. In 2021 what's changing is many companies and devs are getting rightly upset about multinationals ripping off their code without so much as an attribution. These companies are saying that not only is your code not worth money, it isn't even worth the exposure on your resume.

Spooky23 6y ago

The premise is wrong. The consolidation of computing to a few mega platforms or companies is the big issue open source is where you are seeing the symptoms. Elastic is just another app/database platform. Open source is a side issue with Amazon... the real problem is that ultimately, their ability to exist as a platform is ultimately in the hands of a few companies.

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
I disagree. Not to say that the consolidation is a good thing, but it's not the core problem. If I spend a year of my life and savings to write a new database, how do I make money? Can I make money and open source my work? How? There isn't an easy answer. Open Source isn't always the right answer, and a whole lot of naive software developers are learning this the hard way.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  That's always been a challenge; usually the model is to sell features or certification if you go open source. Alot of people buy RHEL for FIPS 140-2 validation, for example. Even in closed source, some of these business models are dumb with or without open source being in the mix. Think about companies like Citrix or VMWare who are essentially selling their customer book to Microsoft and to a lesser extent Amazon for virtual desktops, and to Microsoft, Amazon and Google in the server space. ISVs used to compete with each other to sell their stuff to run customer desktops or datacenters. There was no aggregation of their runtimes Now for most of the market they are competing with each other to rent their software on big platforms, which may opt to strangle them at any time. On the open source side, people who need FIPS still buy RHEL. Frugal people who need FIPS buy Oracle. RHEL is still open source, and the cheapskates who rely on CentOS can still do so, they just don't get to ride on RHEL's engineering work backporting new fixes to old software. Elastic never had a sticky business model.

Railsify 6y ago

When I see articles like this I think back to Neo4j, when we adopted the product the enterprise features were open source, which turned out to be a long con bait and switch, enterprise features are now closed. We rewrote our app using another DB and are closely watching more recent entries into the GraphDB space such as Agensgraph ( a new apache project) built atop postgres.

WaitWaitWha 6y ago

meh. There is nothing new under the sun. There have been several identical losses in FOSS. The bigger they are the better when this happens because there is enough volume and momentum to force a new FOSS branch. If it is a "tiny" FOSS piece, there are not enough champions to fight. > So AWS was directly competing with Elastic, but *not taking the same responsibility for the open source project or investing in it as heavily as Elastic was*. Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes. They chose to branch, and contribute it back. Several of the fixes and improvements are from AWS. Did the author want an IBM/CentOS takeover? Or, deny AWS to use Elastic but pretend to be FOSS?

aynyc 6y ago
> Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes. I don't understand this part. AWS doesn't have anything internally that would compete against ELK. Unless you are taking about AWS buying ELK flat out. But then Azure and GCP can fork ELK and keep selling the service. Is my assumption incorrect?
- bdcravens 6y ago
  Yes: AWS has launched many "native" offerings to compete with the market's open source product, only to give in to demand and launch a managed version of the open source product (CloudSearch/ElasticSearch, ECS/Kubernetes, SQS/ActiveMQ, DynamoDB/MongoDB, etc)
geerlingguy 6y ago
Before a couple years ago (when elastic started digging deeper into the paid addon realm), I don't think they could've forked and been able to keep enough compatibility / community around their fork to make it as useful and compatible with everything Elasticsearch did. But today, I think they have a 50/50 shot of the Amazon-forked ES version becoming the de-facto standard, and Elastic's fading into obscurity.

Proven 6y ago

> One way is to become more restrictive in licensing, choosing only copyleft licenses that were originally created to offer more protections to individuals than corporations. I would disagree with how you made that characterization. Licenses apply equally to everyone, and corporations are made of individuals. If you meant end users vs. service providers, that's what Elastic did and to end users their new license looks more permissive than GPL 3.0. Yes it does have "a major restriction", but it doesn't force individual users and even those who redistribute Elastic software to release their modifications, whereas GPL 3.0 would have that effect. To me - a user - the new Elasticsearch license is more permissive (because before some Elasticsearch add-ons were restricted) and I can live with that. Amazon - thanks to a more permissive license that Elasticsearch used to release under - can still do their thing. Good luck to them. If that license wasn't permissive they wouldn't be able to do this. And the Fedora community and other busybodies ... I don't care what they say :-)

stereolambda 6y ago

> But maybe they're onto something. Maybe blindly adopting permissive open source licenses to invite more corporate ownership isn't the right answer. I do think this is the answer. Try to use LGPL, GPL or AGPL as appropriate. I also agree with some people that there's an issue with framing the question as defending the right of developers to get paid for open source. This was never much of a thing by default. People have been trying to build FOSS companies, with varying success. But I would guess most end user-facing things, like GNU, Linux, VLC etc. were built by academics or hobbyists, or foundations. Commercial FOSS tries to sell infrastructure to enterprises. It's not things you and I would use if we weren't IT professionals. (Linux is a peculiar beast here. The kernel is largely developed by big corps, but playing by the copyleft rules, because it's such a fundamental infrastructure. Big distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are the middle ground where they can be freely used by individual people, but are a side effect of Canonical and Red Hat's development processes.) The correct framing of FOSS is benefit of the users and the society at large. We use .?GPL to ensure that the software that people use is inspectable, and modifiable if the vendor does something bad. Thus we serve people's, and our own, interests in the long term. We reduce the area where companies can damage the public for profit, when hiding behind closed source, unchangeable dark patterns, "hai we ban you there is no appeals" etc. etc. That the essential software can be had free of charge in practice is also a nice thing... to some extent. The answer to the problem of compensating the developers was never much directly solved by FOSS. (Of course, you can try to use it to also get hired, to sell hosting or support.) This is a social/political/economic problem. Trying to solve it with licensing (a.k.a. copyright law hacking) is and understandable effort, but very likely a dead end. EDIT: I see under the sibling comments that the OP is more specifically concerned about the fundamental and "invisible" projects like sudo. I can't add much on that, but I do think there's value in getting (some) signaling and (some) bargaining power by choosing copyleft. Especially if there would be solidarity and consensus among developers in doing this.

gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
You are completely right. But the answer to this is always the same: off-topic Stallman ad hominem > Linux is a peculiar beast here. The kernel is largely developed by big corps, but playing by the copyleft rules, because it's such a fundamental infrastructure. Not quite. linux is the success of the past! but already corrupted by "tainted" kernel... linux adopted GPL, which was *unthinkable* by corporate back then. But because devs didn't cave in to "permissive license fallacy", they had to eat it up. The thing is, GPL is severely outdated. It does nothing to force Google, Amazon to open source their code that they profit from because of an OSS base work. GPL, with tainted kernel, merely force them to open source irrelevant parts of Android. The drivers and spyware-DRM can all remain proprietary. And does *absolutely nothing* to their bread and butter, which is hosted services on top of OSS software. until we stick to GPLv3 like linux stuck with GPL, opensource is point less.

draw_down 6y ago

> Elastic effectively killed Elasticsearch Good grief, what a way to put it. You could just as well say Amazon killed it. But of course we can't say that

thinkingkong 6y ago

These are two completely different issues and situations. The only thing they have in common is that theyre open source projects controlled by for-profit entities. The moment cooperation is no longer in their best interest they will stop. In elastics case they were between a rock and a hard place. The world changed around that project and they got sherlocked. It happens. AWS has done it so many times its shocking they didnt anticipate it in the first place. Being venture backed sours the batch a lot faster. The CentOS issue is unique. The maintainers gave control to the company that owned the licensed distribution of the software. Did they get a whole promise in return? Of course theyll cut support for it. Even in IBMs own portfolio its a conflict on a balance sheet alone. But its not the fault of enterprise open source. Open source works in this situation: there will be a fork just like centos was a fork of redhat.

zokier 6y ago
> In elastics case they were between a rock and a hard place. More like rock and a very soft place cushioned by wads of cash. Elastic so far has been doing very well fincially. And this isn't some new development from AWS side that Elastic needed to react upon, AWS have been offering ES for over 5 years.

adamc 6y ago

There is a fundamental problem, in that open source makes it easy to take and not give. It has many advantages, but that means that it is hard to give it high quality support and development (which generally requires paying people) if you cannot monetize something about the software -- be it support, or hosting, or selling some close-source product that depends on it. If the licensing terms let someone else monetize your investment to the detriment of your own revenues, that's a problem. Even if you would be satisfied with break-even, you have to pay your own developers. Amazon may be "within their rights", but the pattern is unsustainable as-is.

gspr 6y ago
> There is a fundamental problem, in that open source makes it easy to take and not give. The GPL licenses address this problem. It's just a shame that the trend nowadays is towards BSD-like licenses.
- adamc 6y ago
  It does address the problem. However, it also scares away users and fractures the market.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    I never understood what is there to be scared about. People buy Microsoft Word knowing they won't be able to change it, because it's closed source. However it sells well. Do people use LibreOffice because it's Mozilla licensed and not GPL? Do all those people that don't dream about modifying Word really want to add secret proprietary features to LibreOffice? Similarly, Oracle (the database) vs MariaDB (GPL) vs PostgreSQL (its own license, basically MIT / BSD.) There are definitely people that patch databases but I wonder how many people here decided to use one and not the other because they thought "what happens if I ever want to add something to MariaDB and nobody else must get it?"
    - adamc 6y ago
      No, where is scares them is at the copyleft level, when they are writing software. You're quite right that it probably doesn't scare many when they are just using it as an appliance (e.g., a database).

caniszczyk 6y ago

cracks? we are nothing in a boom time for enterprise open source... more companies are contributing than in the past and hiring engineers to work on open source, we have open source alternatives to every project you mentioned

BossingAround 6y ago

Doesn't Jeff work for Red Hat?

vrtx0 6y ago

Projects that change from Apache or GPL-like licenses to SSPL are still open source. This doesn’t mean you have to release your source code if you use these projects — only if you start selling a hosted platform that offers the software as a service. Every company I’ve seen do this was been backed into a corner by Amazon, who almost never contributes to these projects. This is nothing more than Amazon trying to kill these projects by causing fragmentation. *Yes, I’ve read the OSI link AWS-fans always refer to.

SXX 6y ago
Have you read SSPL? It's literally apply restriction to SaaS that impossible to comply with. Also it's not some "everyone, but Amazon license". Terms they use are very fuzzy and can easily apply to more than just SaaS companies. If Elastic wanted to stay open source they would use BSL: proprietary for N years and then code became GPL / APLv2. Anti-SaaS clause of SSPL is here: > The “System Libraries” of an executable work include anything, other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an implementation is available to the public in source code form. A “Major Component”, in this context, means a major essential component (kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system (if any) on which the executable work runs, or a compiler used to produce the work, or an object code interpreter used to run it. > The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work. https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license

louwrentius 6y ago

Given this new trend, how long will Ubuntu (Server) last...

c0l0 6y ago

If anything will ever kill established "Enterprise Open Source" or Open Core business models, it's because of cloud service consumers and cloud platform customers that prefer the seamless and often convenient integration of FOSS services and technologies their preferred cloud platform (be it Azure, AWS, GCP, or whatever other player that reaches a sufficient size to be able to) provides. That happens to the direct financial detriment of the companies that actually created these free tools, while (perhaps naively) hoping to be able to sell services based on them to enterprise customers themselves. And it's going to be a real pity and for the FOSS community when it happens. Software may be eating the world, but managed software platforms are eating (free) software.

deleted 6y ago

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znpy 6y ago

meh, elastic should have gone with the affero gpl since the beginning imho. something like a dual license: you want the free stuff? here's the affero gpl license. you don't want the affero gpl license? contact sales and a custom license for the current version will be arranged. RIP elasticsearch, I guess.

staunch 6y ago

Cloud services like Amazon's AWS, Google's GCP, and Microsoft Azure are the proprietary operating systems of the modern day. Today, they're doing many of the bad-for-the-world things that Microsoft did with Windows in the 90s.

jrochkind1 6y ago

I'm not sure this model ever worked. "form a company whose principle thing is creating open source licensed software." That is not the model that was used to create open source in the "golden age" (although that model may not work anymore either).

deleted 6y ago

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carapace 6y ago

> Third, if I want to earn a living or build a company around open source, what are my options? Don't. The very idea that you should have to "earn a living" is now bogus and should be thrown out. I believe computers, software and technology in general should be used to bring about a post-historical Golden Age of peace and prosperity.[1] Programs especially are a kind of wealth that can be copied for effectively zero cost. So I would say that the urge to "earn a living or build a company around open source" is misguided. If you want to write software and give it away for free, that's awesome! My advice is either be comfortable being really poor, or be wealthy already. If you want to go from being poor to being wealthy by giving away copies of software, I don't know what to tell you, to me that seems like an oxymoron. It just seems like a weird idea. Instead, let's use the technology we already have to construct a new economy that provides a good quality of life for everyone automatically. [1] Otherwise, what's the goddamned point!?

er4hn 6y ago
The problem with saying that "earning a living" is bogus is that it doesn't jibe well with the real world. Being poor is not a good mindset since it is tied to insecurities and uncertainty around food, shelter, and healthcare. Relying on the benevolence of the rich is likewise a plea to the morals of people who historically have not felt the need to behave in a way that fits your specific morals. The problem is how does one get to a point where the golden age arrives? FLOSS treats this as being incentivized by legal and social means, i.e. software licenses for use and education by orgs such as GNU. This doesn't always solve the issue (as recent events show) but it has been more effective to work within the system and push things forward than to take a stance and live on a hill for it. Politically, you can see similar events be carried out. China has an explicit governmental goal of eventually entering full Communism. I'm not going to debate if that is a _real_ goal of theirs, but they believed that it could be achieved and people could be given opportunities to achieve that by first opening up to world markets at large. This was after the Great Leap Forward plans failed. Judging by the difference between the GLF and China today it went well for them to operate within the system as well.
- carapace 6y ago

zelon88 6y ago

I completely disagree that cracks are showing and I think you used two very weak examples in CentOS and Elastic. These were and always have been losing bets. Elastic has always bemoaned being open source, so everyone should have seen that coming. And CentOS died when they were bought by RHEL. Anyone who put their weight into these programs after those red flags went up were taking a risk. And that's exactly why OSS is not cracking. Not even close. So CentOS and Elastic aren't open source anymore. Who cares. "But my workflow! How will I do xxx or yyy now?" Do what you did before CentOS and Elastic. Find an open source alternative. If there aren't any and it's important enough make your own. The world will go on people. Just like Gitlab jacking the price. They want you to assume that your choices are to either pay more or go without source control. It's up to you to be smart enough to say "I'll just find another source management solution that fits my budget."

dralley 6y ago
>So CentOS and Elastic aren't open source anymore. CentOS is still open source. Nothing is happening to the sources themselves. It's the work of taking those sources, stripping trademarks, building artifacts and distributing them as a near identical-clone of RHEL which is ending. Or at least, Red Hat doing that work at their own expense is ending. "Rocky" and "Alma" linux are picking up that work themselves, nothing prevents that from happening.
hodgesrm 6y ago
To your point, there are already two alternatives for CentOS users: * AlmaLinux: https://almalinux.org/ https://almalinux.org/ * Rocky Linux: https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/ This looks like business as usual in open source.
- _-david-_ 6y ago
  Neither of which have ISOs yet.

a13n 6y ago

> But the Fedora community has publicly stated that "to consider the SSPL to be 'Free' or 'Open Source' causes a shadow to be cast across all other licenses in the FOSS ecosystem." My takeaway from all this isn't that "enterprise open source" is no longer a viable business model. It's that if you want to start an enterprise open source company, start with SSPL. It works great as an open source license. People and businesses can use, modify, and redistribute the product for free. The only thing they can't do is package the product and sell/host it as a service. This is extremely reasonable. AWS shouldn't be able to take the technology that your team built, without asking/paying/contributing, and quickly turn it into a $100m+ business. Sure "true" open source champions will balk at the license. But at the end of the day, the technology only flourishes because of the business built around it (eg. Elastic around Elasticsearch). SSPL goes a long way to protect your business, and therefore the underlying technology, from big tech. What would Elasticsearch be without Elastic? What would MongoDB be without MongoDB Inc?

SXX 6y ago
Where Elasticsearch would be without Apache Lucene? Too bad Lucene doesn't use SSPL because it's would be so nice to not let company like Elastic to make billions of dollars on it. /s Don't want someone to profit from your code? Just use EULA and call it a day.

hnarn 6y ago

From my perspective, which admittedly is subjective and might be missing glaring examples to the opposite, open source has increasingly become a free marketing gimmick for startups looking to be bought out. I feel like this would explain why so many open source projects these day seem surprised when confronted with the expectations of being an open source project. All things being equal, a piece of software will become more popular if it's open source. If it's open source and worse than the proprietary alternative, it will still pick up steam, while a proprietary competitor would be largely ignored. In fact, I would claim that a proprietary competitor will even be ignored if it's just as good, and even if it's a bit better: because there is a cost of adoption of new technologies, being a bit better isn't enough. An example of something that wasn't open source but succeeded anyway is Splunk. As far as I know, they have never leveraged open source, but their selling point was so unique that they didn't need to. However, most ideas aren't that game changing. Most projects don't have the luxury of an idea that has an elevator pitch so attractive it will attract both investors and customers right away. By 2007, Splunk had raised US$ 40M. The initial release of Elasticsearch was in 2010. How would ES have been received if they went to market with a proprietary product? I think the reason why it was open sourced from the start is quite obvious: noone would have cared otherwise, or they would have been overshadowed by an open source alternative. There was a demand for new, flashy, modern log monitoring among those that didn't want to buy Splunk, so it didn't have to be as good. What seems to happen more frequently though is that cloud services pick up these open source alternatives, make money off them, and/or buy up the company holding the IP. They move in and "embrace, extend and extinguish", killing two birds with one stone: on the one hand they damage the primary free alternative, while at the same time improving it while owning the full rights to the improvements. I don't have an answer to what to "do" about this but it seems like an increasing trend ever since the cloud industry started swallowing up most of what IT is about. In a way I suppose it's unavoidable, and maybe we need to see the beauty in the inherent resilience of open source: even when it's bought off and killed, they can never kill the previously freely licensed code. The "idea" if you will can live on, and must live on if we're going to avoid a complete dystopia in the long run. So turn the frustration of your favorite project being killed off into action: realize that no code comes for free, behind every open source success is usually an unsung and unpaid hero, and if you can't pick up the torch yourself, at least throw a few bucks to those who do. What else is there?

jitendrac 6y ago

I disagree with it, OSS ecosystem heavily rely on individual contributions at first. Both Elastic and CentOS cases are successful just because they are opensource, otherwise there would way little buzz around it, I strongly believe they would not have been successful if they were not licensed under Opensource license.

zby 6y ago

I don't know about Open Source - but Free Software is about users having the right to understand and modify the software that they use. This is my understanding of 'the printer story': https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201d-redux-a-testimonial-about-the-injustice-of-proprietary-firmware https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201.... With hosted solutions the software runs on the supplier servers - so if the user wants to modify it he has to resign from the hosted solution (or maybe negotiate a special case - this does not seem very realistic). This is a fundamental limitation. If the software is Open Source the user still can copy it, modify and run it on their own servers (or on some other cloud supplier who would agree to the change) - but it is a lot of hassle (and hassle is important - after all with enough work you can always decompile a binary so it is only the hassle that differentiates source code from binary). Maybe if there was enough competition between cloud providers - then this could work - but I think the economy is against it.

Jkvngt 6y ago

Dual-licensing with a "free" tier for non-commercial use and a paid tier for corporate users could solve this. In fact in the future, I believe many companies will do this with software and not just SAAS behind a cloud where this model is dominating today.

deleted 6y ago

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lifeisstillgood 6y ago

I think a windfall tax on FAANGs would get us 80% of the way there - with governments around the world appropriating a suitable levy and then pouring that levy back into "grassroots OSS". The how part is a bit troublesome - it should have a VC style flavour (effectively setting up hundreds of software foundations with old school grey beards helping the selection process) and providing summer of code style grants to just get things off the ground. Governments (imo) should be almost exclusive users of OSS - and if the code they want is not put there, seed it. I am not fond of governments do it all for us, But it is hard to imagine how else to extract money from corporations resting their profits on the commons.

ohazi 6y ago

A lot of software that was once innovative is now mature. 20 years ago, the bar for what you could sell was really low, because there just wasn't a lot of software available, full stop. If you had something that was even a little bit useful, somebody would probably want it. People who bought software from you once were also eager to pay you for updates, because annual improvements could be dramatic. So what happened? Features that were once unique selling points of one commercial application were copied by other vendors and by open-source implementations. Clever techniques were studied carefully and are now well understood. Smart people looking for a challenge would study every publicly available implementation of some algorithm and then come up with one that beat them all. But why did the rate of software improvement seem to slow down? Don't we have more people working on software than ever before? Don't they have better building blocks than ever before? Consider that everything that has ever been published as open source remains in the public commons forever. This body of work grows without bound. Both improvements and regressions continuously show up, but (eventually) the improvements are identified and the regressions are cast aside. So this pile of software theoretically improves without bound as well. Yes, we have more people writing software than ever before, and yes, they have better building blocks than ever before. But they're not competing with other software developers and other companies -- they're competing with every piece of software ever written by anyone. So it shouldn't be surprising or controversial that the bar for marketable software is going to keep getting higher forever. These licensing shenanigans and the steady march towards "Everything as a Service" is a result of companies pivoting from attempting to innovate to rent seeking.

hugs 6y ago

Stories about enterprise open source are so frustrating. They never mention Selenium & the ecosystem of companies making millions of dollars. Selenium basically doesn't exist at all whenever anyone asks "BuT wHeRe aRe tHe OpEn sOurCe sUcceSs StorRies?!" Selenium and Appium are Apache 2 licensed. I started a SaaS service based on them. So has Amazon. The sky has not fallen. The licenses will not change. But apparently this story DOES NOT EXIST.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

As someone who watched the "birth" of the "Open Source Movement" I can say with some certitude that we have proven, once again, that the theories of communism don't work in software just like they don't work in state governance. The same mechanism, which is that the benefits of the work accrue more forcefully to the user than to the worker, are the same. I first saw this in action[1] when Ward Christensen found out that a company was selling "Xmodem" (software that let you easily transfer files over a modem while in a terminal session over that same modem) to the government for big $$. To understand the value here, prior to this invention you needed two connections to a computer to both have a human interaction with it and a second connection between the source of your files and the computer in order to transfer data to it. In UNIX and elsewhere you could type 'cat -> foo' but that forced all of your data through the terminal driver and if it happened to contain 0x04 (^D on UNIX) you would log out! So Ward's big idea was a "modal" connection where you could put the computer in "data transfer mode" and either send or get a file. It was really useful in dial up BBS days and even in the early days of computers things like "LapLink" did similar sorts of things. The key here was this capability had value and while Ward had invested time writing the software he felt the approval of his peers was sufficient payment for his work. The deal here was that Ward had made his code "public domain", he literally disclaimed all rights to it, because he, like other enthusiasts, held the viewpoint that "We are all a big club and we share stuff all the time." But a vendor saw that the Government had a need for this capability, and like many such organizations was used to paying people to provide and support the capability. So the vendor took Ward's software, and sold a product to the US Government that provided this capability. Since Ward had disclaimed his rights, the vendor had no further obligation to Wayne and delightfully pocketed all the money that the Government paid them. When this was discovered there was some outrage. After all it was Ward's work and he should have been compensated right? This turns out to be a really interesting question for surfacing how various people feel about both the "value" of digital goods (which can be copied for nearly zero marginal cost) and the "value" of implementation. Stallman's response was that once Ward had created the software his "right" to any value was exhausted. The original GPL manifesto was about making it explicit that no one else had a right to any value from the work either. Even if people were willing to pay $1 each for a software work product, a person who provided them with that work product was forbidden from capturing that value. They were entitled to "reasonable copying costs, and any monies that might make supporting the software." Period. When you constrain a market in that way, it inhibits the market mechanisms that incentivize the creation of new goods, and the ability to fund the creation of new goods with the sale of successful goods. It depends on finding an supply of workers who will work once and give away all downstream value for nothing. This is great for customers but it really impoverishes the people who are actually writing code. The communism corollary is that you provide the needs for all of the workers, food, shelter, etc. And transfer all the downstream value of their work to the state. Where, historically, bad actors at the nation state have plundered that value and lived like decadent kings. A good current analogy is Google. Google couldn't exist the way it exists if it had to pay for the value it extracts out of the work the Linux community puts into that ecosystem. Fortunately for Google, thanks to the FOSS rules, it doesn't have to! As long as it isn't selling Linux it gets all that value for free, and it pockets all the profits from the services it offers which are derived in part by the value of having a "free" operating system. I believe that because you cannot connect the economic value of the work someone has done, to the worker(s) who did it, you create an opportunity to take that value for yourself. For me, that will be the bitter legacy of "free" software. If, for some reason, we were able to reverse the ability to take this value without compensation it would make being a software engineer a much better job. Seriously. As a result "Enterprise Free Software company" is unlikely to ever be a 'thing.' While it can make money in the short term as you translate a moment in time to a change in value. Long term it is doomed. This becomes especially evident when the additional new work needed to be done on software goes to zero. [1] And FWIW so did Stallman.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

I have said this before, and I'll keep saying it: A corporation controlling an open source project is antithetical to the purpose of Open Source, which is a project designed for the collaboration of a community of users. Licensing issues are just a tiny part of the problem. Open Source is a license type and philosophy, but that license type exists solely so that users can get fixes for their bugs/problems incorporated into upstream. Corporate Open Source doesn't give a shit about a user's problems. The corporation only exists to further its own interests, and it uses Open Source as a tool to do so. Its sole motivation is profit, and so it is unwilling to accept the changes that users want to make if they're not directly benefiting the corporation. Community-driven Open Source is about the users. Sometimes the project leads are a little too dictatorial and micromanage the project, preventing user fixes for stupid reasons. But most of the time, if you have a useful thing to contribute or change, they will accept it, even if it doesn't benefit them personally. I think the current trend with Corporate Open Source was natural given the selfish nature of corporations. It's only going to get worse from here. In 10 years, most Corporate "Open Source" projects will go one of two ways. In one, they're donated to Corporate-aligned "Foundations" and all the development is done by the corporation, but "management" is done by some generic board [of people in corporations]. In the other, it's just a thin API layer over a proprietary system, like kernel drivers. I think the only real Open Source left will be the old school variety. The projects led by a random chick in her garage who just needs a tool that solves her problems. Nobody's going to pay her for it, and she's fine with that, because she just needs this damn code. And that will be how Open Source survives: the hobbyist who donates their work to the world, just because it's a good thing to do. The only salvation I can see in all of this is a new form of Open Source that enables corporations to safely donate their work. Note that I said donate. They can't have any expectations of holding onto IP or copyright. But perhaps they can find some way to use it as a tax write-off? So the project is run by a chick in her garage, but she takes patches from corporations, or maybe even a small yearly "donation" just to keep managing the project. In this way you could actually have a thriving community, even if that community is made up of corporations.

einpoklum 6y ago

I don't know about all that... ElasticSearch I don't have experience with, but CentOS is an example of a project I don't like in a bunch of ways - and I believe (on faith and anecdotal evidence mind you) that developers didn't like it nor choose to use it unless, for some reason, they needed the RHEL compatibility, which means that they need some tie-in to a corporate-commerical-only flavor of Linux. So, I would argue, CentOS doesn't have an organic raison d'etre. If had one, it would be very difficult to "kill" it.