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Straw Man I've seen "not a business model" quipped a hundred times, as if that ends whatever debate is going on. I've yet to see anyone actually argue that ope

Straw Man I've seen "not a business model" quipped a hundred times, as if that ends whatever debate is going on. I've yet to see anyone actually argue that open source actually is a business model, as opposed to having their argument bent that way. The author doesn't link to any examples. Who are they browbeating? I don't see MongoDB arguing that the meaning of open source should address financial incentives for developers, either. I see them arguing that open source copyleft can be strong enough to demand openness from their competitors, as GPL would have in the packaged-software era. Mongo have a financial concern, but exactly to the author's point about means versus ends, they're not trying to write their business into any definition. They're reading the definition to cover a license that works for their business. If open source didn't concern itself with business, it wouldn't exist. The whole pitch was to business. Cathedral and the Bazaar was a marketing manual for selling manager-types. O'Reilly bankrolled events and meetings. Early on in OSI history, they readily approved several stronger copyleft licenses for specific businesses. MPL. Sleepycat. QPL. IPL. RPL. Arguably AGPL. That's the history. JMW does say there hasn't been a successful open core product, but he defines success as "ubiquity in the modern data center". In business, there's plenty of success between irrelevance and market domination. Ferraris and fast chargers aren't ubiquitous in modern garages. What I see here is that open source is a business model to some interested parties. That model is add-on services---integration, customization, support, hosting---and no other. Never mind that dual licensing, open core, delayed release, and others existed well before RedHat and WordPress and IBM successes made headlines. Never mind that these models had their business standard bearers, too. Never mind that they sometimes offered support documentation or configurations for hosting that add-on service companies didn't. The difference now is that the anti-commercial, permissive-focused, "open source means I never hear 'no'" faction view happens to correspond to the interests of the titans of industry, who are all cloud services companies. These companies want to commoditize their complements---"open source" means we can reap what you sow and sell it to our customers---but not the proprietary code they use to differentiate their clouds. They patronize the big open source foundations. We shouldn't be asking what open source is or means, as if it's an end in itself. We should be asking what it's for. And accepting there was never any conflict-free consensus there. We brushed all that under a rug in the late 1990s and early 2000s, because there was fame and money and a sense of purpose to be had selling "open source" as a brand and a "revolution". Now that work is done, the victorious allies are squabbling again. So it goes.

hodgesrm 6y ago
> These companies want to commoditize their complements---"open source" means we can reap what you sow and sell it to our customers---but not the proprietary code they use to differentiate their clouds. I've worked with numerous SaaS businesses who run open source for as much external software as possible because it has better economics at scale. They want tight control of software configurations, ability to diagnose problems themselves, quick application of security patches, etc. It's not cheap; you have to hire highly qualified engineers to make it work. The approach makes more sense as the business gets bigger, in the same way that it makes sense at some point to design your own data centers, own hardware, etc. It's therefore not surprising to see large businesses go all-in on open source.

hodgesrm 6y ago

> These companies want to commoditize their complements---"open source" means we can reap what you sow and sell it to our customers---but not the proprietary code they use to differentiate their clouds. I've worked with numerous SaaS businesses who run open source for as much external software as possible because it has better economics at scale. They want tight control of software configurations, ability to diagnose problems themselves, quick application of security patches, etc. It's not cheap; you have to hire highly qualified engineers to make it work. The approach makes more sense as the business gets bigger, in the same way that it makes sense at some point to design your own data centers, own hardware, etc. It's therefore not surprising to see large businesses go all-in on open source.