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In rebuttal I'll paraphrase a little from Paul Ramsey (maintainer of 20-year open source project PostGIS)[0] His basic view is that Open Source is the dominant

In rebuttal I'll paraphrase a little from Paul Ramsey (maintainer of 20-year open source project PostGIS)[0] His basic view is that Open Source is the dominant model today, but tension comes as very little of the value produced comes back to the community that creates this value. He argues this will always be 'the bare minimum' by virtue of economics, but that if something important slows down too much someone will put some money in it. But this is a model that operates and works. It is borne out by his history in postgis, which is maintained by a small number of people mostly in moderately-profitable service companies, in the red-hat mould. He's concerned about value being captured by cloud companies though who frequently don't employ open-source maintainers however. Some of this is further expounded in another talk by him here [1] (slides at [2]) on the future of open-source where he is very bullish. [0] from about 19:00 onwards here https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-88 https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-88 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ5_NnrBHjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ5_NnrBHjo [2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-PAgIk9--nedCdfMGEwhcnqxqy1fGYUXwWhxzMfqJZg/edit#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-PAgIk9--nedCdfMGEwh...

darksaints 5y ago
This personally rings true for me. My company is getting literally billions of dollars worth of value from a couple of applications (one of which I created and maintain) built upon the foundation of Postgres and PostGIS. And we benefit immensely from active development of it: PostGIS version 3.1 released a new more efficient overlay algorithm which probably saves us $5k a year in compute costs alone, and untold thousands with the ability to deprecate a hacked house of cards that was ready to crumble. And yet every time I have mentioned to my management that it would be great if we could take 1% of our consulting budget and funnel it towards PostGIS, they respond almost bewildered...why willingly pay for something that we already get for free? It's frustrating and I have no idea how to remedy it.
- sircastor 5y ago
  I can’t speak to this directly, as I haven’t had to deal with this at the management level. My thought though is that this is preventative care. This is going to the Doctor regularly so you don’t get surprised when something goes awry. Likewise, making sure the OSS project you’re totally dependent on doesn’t suffer a catastrophic failure or abandonment is a worthy investment.
- musicale 5y ago
  > why willingly pay for something that we already get for free? That pretty much sums it up. It's why money is unlikely to flow from businesses into open source projects unless the developers are employed by those businesses, in which case the question often becomes "why are we paying to develop software that will be given away free to our competitors?"
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Maybe think of some feature or optimization that would benefit your company, and fund its development by one of the contributors?
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Too true. If you are a dev, ask yourself how large your budget is to distribute for projects that are among your business critical core dependencies, but are developed externally under free software licences. I am not blaming you if you don't even know the word budget. Of course the best business strategy under current rules would be to let other companies pay here. That would net you a competitive advantage. Perhaps GPL was right in the end and companies need to be forced to either contribute or pay for commercial alternatives. Maybe some would learn how expensive software really is and that it requires constant investment of maintenance as most other products do as well.

darksaints 5y ago

This personally rings true for me. My company is getting literally billions of dollars worth of value from a couple of applications (one of which I created and maintain) built upon the foundation of Postgres and PostGIS. And we benefit immensely from active development of it: PostGIS version 3.1 released a new more efficient overlay algorithm which probably saves us $5k a year in compute costs alone, and untold thousands with the ability to deprecate a hacked house of cards that was ready to crumble. And yet every time I have mentioned to my management that it would be great if we could take 1% of our consulting budget and funnel it towards PostGIS, they respond almost bewildered...why willingly pay for something that we already get for free? It's frustrating and I have no idea how to remedy it.

sircastor 5y ago
I can’t speak to this directly, as I haven’t had to deal with this at the management level. My thought though is that this is preventative care. This is going to the Doctor regularly so you don’t get surprised when something goes awry. Likewise, making sure the OSS project you’re totally dependent on doesn’t suffer a catastrophic failure or abandonment is a worthy investment.
musicale 5y ago
> why willingly pay for something that we already get for free? That pretty much sums it up. It's why money is unlikely to flow from businesses into open source projects unless the developers are employed by those businesses, in which case the question often becomes "why are we paying to develop software that will be given away free to our competitors?"
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Maybe think of some feature or optimization that would benefit your company, and fund its development by one of the contributors?
raxxorrax 5y ago
Too true. If you are a dev, ask yourself how large your budget is to distribute for projects that are among your business critical core dependencies, but are developed externally under free software licences. I am not blaming you if you don't even know the word budget. Of course the best business strategy under current rules would be to let other companies pay here. That would net you a competitive advantage. Perhaps GPL was right in the end and companies need to be forced to either contribute or pay for commercial alternatives. Maybe some would learn how expensive software really is and that it requires constant investment of maintenance as most other products do as well.