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> A majority of the value created by modern software ultimately comes from free and open source software. > From this perspective most VC investments aren’t ab

by abeppu 3y ago

> A majority of the value created by modern software ultimately comes from free and open source software. > From this perspective most VC investments aren’t about creating value but about strip-mining FLOSS projects and communities. The scale is for extraction. As with so many things, I find this analysis suffers for using metaphors about the physical world with software. Strip-mining is a loaded term because it uses destructive means to acquire exclusive access to physical resources, in a way which leaves literally less than there was before, and which can be literally lethal to a literal biological ecosystem and literally toxic to physically proximal human communities. "Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with physical material means that others cannot have what you've pulled out; it's gone. A company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools (operating system, languages, build tools, application frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to) remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from enjoying it. To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can make it healthier, if for no other reason than they are cultivating more engineers that know how to use these tools. "Extraction" is not the right metaphor. The issue of adding proprietary features to OSS projects I think we should acknowledge as diluting value, not subtracting it. If the choice is between project development being discontinued at time T with core feature set F, vs continued through time T+K with extended feature set F + G + H where H is proprietary, but G is not, users who won't use the proprietary features may still benefit from G, and are still better off with continued development -- but we must acknowledge that it's at a slower rate than if H had not been added. Communities should evaluate whether diluted support is worthwhile, or at what point it should be considered abusive, or at least separated into distinct companion projects.

version_five 3y ago
I think strip mining is a good analogy. Like google has strip mined the internet and left a toxic pit behind, if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.
- infogulch 3y ago
  > left a toxic pit behind Nonsense. If google scrapes your site, your site is not affected. Where is the toxic pit, exactly?
  - _bohm 3y ago
    By becoming the de facto entry point into the internet, Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam sites that dilute and push down real content on the internet.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      You only see it if you use Google, and you are always free to not use it. They may be evil etc but this logic is like "I can't stop punching myself".
      - version_five 3y ago
        Not remotely true, you see it every time you go to a SEO optimized site, however you get there.
        throwaway290 3y ago
        And how, may I ask, do you end up on all those SEO optimized sites?
    - orangeoxidation 3y ago
      > Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam sites that dilute and push down real content on the internet They don't push real content "down the internet" they push it down the google rankings. And while Google search is not as great as it was, it remains a strong contender for the best way to find stuff on the internet. I don't think the internet would be better off without it. You can however make good arguments for Google News, "Instant Answers" in Search, and other products, taking (impressions) from the internet.(And Chrome, Chrome worries me.)
a13o 3y ago
The strip mining imagery landed for me when focusing on the trend of open source communities adjacent to cloud platforms. Citus, ElasticSearch, Kubernetes, etc all feel like corporate goliaths forked and outcompeted David. No analogy is perfect, but I can see facets of why one might liken this to strip mining.
- rrdharan 3y ago
  How does David vs. Goliath apply to any of these projects? Kubernetes was developed, paid for and released by Google and loosely inspired by Borg. ElasticSearch meanwhile wouldn't exist without Lucene which was again paid for and released by Excite in 1999, and who were very much not a David at the time. PostgreSQL came out of Berkeley.. is the idea that David is the PostgreSQL Global Development Group (which includes Microsoft, Google and Amazon employees)? Or maybe it's EDB (https://www.enterprisedb.com/ https://www.enterprisedb.com/)?
pseudocomposer 3y ago
Potential value extraction of OSS really depends on the license; the (A)GPL vs. MIT-style license debate has been going for decades now. There’s a reason none of the big corporations touch anything GPL, aside from Linux distro subdivisions that are never their direct money makers. And when you compare what actually reaches consumers, like Qt vs. GTK for an ancient but ongoing example, or basically every Android distro pre installed on a consumer phone, and the various modern MIT-licensed FE tools (React, Flutter, etc.)… the apparent levels of nefariousness/data mining/anti-competitiveness/price-gouging generally seem higher for the MIT-licensed (and especially corporate-controlled) products than (A)GPL products. (Yes, there is also definitely a trade off in terms of easy UX between these!)
skrebbel 3y ago
I agree but this blog post is hardly about that. It’s way less “companies bad, OSS good” as I expected it to be after reading your comment.
rpastuszak 3y ago
I actually like the metaphor, although I agree it's flawed. > "Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with physical material means that others cannot have what you've pulled out; it's gone. For instance, look at the amount of brainpower wasted on using tech to steal our attention via adtech (and its supporting industries), large companies using OSS to increase their monopolies instead of giving back, small companies trying to build nothing of immediate value, but rather blitz-scale so they can get sold at valuations not reflecting their value.
wpietri 3y ago
> To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can make it healthier, if for no other reason than they are cultivating more engineers that know how to use these tools. "Extraction" is not the right metaphor. It can, but it often does the opposite. "Extraction" may not be a metaphor that's quite true to the material. But it's very true to the attitude with which many companies operate, and that's because a lot of business culture was developed in extractive contexts and then applied elsewhere.
kdmccormick 3y ago
I work on one of those FLOSS projects that has several ostensibly-open-but-only-works-on-the-proprietary-instance sort of features baked into the core codebase. Some of them are dilutive, but some of them are actively subtractive, especially when they impact performance, become a blocking point during library upgrades, confuse our users, and generally make the codebase harder to reason about. This code is essentially dead code in the community offering, and we all know that dead code is not neutral, it's a liability. Fortunately, our project is moving in the opposite direction than the one that the article describes: we have an independent steering committee & well-funded core team now, and lately have been actively trying to boot proprietary features out of the core offering. But it's a lot of work, both technically and socially, and we'd have much more time to spend on new features if it weren't for the dead weight we have to deal with.
- JJMcJ 3y ago
  More than one FLOSS developer has written of huge companies with thousands of programmers working for them practically crying and begging to have a feature added to software that serves only the company's interest. Or even replying that they are busy with other things but if the company wants to pay for the change they can work on it, and company replying that that seems like "extortion", as if the developer is under moral obligation to fix Initrode's problems for free by the end of the week.
  - kdmccormick 3y ago
    Yeah, our situation isn't quite that bad. The big company is happy to write the feature usually, but that doesn't mean the feature should be bolted into the main repo with its special dependencies dropped right into setup.py install_requires.
  - ThrowawayR2 3y ago
    > "...huge companies with thousands of programmers working for them practically crying and begging to have a feature added to software..." One clueless employee, almost certainly without the knowledge of his cow-orkers or managers let alone any kind of authorization to represent their employer when communicating externally, writes a dumb email to a FOSS project and suddenly the tech commentariat is all abuzz about "$BIGCORP (the whole thing) is 'practically crying and begging' to $FOSS_PROJECT for a feature"? Surely there must be a name for this fallacy and, if not, there should be. The organizational hivemind fallacy perhaps?
gochi 3y ago
>A company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools (operating system, languages, build tools, application frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to) remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from enjoying it They don't need to, until they realize people aren't upgrading to the added layers of offerings and then start removing that value. This is required because the base value tends to be substantial enough to swiftly encourage people to use it, and VC loves the growth this comes with.
- monocasa 3y ago
  Most company use of OSS isn't a freemium model, but instead them using it for their infrastructure in complements to their ultimate product. Think Google's use of Linux on their servers, or their use of gcc/clang to compile their search application.
  - gochi 3y ago
    Disagree on that. It is the freemium model that's used. Specifically enterprise tiers for the vast majority of OSS. There is a crucial subsection of OSS used within companies but those often come with support contracts and branding which is what you're referring to with Google, but a far cry from "most".
    - monocasa 3y ago
      No, like, how many companies are paying support contracts for Nginx, anything you npm install, anything their engineers 'brew install'. Some of these might have support contracts that you can buy, but that's not used in the vast majority of cases. I really do think you're not seeing the forest through the trees here.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
keepamovin 3y ago
I’m launching something soon to try to reverse this and give back power to open source creators, around their earnings and, to bring a bit of order to an informal marketplace that really needs it. If you’re interested, join the wait list / launch email list and you’ll get to be among the first to use it: https://ash6wpkw.paperform.co/ https://ash6wpkw.paperform.co/
esafak 3y ago
Which FLOSS projects did pyTorch and Tensorflow -- the libraries behind the hottest companies today -- strip mine? Both come from venture-backed companies.
- bombolo 3y ago
  And they have no dependencies? Despite being known for being hellish to install due to how badly they handle dependencies…
behringer 3y ago
I think open source users need to get more serious about using a more pro consumer license like the gnu gpl. If you're using less restricting licensing you're working for Amazon for free.
paulddraper 3y ago
Often these open-source projects have their own commercial offerings to support development, e.g. Elasticstack, MongoDB. And then AWS destroys that, without offering any contributions themselves. So it's no longer commercially viable for the original organization, and development suffers. That's a net negative result.
Havoc 3y ago
> I find this analysis suffers for using metaphors about the physical world with software. Strip-mining is a loaded term The analysis isn’t suffering from it but rather that is the analysis. The authors whole point is that these foss communities and projects will die as a result

by abeppu 3y ago

version_five 3y ago

I think strip mining is a good analogy. Like google has strip mined the internet and left a toxic pit behind, if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.

infogulch 3y ago
> left a toxic pit behind Nonsense. If google scrapes your site, your site is not affected. Where is the toxic pit, exactly?
- _bohm 3y ago
  By becoming the de facto entry point into the internet, Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam sites that dilute and push down real content on the internet.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    You only see it if you use Google, and you are always free to not use it. They may be evil etc but this logic is like "I can't stop punching myself".
    - version_five 3y ago
      Not remotely true, you see it every time you go to a SEO optimized site, however you get there.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        And how, may I ask, do you end up on all those SEO optimized sites?
  - orangeoxidation 3y ago
    > Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam sites that dilute and push down real content on the internet They don't push real content "down the internet" they push it down the google rankings. And while Google search is not as great as it was, it remains a strong contender for the best way to find stuff on the internet. I don't think the internet would be better off without it. You can however make good arguments for Google News, "Instant Answers" in Search, and other products, taking (impressions) from the internet.(And Chrome, Chrome worries me.)

a13o 3y ago

The strip mining imagery landed for me when focusing on the trend of open source communities adjacent to cloud platforms. Citus, ElasticSearch, Kubernetes, etc all feel like corporate goliaths forked and outcompeted David. No analogy is perfect, but I can see facets of why one might liken this to strip mining.

rrdharan 3y ago
How does David vs. Goliath apply to any of these projects? Kubernetes was developed, paid for and released by Google and loosely inspired by Borg. ElasticSearch meanwhile wouldn't exist without Lucene which was again paid for and released by Excite in 1999, and who were very much not a David at the time. PostgreSQL came out of Berkeley.. is the idea that David is the PostgreSQL Global Development Group (which includes Microsoft, Google and Amazon employees)? Or maybe it's EDB (https://www.enterprisedb.com/ https://www.enterprisedb.com/)?

pseudocomposer 3y ago

Potential value extraction of OSS really depends on the license; the (A)GPL vs. MIT-style license debate has been going for decades now. There’s a reason none of the big corporations touch anything GPL, aside from Linux distro subdivisions that are never their direct money makers. And when you compare what actually reaches consumers, like Qt vs. GTK for an ancient but ongoing example, or basically every Android distro pre installed on a consumer phone, and the various modern MIT-licensed FE tools (React, Flutter, etc.)… the apparent levels of nefariousness/data mining/anti-competitiveness/price-gouging generally seem higher for the MIT-licensed (and especially corporate-controlled) products than (A)GPL products. (Yes, there is also definitely a trade off in terms of easy UX between these!)

skrebbel 3y ago

I agree but this blog post is hardly about that. It’s way less “companies bad, OSS good” as I expected it to be after reading your comment.

rpastuszak 3y ago

I actually like the metaphor, although I agree it's flawed. > "Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with physical material means that others cannot have what you've pulled out; it's gone. For instance, look at the amount of brainpower wasted on using tech to steal our attention via adtech (and its supporting industries), large companies using OSS to increase their monopolies instead of giving back, small companies trying to build nothing of immediate value, but rather blitz-scale so they can get sold at valuations not reflecting their value.

wpietri 3y ago

> To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can make it healthier, if for no other reason than they are cultivating more engineers that know how to use these tools. "Extraction" is not the right metaphor. It can, but it often does the opposite. "Extraction" may not be a metaphor that's quite true to the material. But it's very true to the attitude with which many companies operate, and that's because a lot of business culture was developed in extractive contexts and then applied elsewhere.

kdmccormick 3y ago

I work on one of those FLOSS projects that has several ostensibly-open-but-only-works-on-the-proprietary-instance sort of features baked into the core codebase. Some of them are dilutive, but some of them are actively subtractive, especially when they impact performance, become a blocking point during library upgrades, confuse our users, and generally make the codebase harder to reason about. This code is essentially dead code in the community offering, and we all know that dead code is not neutral, it's a liability. Fortunately, our project is moving in the opposite direction than the one that the article describes: we have an independent steering committee & well-funded core team now, and lately have been actively trying to boot proprietary features out of the core offering. But it's a lot of work, both technically and socially, and we'd have much more time to spend on new features if it weren't for the dead weight we have to deal with.

JJMcJ 3y ago
More than one FLOSS developer has written of huge companies with thousands of programmers working for them practically crying and begging to have a feature added to software that serves only the company's interest. Or even replying that they are busy with other things but if the company wants to pay for the change they can work on it, and company replying that that seems like "extortion", as if the developer is under moral obligation to fix Initrode's problems for free by the end of the week.
- kdmccormick 3y ago
  Yeah, our situation isn't quite that bad. The big company is happy to write the feature usually, but that doesn't mean the feature should be bolted into the main repo with its special dependencies dropped right into setup.py install_requires.
- ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  > "...huge companies with thousands of programmers working for them practically crying and begging to have a feature added to software..." One clueless employee, almost certainly without the knowledge of his cow-orkers or managers let alone any kind of authorization to represent their employer when communicating externally, writes a dumb email to a FOSS project and suddenly the tech commentariat is all abuzz about "$BIGCORP (the whole thing) is 'practically crying and begging' to $FOSS_PROJECT for a feature"? Surely there must be a name for this fallacy and, if not, there should be. The organizational hivemind fallacy perhaps?

gochi 3y ago

>A company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools (operating system, languages, build tools, application frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to) remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from enjoying it They don't need to, until they realize people aren't upgrading to the added layers of offerings and then start removing that value. This is required because the base value tends to be substantial enough to swiftly encourage people to use it, and VC loves the growth this comes with.

monocasa 3y ago
Most company use of OSS isn't a freemium model, but instead them using it for their infrastructure in complements to their ultimate product. Think Google's use of Linux on their servers, or their use of gcc/clang to compile their search application.
- gochi 3y ago
  Disagree on that. It is the freemium model that's used. Specifically enterprise tiers for the vast majority of OSS. There is a crucial subsection of OSS used within companies but those often come with support contracts and branding which is what you're referring to with Google, but a far cry from "most".
  - monocasa 3y ago
    No, like, how many companies are paying support contracts for Nginx, anything you npm install, anything their engineers 'brew install'. Some of these might have support contracts that you can buy, but that's not used in the vast majority of cases. I really do think you're not seeing the forest through the trees here.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

keepamovin 3y ago

I’m launching something soon to try to reverse this and give back power to open source creators, around their earnings and, to bring a bit of order to an informal marketplace that really needs it. If you’re interested, join the wait list / launch email list and you’ll get to be among the first to use it: https://ash6wpkw.paperform.co/ https://ash6wpkw.paperform.co/

esafak 3y ago

Which FLOSS projects did pyTorch and Tensorflow -- the libraries behind the hottest companies today -- strip mine? Both come from venture-backed companies.

bombolo 3y ago
And they have no dependencies? Despite being known for being hellish to install due to how badly they handle dependencies…

behringer 3y ago

I think open source users need to get more serious about using a more pro consumer license like the gnu gpl. If you're using less restricting licensing you're working for Amazon for free.

paulddraper 3y ago

Often these open-source projects have their own commercial offerings to support development, e.g. Elasticstack, MongoDB. And then AWS destroys that, without offering any contributions themselves. So it's no longer commercially viable for the original organization, and development suffers. That's a net negative result.

Havoc 3y ago

> I find this analysis suffers for using metaphors about the physical world with software. Strip-mining is a loaded term The analysis isn’t suffering from it but rather that is the analysis. The authors whole point is that these foss communities and projects will die as a result