11 ms·

Why Open Source?

169 points by subomi 3y ago

spjain 3y ago
Feel the same way with integralapi.co – we'll be going open source very soon but want to make sure we have everything "open source ready". Can't give out code that can't be exposed to the public.
- ushakov 3y ago
  Love the website design, but don't quite understand what it is and what problem you're trying to solve?
ezekg 3y ago
I really love the sudden surge of open sources businesses coming out of YC and in general. I share some of the same sentiments in the post, having open sourced my SaaS business of 7 years earlier this year. One of my main driving forces was market pressure from enterprises wanting to self-host. One of the other drivers was my bus-factor of 1, as was longevity as you mentioned. Time will tell if the distribution side of things will ring true for my business, but I'm hoping it will judging by initial growth i.r.t. CE. I wrote more about my "whys" here [0] if anybody is interested in a similar post. [0]: https://keygen.sh/blog/all-your-licensing-are-belong-to-you/ https://keygen.sh/blog/all-your-licensing-are-belong-to-you/
- pabs3 3y ago
  FYI, the license you chose doesn't seem like it would meet the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
- subomi 3y ago
  OP here. Hey, I read your post and I'm a big fan of keygen. I plan on self-hosting it too for Convoy soon. :)
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - ezekg 3y ago
    That's *really* awesome to hear. Thanks for sharing. :) Let me know if you ever need anything!
    - subomi 3y ago
      Sure thing. Well done!!
- deleted 3y ago
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whobre 3y ago
Deja vu from the late 1990s
paulgb 3y ago
Well said, Subomi. I’d like to see more open source companies be public about how they think about open source as a strategic decision (admittedly, I could do better about this myself). I think Vercel / Next.js and Automattic / Wordpress are great examples of aligning value to the business while also creating (and not capturing) a bunch of value to users of the open source project. As a result of leaving some value on the table for users, both projects have a thriving plugin/extension community that wouldn't exist if they were closed-source or confined to a single vendor. Likewise, I'm more likely to start a Next.js project knowing that I can host it anywhere, even though my default is to use Vercel.
- subomi 3y ago
  Paul, please write the article. I *want* to read it. Hard agree. It's why I also believe that more & more companies will be more strategic with their licensing choice from the beginning. The common wisdom is to give it all away and grow at all costs, then switch licenses when there's brand value and the business needs revenue. This is poor because the license changes aren't bad in themselves because they still enable the individual developer to take enormous benefits, but they come with significant disadvantages like community drama, bad pr etc.
deleted 3y ago
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ushakov 3y ago
Elephant in the room: People looking for open-source solutions are not looking to spend money, it's usually the opposite. If you want to build a business around open-source you should keep in mind, that your users are not your customers. What individual software developers want is different what enterprises want to pay for. Focus on the latter
- simonw 3y ago
  "People looking for open-source solutions are not looking to spend money, it's usually the opposite." I don't think that's true. In previous positions where I've had significant influence on budget spend I've still favored open source solutions because they make more sense from a risk point of view: should the vendor fail, the product has a solid chance of continuing to be useful.
  - ushakov 3y ago
    It depends. I'd rather go with a venture-baked open-source solution rather than something made by one person in his free time
    - nazgulsenpai 3y ago
      I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here except some people/companies have different priorities -- and if that's the case then there's room for both VC backed startups and smaller open-source projects.
- danenania 3y ago
  It's the freemium model, which has always required a sufficient conversion rate from free to paid to work. That doesn't mean you should ignore what your free/OSS users want though. Today's hobbyist OSS user may be hired at a big company tomorrow and introduce everyone there to your product.
  - ushakov 3y ago
    Last week, I talked to a VC, who's invested in a pretty popular open-source startup. They have huge issues converting oss users > paying businesses
simonw 3y ago
I'm building https://www.datasette.cloud/ https://www.datasette.cloud/ and https://datasette.io/ https://datasette.io/ almost entirely open source for a number of commercial reasons. 1. I want organizations (initially newsrooms that care about data journalism, but rapidly growing beyond that) to be able to trust the product. The default result of 95% of startups is to go out of business, and going all-in on a product that then blinks out of existence is bad! When I'm selecting a vendor this is a thing I always consider, so I'd like my customers to feel confident that they have the ultimate escape hatch - run it yourself - should they ever need it. 2. Newsrooms in particular have learned this lesson before, many times over - and not just for startups. Remember Google Fusion Tables? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables That's just one relatively recent example. 3. Datasette is an ecosystem play. There are over 100 plugins already - https://datasette.io/plugins https://datasette.io/plugins - and I hope for there to be thousands more. Developers don't invest nearly as heavily in building and releasing plugins for closed-source platforms. 4. Open source is a way for me to punch _way_ above my weight. I can have a much larger impact on the world by participating in open source, compared to if everything I'd been building had been closed.
- MPlus88 3y ago
  How are you going to monetize it? Your site has no mention of pricing.
  - simonw 3y ago
    I'm going to charge organizations a monthly fee for using the hosted SaaS service. Implementing billing and setting pricing is next on my TODO list!
    - codetrotter 3y ago
      Will the billing system itself also be an open source plug-in for datasette? :D
      - 3y ago
BirAdam 3y ago
Honestly? I personally care very little whether or not something is open source at this point in time. Code bases have become so large that there’s little benefit to me other than self-hosting, and there are few things I care to self-host. The main argument I would make is that companies should, at the very least, open source everything before shuttering. If you’re going out of business, allow your former customers to maintain themselves what you’re no longer going to maintain yourself.
- willio58 3y ago
  I never self host out of pure laziness. I like open source because I know (at least theoretically) that I can go in and fix something with a PR in a codebase I don’t “own”. I've fixed like 2 things in projects I've used ever, I kinda suck as a contributor. But the indirect benefits I get from others being able to contribute to these projects is immense.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Fix, or just understand. There is "documentation" and there is documentation. And the real documentation is always the code.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  The real question is about contingency planning. Open source means you have the option to host yourself, but like you say that could be a lot of hassle, or more work than just switching to another closed source SaaS. There are a few factors. If the space is competitive and there is an established API/protocol, it probably doesn't matter. Think Wordpress hosting, Email, renting VMs etc. If it is open source and widely adopted - e.g. Linux, Redis, Kubernetes etc. then you know that thing is going to be supported forever. Although with the slight risk of a Terraform/Moq type issue. But then you have open source and widely adopted with shifting APIs that generate more work - e.g. React. Then you have these small companies that open source on YC with a 1-1 mapping between repo and corporation. If the corp goes under, the repo may go stale. The decision as to the expected longevity and migration pain depends on a lot of factors. It is sort of intuitive. But open sourceness (and license freeness) is just one factor.
endisneigh 3y ago
Though as an end user I love open source - I love it because it’s free, but you’re not going to necessarily build a business off people who like free stuff unless it involves monetizing them another way (ads, getting them to give you labor for free, etc). Open source aside I wish there were some improvements on doing a highly available self hosted setup. I’m talking plugging 5 machines into a router and power and it just works. Auto healing, redundant backups, etc.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  I find "open core" or source-available (with license allowing self-hosting and custom modifications) to be a good middle ground. It allows potential users to quickly try out the solution and prove its worth without having to first go through a (often months-long in big companies) procurement process. It also allows users to understand how the system works internally which can fill gaps in documentation or cover use-cases the original developer hasn't thought of. It can also allow them to fix bugs/edge-cases (that may not be in upstream as they are specific to a niche use-case) or to tweak the software to better fit their infrastructure. Finally being self-hostable automatically makes the software suitable for secure, potentially air-gapped environments or allows the software to be deployed closer to where the rest of the infrastructure is.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    Disagree on source-available... if the upstream business dies, source available doesn't necessarily allow you to make adjustments or fix bugs should that upstream company go under, or just stop supporting the application/library/service you depend on.
    - ezekg 3y ago
      What "source-available" license doesn't allow you to do that via a fork? I'd love to know. ELv2 allows it. BUSL allows it. SSPL allows it. Apache Commons allows it. People diss these licenses and they don't even understand them.
gardenhedge 3y ago
Open source allows other Open companies to train their models.
tzhenghao 3y ago
Open source also serves as a "defense strategy" for larger companies whose core business does not directly / indirectly depend on commercializing its open source project(s). They in turn serve more like hedges. For example, Meta with PyTorch in context of the machine learning tooling space. PyTorch is probably strategically important for them as they do not have a cloud business. The other large competing deep learning framework is Tensorflow, designed and open sourced by Google but also owns a cloud business (GCP). They also have in-house AI accelerators like TPUs. Microsoft didn't really have a deep learning framework, but they have ONNX, and is now using ONNXRuntime as an on-ramp to their cloud business (Azure). If Meta wants to continue doing ML, and all the other cloud players jacked up their prices, that's gonna hurt Meta's operating costs. So it's still "cheap" to have hedged against such a scenario. All these on top of upsides like developer marketing etc.
- mousetree 3y ago
  > If Meta wants to continue doing ML, and all the other cloud players jacked up their prices, that's gonna hurt Meta's operating costs How so? Meta is not running AWS/GCP/Azure.
  - tzhenghao 3y ago
    They’re not, but there’s non-zero probability most R&D below a deep learning framework gets fully vertically integrated (or even aggregated in the short term) to just the big cloud players.
    - indymike 3y ago
      Give this time, and it will change.
- bootsmann 3y ago
  Open sourcing Pytorch was also a human resources decision. Big tech learned this lesson somewhere around 2014, that whatever problems they solve, other companies will have 5 years down the line and if they don’t open source their solutions someone else will release the industry defining standard and meta & co will have trouble hiring people for their handrolled solution 15 years down the line. IIrc some spotify engineer said in an interview once that this was a big reason behind them open-sourcing backstage.
zabzonk 3y ago
> 92% of SaaS companies fail then for gods sake stop creating them! also what has this to do with foss?
gandhirs 3y ago
Why male modela?
returningfory2 3y ago
In light of Terraform/HashiCorp's license change recently, how "open source" should we consider companies like this? Currently their GitHub repo is licensed under an open-source Mozilla license [1]. But contributors also have to sign a CLA [2] which perhaps (?) allows the company to re-license the work like HashiCorp did? Should we now consider companies like this to be "open source for the moment"? [1] https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy [2] https://cla-assistant.io/frain-dev/convoy?pullRequest=1362 https://cla-assistant.io/frain-dev/convoy?pullRequest=1362
- deleted 3y ago
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- remram 3y ago
  Open source is about the license out, please don't try and add more implied meanings to the word. It's getting ambiguous fast enough. How about "open to contributions" or "open governance"?
  - returningfory2 3y ago
    > Open source is about the license out Could you clarify what you mean here? Is "out" a typo?
    - remram 3y ago
      "outbound" is the usual term I think, the license terms under which users get the product. There is no requirement on the "inbound" terms, what you have to do to get the project to make or accept the changes your request. E.g. "inbound=outbound" is a common model for contribution [1], a short way of saying that contributions are licensed by their author under the same conditions that the project is available to users. But that has nothing to do with whether a project is open source. [1]: Example in GitHub ToS: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#6-contributions-under-repository-license https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
andy99 3y ago
I looked into this recently in relation to AI models, and had the following list for reasons companies (and ICs to some extent) open source. It's my own post but I think it's on topic here: http://marble.onl/posts/motivations_for_open_source.html http://marble.onl/posts/motivations_for_open_source.html Name recognition Community contribution Collaboration Building a user base Creating a standard
smarx007 3y ago
While on the topic, I think EUPL should become the default license for open-source projects in the business context. It's a weak copyleft license (OSI and FSF approved), so it does not strike mortal fear of "viral" license spread on business partners. Similar to EPL, MPL, and LGPL, it creates an obligation of sharing back the changes made to weak-copyleft licensed portion of the code. Finally, EUPL closes the SaaS loophole, which is similar to a non-existent Affero LGPL license.
- rapnie 3y ago
  It is interesting that the EU institutions started using #EUVoice (Mastodon) [0] and #EUVideo (Peertube) [1] on the Fediverse, both AGPL-licensed. [0] https://social.network.europa.eu https://social.network.europa.eu [1] https://tube.network.europa.eu https://tube.network.europa.eu
- arp242 3y ago
  The EUPL has a lot of things going for it: it's readable by mortals (unlike GPL), has official translations, and in general is just "GPL, but better". That said, it doesn't quite close the "SaaS loophole". Or rather, it's somewhat easily circumvented as the EUPL allows combining your code with other copyleft "compatible licenses" and then redistributing all of this combined work under the "compatible license". These compatible licenses include the GPL and LGPL. For my project I removed these licenses from the list of "compatible license", so technically it's not "EUPL 1.2", although it's close enough... I brought this up with one of the authors of the EUPL a few years back, and they felt it was fine as-is, but I still wish it would allow things to be a bit more flexible in this regard. Still, I think EUPL is an excellent replacement for the GPL. But AGPL is a bit more complex. I still prefer my "EUPL 1.2 Martin flavour" because IMHO the AGPL is a horrendously written license and the text is just atrocious even by legalize standards. It sees very little usage unfortunately; last time I checked my project was the only one in all of the Void repo to use EUPL :-/
  - jmholla 3y ago
    Which of your projects uses your modified license? That sounds like it could be just right for a project I'm working on. Edit: Reading up more on it, it sounds like modifying the license isn't allowed. It's explicitly called out in section 3.7 of their guidelines. [0] Also, I didn't see anything in their guidelines that would help with the "SaaS loophole", unless you are referring just to the source availability as the loophole. [0]: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/inline-files/EUPL%201_1%20Guidelines%20EN%20Joinup.pdf https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/inline-files...
Aleklart 3y ago
Because Free Software gives to much freedom to users.
jehb 3y ago
It's an interesting question, but it's the opposite of the one I usually ask. Software should be open source. "Why try to monetize?" would be the question I'd ask myself.
bibryam 3y ago
I described a checklist for open source vs fake open source evaluation https://blog.oss.fund/p/a-framework-for-open-source-evaluation https://blog.oss.fund/p/a-framework-for-open-source-evaluati...
abatilo 3y ago
I used to open source every single thing I built. But recently, I stopped doing that because now I build everything as a single monorepo. All of my completely disconnected side project ideas are all in one repo and I'm much more happy being able to keep this like dependencies up to date in one place instead of having a different repo per project. I would like to go back to open sourcing all things I play with but maybe I need to find a repo structure and tooling that would make that more sustainable.
- clcaev 3y ago
  have a look at git subtree?
MrNeRF 3y ago
Open source software deserves celebration. Its impact on the world is profound and transformative. Recently, I began porting the 3D Gaussian splatting paper to C++ and CUDA with an aim to optimize the training speed of such models. This endeavor was only possible because the original authors open-sourced their work. The feedback has been encouraging, and I feel that I'm making a difference—perhaps even more than in my regular job. That said, it's essential to remember that contributing to open source, while rewarding, can be demanding if it's not your full-time occupation. Yet, through such efforts, we ensure these tools remain freely accessible and aren't monopolized by corporations. I provide you the link to this GitHub project in case you are interested. https://github.com/MrNeRF/gaussian-splatting-cuda https://github.com/MrNeRF/gaussian-splatting-cuda
nologic01 3y ago
It is quite intriguing that after four decades [1] it is not particularly clear why individuals and organizations adopt "open source" (in one of its many forms). Yet somehow it keeps growing as tangible reality and is now possibly irreversible. There have been countless arguments for motivations, benefits (short and long term), sustainable business models etc., with various degrees of plausibility but in general rather vague, anecdotal and subjective. What is missing is not reflection on the phenomenon by its practitioners (or others in the tech domain) but the sharp, objective and comprehensive eye of scholars with legal and economic expertise (and by now, also a knack for tech history). Understanding the dynamics of "open source" (in quotes again, because of its wide and evolving range of manifestations) is quite important. E.g., there are many domains that seem completely allergic to it, for reasons that are as unclear as the reasons for success in other areas. In any case, while techies are taking it for granted, it is one of the most remarkable social phenomena of recent times. There aren't that many examples of large scale cooperation / coopetition of complete strangers across the planet, working on very concrete and useful tools. [1] lets take the GNU project as the nominal start of the open source era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project
new_user_final 3y ago
how do you integrate convoy with twilio? it seems twilio webhook needs custom response based on event e.g record call.
- subomi 3y ago
  You can configure a custom response on every source configured on Convoy.
reshmakh 3y ago
Thought this was great - especially being so up front about the value of distribution. I wrote a post about the very same meetup, but note distribution is not one of our "why open source" answers https://www.medplum.com/blog/yc-oss-faq https://www.medplum.com/blog/yc-oss-faq - perhaps we are alone in this regard https://github.com/medplum/medplum https://github.com/medplum/medplum
tiffanyh 3y ago
It’s interesting to see how “being open source” has become the new “freemium” GTM model, but with significantly more downsides for the vendor. E.g., now you don’t even know who’s using your product, how to collect their feedback nor who to contact to convert them to paid.
gregwebs 3y ago
Open source creates the largest possible market share for the project. Those doing most of the code contributions will miss out on monetizing a lot of this market. But it's better to monetize 10% of a market that is 100x bigger than monetize 100% of a market that is 100x smaller. Even if someone else isn't contributing much and is monetizing another 1% of the market.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  I am pro-open source, I contribute back to projects, I've been doing this since the 90s. I'm going to gently push back a little bit on this: > But it's better to monetize 10% of a market that is 100x bigger than monetize 100% of a market that is 100x smaller. The piece to really think about is the support burden. Yes, with your numbers, you've monetized 10x net more users. But you have 100x more users who think you owe them free tech support, and if you are sufficiently curt while telling them "I don't care if you're having problems, the people who pay me are happy. If you want help, you too can pay me", you can quickly end up with a much smaller market than if you just had a much smaller happy set of closed-source users to being with. Open Source is amazing. I wouldn't in a million years want to be the maintainer of a large open-source project. The people who do that without burning out deserve sainthood.
  - gregwebs 3y ago
    You are talking about unmonetized open source (which I agree with you about). But the context of this conversation is companies monetizing open source. I have been in both situations and it wasn’t a problem when at the company monetizing.
janosdebugs 3y ago
> Open Source is the ultimate form of sustainability. If the company that produces open source fails, the software doesn't have maintainers anymore. Unless someone else picks up working on a possibly hugely complex piece of code, you will have an outdated, possibly full-of-secholes relic in no time. Software isn't static. So many open source projects have a funding problem. A single company pays the 5-15-50 developers it takes to keep it alive, build releases and so on, and then suddenly goes under or pulls funding. You can't just simply take over the mainenance of a large project at the snap of your fingers. The projects mentioned in the article are the exception, not the rule. The "community" doesn't typically come up with funding to the tune of several million dollars a year, nor does it have the know-how on all the details. If you need an example, take a look at the commit graph of the oVirt project [1] after Red Hat decided to sunset it. No forks, very little in the eay of new maintainers. Unless you want to risk it, you probably need to move off oVirt sooner or later. (Bias disclaimer: I worked on the Kubernetes/OpenShift integration for oVirt for ~2 years.) [1] https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-engine/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-engine/graphs/commit-activity
- opensource4ever 3y ago
  For sure, but this is infinity better than some close sourced project (like hardware driver, old iphone), where the user are stuck because the code is NOT open. What you are mentioning seems like a business and funding issue in general for software development. However, in now days and age everything (beside private key) ought to be open sourced. That is how a transparent work will work. And as we can lack of transparency has caused way more problem than problem such as oVirt project
  - janosdebugs 3y ago
    I agree that it would be better to have the source code for things. However, what good is the source code if you don't know how to, or even worse, can't build it because it was always built using an intricate web of build systems that rely on servers that no longer exist? Can I patch and recompile the project on my computer and is it easy to find out how to do it? Do I even have the tools to build it freely available? Unfortunately, a great many open source projects fail this test.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
Convoy being a VC funded company I think the mission for Conoy is to grow, grow, go public, increase shareholder value. Or these days, perhaps build, grow and make actual real profits. not "" At Convoy, our mission is simple; we genuinely want to put our technology into the hands of as many engineers as possible without having to worry about long sales cycles, data compliance issues, and being constrained to your immediate network & friends. ""
ThinkBeat 3y ago
How does being open source free a company from data compliance issues? > ... without having to worry about long sales cycles, data compliance issues which may or may not be associated with this part: > ... and try to justify it with something-something data privacy.

169 points by subomi 3y ago

Feel the same way with integralapi.co – we'll be going open source very soon but want to make sure we have everything "open source ready". Can't give out code that can't be exposed to the public.

ushakov 3y ago
Love the website design, but don't quite understand what it is and what problem you're trying to solve?

ezekg 3y ago

I really love the sudden surge of open sources businesses coming out of YC and in general. I share some of the same sentiments in the post, having open sourced my SaaS business of 7 years earlier this year. One of my main driving forces was market pressure from enterprises wanting to self-host. One of the other drivers was my bus-factor of 1, as was longevity as you mentioned. Time will tell if the distribution side of things will ring true for my business, but I'm hoping it will judging by initial growth i.r.t. CE. I wrote more about my "whys" here [0] if anybody is interested in a similar post. [0]: https://keygen.sh/blog/all-your-licensing-are-belong-to-you/ https://keygen.sh/blog/all-your-licensing-are-belong-to-you/

pabs3 3y ago
FYI, the license you chose doesn't seem like it would meet the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
subomi 3y ago
OP here. Hey, I read your post and I'm a big fan of keygen. I plan on self-hosting it too for Convoy soon. :)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ezekg 3y ago
  That's *really* awesome to hear. Thanks for sharing. :) Let me know if you ever need anything!
  - subomi 3y ago
    Sure thing. Well done!!
deleted 3y ago
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whobre 3y ago

Deja vu from the late 1990s

paulgb 3y ago

Well said, Subomi. I’d like to see more open source companies be public about how they think about open source as a strategic decision (admittedly, I could do better about this myself). I think Vercel / Next.js and Automattic / Wordpress are great examples of aligning value to the business while also creating (and not capturing) a bunch of value to users of the open source project. As a result of leaving some value on the table for users, both projects have a thriving plugin/extension community that wouldn't exist if they were closed-source or confined to a single vendor. Likewise, I'm more likely to start a Next.js project knowing that I can host it anywhere, even though my default is to use Vercel.

subomi 3y ago
Paul, please write the article. I *want* to read it. Hard agree. It's why I also believe that more & more companies will be more strategic with their licensing choice from the beginning. The common wisdom is to give it all away and grow at all costs, then switch licenses when there's brand value and the business needs revenue. This is poor because the license changes aren't bad in themselves because they still enable the individual developer to take enormous benefits, but they come with significant disadvantages like community drama, bad pr etc.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ushakov 3y ago

Elephant in the room: People looking for open-source solutions are not looking to spend money, it's usually the opposite. If you want to build a business around open-source you should keep in mind, that your users are not your customers. What individual software developers want is different what enterprises want to pay for. Focus on the latter

simonw 3y ago
"People looking for open-source solutions are not looking to spend money, it's usually the opposite." I don't think that's true. In previous positions where I've had significant influence on budget spend I've still favored open source solutions because they make more sense from a risk point of view: should the vendor fail, the product has a solid chance of continuing to be useful.
- ushakov 3y ago
  It depends. I'd rather go with a venture-baked open-source solution rather than something made by one person in his free time
  - nazgulsenpai 3y ago
    I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here except some people/companies have different priorities -- and if that's the case then there's room for both VC backed startups and smaller open-source projects.
danenania 3y ago
It's the freemium model, which has always required a sufficient conversion rate from free to paid to work. That doesn't mean you should ignore what your free/OSS users want though. Today's hobbyist OSS user may be hired at a big company tomorrow and introduce everyone there to your product.
- ushakov 3y ago
  Last week, I talked to a VC, who's invested in a pretty popular open-source startup. They have huge issues converting oss users > paying businesses

simonw 3y ago

I'm building https://www.datasette.cloud/ https://www.datasette.cloud/ and https://datasette.io/ https://datasette.io/ almost entirely open source for a number of commercial reasons. 1. I want organizations (initially newsrooms that care about data journalism, but rapidly growing beyond that) to be able to trust the product. The default result of 95% of startups is to go out of business, and going all-in on a product that then blinks out of existence is bad! When I'm selecting a vendor this is a thing I always consider, so I'd like my customers to feel confident that they have the ultimate escape hatch - run it yourself - should they ever need it. 2. Newsrooms in particular have learned this lesson before, many times over - and not just for startups. Remember Google Fusion Tables? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables That's just one relatively recent example. 3. Datasette is an ecosystem play. There are over 100 plugins already - https://datasette.io/plugins https://datasette.io/plugins - and I hope for there to be thousands more. Developers don't invest nearly as heavily in building and releasing plugins for closed-source platforms. 4. Open source is a way for me to punch _way_ above my weight. I can have a much larger impact on the world by participating in open source, compared to if everything I'd been building had been closed.

MPlus88 3y ago
How are you going to monetize it? Your site has no mention of pricing.
- simonw 3y ago
  I'm going to charge organizations a monthly fee for using the hosted SaaS service. Implementing billing and setting pricing is next on my TODO list!
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Will the billing system itself also be an open source plug-in for datasette? :D
    - 3y ago

BirAdam 3y ago

Honestly? I personally care very little whether or not something is open source at this point in time. Code bases have become so large that there’s little benefit to me other than self-hosting, and there are few things I care to self-host. The main argument I would make is that companies should, at the very least, open source everything before shuttering. If you’re going out of business, allow your former customers to maintain themselves what you’re no longer going to maintain yourself.

willio58 3y ago
I never self host out of pure laziness. I like open source because I know (at least theoretically) that I can go in and fix something with a PR in a codebase I don’t “own”. I've fixed like 2 things in projects I've used ever, I kinda suck as a contributor. But the indirect benefits I get from others being able to contribute to these projects is immense.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Fix, or just understand. There is "documentation" and there is documentation. And the real documentation is always the code.
quickthrower2 3y ago
The real question is about contingency planning. Open source means you have the option to host yourself, but like you say that could be a lot of hassle, or more work than just switching to another closed source SaaS. There are a few factors. If the space is competitive and there is an established API/protocol, it probably doesn't matter. Think Wordpress hosting, Email, renting VMs etc. If it is open source and widely adopted - e.g. Linux, Redis, Kubernetes etc. then you know that thing is going to be supported forever. Although with the slight risk of a Terraform/Moq type issue. But then you have open source and widely adopted with shifting APIs that generate more work - e.g. React. Then you have these small companies that open source on YC with a 1-1 mapping between repo and corporation. If the corp goes under, the repo may go stale. The decision as to the expected longevity and migration pain depends on a lot of factors. It is sort of intuitive. But open sourceness (and license freeness) is just one factor.

endisneigh 3y ago

Though as an end user I love open source - I love it because it’s free, but you’re not going to necessarily build a business off people who like free stuff unless it involves monetizing them another way (ads, getting them to give you labor for free, etc). Open source aside I wish there were some improvements on doing a highly available self hosted setup. I’m talking plugging 5 machines into a router and power and it just works. Auto healing, redundant backups, etc.

Nextgrid 3y ago
I find "open core" or source-available (with license allowing self-hosting and custom modifications) to be a good middle ground. It allows potential users to quickly try out the solution and prove its worth without having to first go through a (often months-long in big companies) procurement process. It also allows users to understand how the system works internally which can fill gaps in documentation or cover use-cases the original developer hasn't thought of. It can also allow them to fix bugs/edge-cases (that may not be in upstream as they are specific to a niche use-case) or to tweak the software to better fit their infrastructure. Finally being self-hostable automatically makes the software suitable for secure, potentially air-gapped environments or allows the software to be deployed closer to where the rest of the infrastructure is.
- tracker1 3y ago
  Disagree on source-available... if the upstream business dies, source available doesn't necessarily allow you to make adjustments or fix bugs should that upstream company go under, or just stop supporting the application/library/service you depend on.
  - ezekg 3y ago
    What "source-available" license doesn't allow you to do that via a fork? I'd love to know. ELv2 allows it. BUSL allows it. SSPL allows it. Apache Commons allows it. People diss these licenses and they don't even understand them.

gardenhedge 3y ago

Open source allows other Open companies to train their models.

tzhenghao 3y ago

Open source also serves as a "defense strategy" for larger companies whose core business does not directly / indirectly depend on commercializing its open source project(s). They in turn serve more like hedges. For example, Meta with PyTorch in context of the machine learning tooling space. PyTorch is probably strategically important for them as they do not have a cloud business. The other large competing deep learning framework is Tensorflow, designed and open sourced by Google but also owns a cloud business (GCP). They also have in-house AI accelerators like TPUs. Microsoft didn't really have a deep learning framework, but they have ONNX, and is now using ONNXRuntime as an on-ramp to their cloud business (Azure). If Meta wants to continue doing ML, and all the other cloud players jacked up their prices, that's gonna hurt Meta's operating costs. So it's still "cheap" to have hedged against such a scenario. All these on top of upsides like developer marketing etc.

mousetree 3y ago
> If Meta wants to continue doing ML, and all the other cloud players jacked up their prices, that's gonna hurt Meta's operating costs How so? Meta is not running AWS/GCP/Azure.
- tzhenghao 3y ago
  They’re not, but there’s non-zero probability most R&D below a deep learning framework gets fully vertically integrated (or even aggregated in the short term) to just the big cloud players.
  - indymike 3y ago
    Give this time, and it will change.
bootsmann 3y ago
Open sourcing Pytorch was also a human resources decision. Big tech learned this lesson somewhere around 2014, that whatever problems they solve, other companies will have 5 years down the line and if they don’t open source their solutions someone else will release the industry defining standard and meta & co will have trouble hiring people for their handrolled solution 15 years down the line. IIrc some spotify engineer said in an interview once that this was a big reason behind them open-sourcing backstage.

zabzonk 3y ago

> 92% of SaaS companies fail then for gods sake stop creating them! also what has this to do with foss?

gandhirs 3y ago

Why male modela?

returningfory2 3y ago

In light of Terraform/HashiCorp's license change recently, how "open source" should we consider companies like this? Currently their GitHub repo is licensed under an open-source Mozilla license [1]. But contributors also have to sign a CLA [2] which perhaps (?) allows the company to re-license the work like HashiCorp did? Should we now consider companies like this to be "open source for the moment"? [1] https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy [2] https://cla-assistant.io/frain-dev/convoy?pullRequest=1362 https://cla-assistant.io/frain-dev/convoy?pullRequest=1362

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
remram 3y ago
Open source is about the license out, please don't try and add more implied meanings to the word. It's getting ambiguous fast enough. How about "open to contributions" or "open governance"?
- returningfory2 3y ago
  > Open source is about the license out Could you clarify what you mean here? Is "out" a typo?
  - remram 3y ago
    "outbound" is the usual term I think, the license terms under which users get the product. There is no requirement on the "inbound" terms, what you have to do to get the project to make or accept the changes your request. E.g. "inbound=outbound" is a common model for contribution [1], a short way of saying that contributions are licensed by their author under the same conditions that the project is available to users. But that has nothing to do with whether a project is open source. [1]: Example in GitHub ToS: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#6-contributions-under-repository-license https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

andy99 3y ago

I looked into this recently in relation to AI models, and had the following list for reasons companies (and ICs to some extent) open source. It's my own post but I think it's on topic here: http://marble.onl/posts/motivations_for_open_source.html http://marble.onl/posts/motivations_for_open_source.html Name recognition Community contribution Collaboration Building a user base Creating a standard

smarx007 3y ago

While on the topic, I think EUPL should become the default license for open-source projects in the business context. It's a weak copyleft license (OSI and FSF approved), so it does not strike mortal fear of "viral" license spread on business partners. Similar to EPL, MPL, and LGPL, it creates an obligation of sharing back the changes made to weak-copyleft licensed portion of the code. Finally, EUPL closes the SaaS loophole, which is similar to a non-existent Affero LGPL license.

rapnie 3y ago
It is interesting that the EU institutions started using #EUVoice (Mastodon) [0] and #EUVideo (Peertube) [1] on the Fediverse, both AGPL-licensed. [0] https://social.network.europa.eu https://social.network.europa.eu [1] https://tube.network.europa.eu https://tube.network.europa.eu
arp242 3y ago
The EUPL has a lot of things going for it: it's readable by mortals (unlike GPL), has official translations, and in general is just "GPL, but better". That said, it doesn't quite close the "SaaS loophole". Or rather, it's somewhat easily circumvented as the EUPL allows combining your code with other copyleft "compatible licenses" and then redistributing all of this combined work under the "compatible license". These compatible licenses include the GPL and LGPL. For my project I removed these licenses from the list of "compatible license", so technically it's not "EUPL 1.2", although it's close enough... I brought this up with one of the authors of the EUPL a few years back, and they felt it was fine as-is, but I still wish it would allow things to be a bit more flexible in this regard. Still, I think EUPL is an excellent replacement for the GPL. But AGPL is a bit more complex. I still prefer my "EUPL 1.2 Martin flavour" because IMHO the AGPL is a horrendously written license and the text is just atrocious even by legalize standards. It sees very little usage unfortunately; last time I checked my project was the only one in all of the Void repo to use EUPL :-/
- jmholla 3y ago
  Which of your projects uses your modified license? That sounds like it could be just right for a project I'm working on. Edit: Reading up more on it, it sounds like modifying the license isn't allowed. It's explicitly called out in section 3.7 of their guidelines. [0] Also, I didn't see anything in their guidelines that would help with the "SaaS loophole", unless you are referring just to the source availability as the loophole. [0]: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/inline-files/EUPL%201_1%20Guidelines%20EN%20Joinup.pdf https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/inline-files...

Aleklart 3y ago

Because Free Software gives to much freedom to users.

jehb 3y ago

It's an interesting question, but it's the opposite of the one I usually ask. Software should be open source. "Why try to monetize?" would be the question I'd ask myself.

bibryam 3y ago

I described a checklist for open source vs fake open source evaluation https://blog.oss.fund/p/a-framework-for-open-source-evaluation https://blog.oss.fund/p/a-framework-for-open-source-evaluati...

abatilo 3y ago

I used to open source every single thing I built. But recently, I stopped doing that because now I build everything as a single monorepo. All of my completely disconnected side project ideas are all in one repo and I'm much more happy being able to keep this like dependencies up to date in one place instead of having a different repo per project. I would like to go back to open sourcing all things I play with but maybe I need to find a repo structure and tooling that would make that more sustainable.

clcaev 3y ago
have a look at git subtree?

MrNeRF 3y ago

Open source software deserves celebration. Its impact on the world is profound and transformative. Recently, I began porting the 3D Gaussian splatting paper to C++ and CUDA with an aim to optimize the training speed of such models. This endeavor was only possible because the original authors open-sourced their work. The feedback has been encouraging, and I feel that I'm making a difference—perhaps even more than in my regular job. That said, it's essential to remember that contributing to open source, while rewarding, can be demanding if it's not your full-time occupation. Yet, through such efforts, we ensure these tools remain freely accessible and aren't monopolized by corporations. I provide you the link to this GitHub project in case you are interested. https://github.com/MrNeRF/gaussian-splatting-cuda https://github.com/MrNeRF/gaussian-splatting-cuda

nologic01 3y ago

It is quite intriguing that after four decades [1] it is not particularly clear why individuals and organizations adopt "open source" (in one of its many forms). Yet somehow it keeps growing as tangible reality and is now possibly irreversible. There have been countless arguments for motivations, benefits (short and long term), sustainable business models etc., with various degrees of plausibility but in general rather vague, anecdotal and subjective. What is missing is not reflection on the phenomenon by its practitioners (or others in the tech domain) but the sharp, objective and comprehensive eye of scholars with legal and economic expertise (and by now, also a knack for tech history). Understanding the dynamics of "open source" (in quotes again, because of its wide and evolving range of manifestations) is quite important. E.g., there are many domains that seem completely allergic to it, for reasons that are as unclear as the reasons for success in other areas. In any case, while techies are taking it for granted, it is one of the most remarkable social phenomena of recent times. There aren't that many examples of large scale cooperation / coopetition of complete strangers across the planet, working on very concrete and useful tools. [1] lets take the GNU project as the nominal start of the open source era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project

new_user_final 3y ago

how do you integrate convoy with twilio? it seems twilio webhook needs custom response based on event e.g record call.

subomi 3y ago
You can configure a custom response on every source configured on Convoy.

reshmakh 3y ago

Thought this was great - especially being so up front about the value of distribution. I wrote a post about the very same meetup, but note distribution is not one of our "why open source" answers https://www.medplum.com/blog/yc-oss-faq https://www.medplum.com/blog/yc-oss-faq - perhaps we are alone in this regard https://github.com/medplum/medplum https://github.com/medplum/medplum

tiffanyh 3y ago

It’s interesting to see how “being open source” has become the new “freemium” GTM model, but with significantly more downsides for the vendor. E.g., now you don’t even know who’s using your product, how to collect their feedback nor who to contact to convert them to paid.

gregwebs 3y ago

Open source creates the largest possible market share for the project. Those doing most of the code contributions will miss out on monetizing a lot of this market. But it's better to monetize 10% of a market that is 100x bigger than monetize 100% of a market that is 100x smaller. Even if someone else isn't contributing much and is monetizing another 1% of the market.

tonyarkles 3y ago
I am pro-open source, I contribute back to projects, I've been doing this since the 90s. I'm going to gently push back a little bit on this: > But it's better to monetize 10% of a market that is 100x bigger than monetize 100% of a market that is 100x smaller. The piece to really think about is the support burden. Yes, with your numbers, you've monetized 10x net more users. But you have 100x more users who think you owe them free tech support, and if you are sufficiently curt while telling them "I don't care if you're having problems, the people who pay me are happy. If you want help, you too can pay me", you can quickly end up with a much smaller market than if you just had a much smaller happy set of closed-source users to being with. Open Source is amazing. I wouldn't in a million years want to be the maintainer of a large open-source project. The people who do that without burning out deserve sainthood.
- gregwebs 3y ago
  You are talking about unmonetized open source (which I agree with you about). But the context of this conversation is companies monetizing open source. I have been in both situations and it wasn’t a problem when at the company monetizing.

janosdebugs 3y ago

> Open Source is the ultimate form of sustainability. If the company that produces open source fails, the software doesn't have maintainers anymore. Unless someone else picks up working on a possibly hugely complex piece of code, you will have an outdated, possibly full-of-secholes relic in no time. Software isn't static. So many open source projects have a funding problem. A single company pays the 5-15-50 developers it takes to keep it alive, build releases and so on, and then suddenly goes under or pulls funding. You can't just simply take over the mainenance of a large project at the snap of your fingers. The projects mentioned in the article are the exception, not the rule. The "community" doesn't typically come up with funding to the tune of several million dollars a year, nor does it have the know-how on all the details. If you need an example, take a look at the commit graph of the oVirt project [1] after Red Hat decided to sunset it. No forks, very little in the eay of new maintainers. Unless you want to risk it, you probably need to move off oVirt sooner or later. (Bias disclaimer: I worked on the Kubernetes/OpenShift integration for oVirt for ~2 years.) [1] https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-engine/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-engine/graphs/commit-activity

opensource4ever 3y ago
For sure, but this is infinity better than some close sourced project (like hardware driver, old iphone), where the user are stuck because the code is NOT open. What you are mentioning seems like a business and funding issue in general for software development. However, in now days and age everything (beside private key) ought to be open sourced. That is how a transparent work will work. And as we can lack of transparency has caused way more problem than problem such as oVirt project
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  I agree that it would be better to have the source code for things. However, what good is the source code if you don't know how to, or even worse, can't build it because it was always built using an intricate web of build systems that rely on servers that no longer exist? Can I patch and recompile the project on my computer and is it easy to find out how to do it? Do I even have the tools to build it freely available? Unfortunately, a great many open source projects fail this test.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

Convoy being a VC funded company I think the mission for Conoy is to grow, grow, go public, increase shareholder value. Or these days, perhaps build, grow and make actual real profits. not "" At Convoy, our mission is simple; we genuinely want to put our technology into the hands of as many engineers as possible without having to worry about long sales cycles, data compliance issues, and being constrained to your immediate network & friends. ""

ThinkBeat 3y ago

How does being open source free a company from data compliance issues? > ... without having to worry about long sales cycles, data compliance issues which may or may not be associated with this part: > ... and try to justify it with something-something data privacy.