19 ms·

Open Source does not win by being cheaper

• deleted 3y ago
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• jandrese 3y ago
  I've always been annoyed that companies will pay 6 figures for a support contract, but won't consider hiring a full time engineer for the same or less pay to support an open source product that does the same thing. The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frustrating. The multiplication of effort you would see if 5 or 6 companies did this is incredible. For example the Linux kernel is an example of this working. Everybody cooperates, everyone wins.
  • Dalewyn 3y ago
    If you hire an engineer, the liability is your problem. If you donate to open source, liability is still your problem. Both of these situations are patently unpalatable for most businesses. Meanwhile, if you pay someone for a support contract the liability is their problem. You see, whether a problem that comes up is fixed is actually irrelevant. The real question is how much liability you can get rid of.
    • bd30 3y ago
      I understand the full time engineer thing. But it was never explained to me at any of the places I have been at that it was a liability thing. At every place they thought we would leak trade secrets. Was always frustrating that technically we could never even contribute the most minor of bug fixes.
      • fsckboy 3y ago
        maybe it's a "blame" thing, but it's not a liability thing. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM*, but nobody ever got a nickel back either. *IBM is a consulting firm now
    • resoluteteeth 3y ago
      What liability are you referring to?
      • beachy 3y ago
        e.g. if you direct the engineer you have hired to build something that turns out to infringe on someone else's BS patents.
      • andyst 3y ago
        in the event of an incident, the exec or departments reputational liability
      • GeneralMayhem 3y ago
        Component breaks due to bug, deployment misconfiguration, scaling failure, etc., and your company loses $1M during the outage. If it's a vendor with an SLA, you can (sometimes) get them to cover the $1M. If it's in-house, you're eating it. It's often cheaper to build/run stuff yourself (unless it's so commodified that you're benefiting from amortization across the vendor's many clients), but then you have to be self-insured for problems.
        • jcrben 3y ago
          I don't think liability payments are that common. As someone who helps in analyzing software purchase decisions, it's certainly not something I hear people bring as a major factor.
          • eep_social 3y ago
            Maybe size of enterprise matters? I work in $LargeCorp and legal was very aggressive about insurance and liability redlines on the last contract I had to deal with.
            • deleted 3y ago
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    • ilyt 3y ago
      Good luck trying to get any actual liability out of them... Like, go try to make Oracle write you a contract where their base going down compensates your lost profits. You just won't get it, unless you throw some hideous amount of money their way (and they will just pay insurance company and pocket the rest).
      • mouse_ 3y ago
        It's not about compensation, it's about finger-pointing. "WE didn't bill your card 40 times draining your bank account -- STRIPE did! Go sue them, not us!"
        • numbsafari 3y ago
          You are still getting sued.
          • jiggawatts 3y ago
            It's a theoretical benefit, not a real one, and the scenario is so rare that most people don't think of it critically. It's like buying insurance against "damage by asteroids". E.g.: "We can just sue Microsoft" is a common one. a) Their SLA literally states that they will compensate you only for the cost of the individual service they provided. The $1/month Azure DNS Zone outage caused your $100M/month business to vanish off the Internet? Here's $1 for your compensation! b) The US Government sued Microsoft and failed to get very far. Are you the US Government? Do you have a budget for dozens of the best lawyers money can buy? Have you sued a multi-trillion dollar market cap org successfully ever? No? Why do you think you can... and win? Generally this boils down to: "I haven't read the contract I signed, but I'm sure if things go bad I can just make the lawyers magically fix things for me."
            • numbsafari 3y ago
              Most customers won't sue you. They'll terminate their business with you and go elsewhere. You have to decide, as a business, if trustworthy vendors are available and select the right one. You can also decide that it's important enough to your value proposition that you want to "own" it. The real reason companies hire vendors is that you don't need some mythical "FTE" that can do all the things. For the "price of a single FTE", a vendor can provide you access to a range of FTEs that are knowledgeable and capable in different domains, and you can flex between them. Thinking about RedHat, as an example, if you pay RedHat the equivalent of a single FTE, let's say $300k/yr, is that just one FTE working on maintaining Apache? A kernel contributor? GCC? This is about fractionalization and labor specialization, not some direct 1:1 tradeoff between hiring some mythical person with commit bits in hundreds or thousands of OSS trees.
    • yoyohello13 3y ago
      Whatever anyone else is saying this is the real reason. I’ve seen it first hand many time. The only thing that matters is being able to blame somebody else when problems arise.
  • liquidpele 3y ago
    Same reason it’s easier to get contractors or backfill instead of giving raises… HR makes it a pita for managers to do it.
  • NegativeK 3y ago
    It can sometimes be way easier to fire a vendor than an engineer.
    • imbnwa 3y ago
      Why?
      • marpstar 3y ago
        You don't provide health insurance to vendors.
      • thechao 3y ago
        Contracts are usually of fixed, short, duration — 6 or 12 months. You just stop renewing the contract. Employees are forever.
      • jprete 3y ago
        Employees gets legal protections that contractors can only dream of. Also, most contracts have specific terms of completion and duration. If the contractor screws up, you can sue them, withhold payments for lack of specific deliverables, or just let the contract run out.
      • paulddraper 3y ago
        Firing is costly to morale, and carries legal risks. Not renewing a vendor contract is easy.
    • mcdonje 3y ago
      But it's often easier to replace an engineer than a vendor.
      • est31 3y ago
        engineers who work in large teams on some component, talk about the design with their managers? Yes you can replace them. Firing the maintainer and author of 90% of the commits of the OSS project your company is relying on in a way that it is hard to migrate away? Who can replace them??
  • hinkley 3y ago
    - Vendor contracts are hard - So we avoid doing them - So we never get good at them - So every contract is a painful lesson in trying Open source wins because I don't have to involve the entire company to use it. I can literally just raise my voice to see if anyone in the group cares and then use it. And even when it's free for small companies, not approving a license is holding up something that we think is already done, so the wheels grind a bit faster.
    • pylua 3y ago
      In many companies I expect at least a security review of the open source before developers can use it. This can have a lot of red tape.
      • toomuchtodo 3y ago
        This is why a SaaS offering is a must. For open source, a security review might be needed. For a SaaS, checkbox SOC2 and we’re on our way. Leverage to reduce the B2B sales cycle as you scale.
      • MilStdJunkie 3y ago
        Yes. Yes. Absolutely. This can stop adoption right in its tracks, and it depends entirely on one or two personalities. Who's at the wheel in office InfoSec. One guy had a strict "Open Source is Inherently Unstable" red line, sooooooooo . . well, we went two levels above him to get OSS signed off on, because the parent org was all about OSS. Doing that was a bad career decision, but it was the right one. This article gets it right almost exactly; transparency was a huge part of adoption, but the extensibility thing is also a big deal for a niche industry. Also, our vendor was unspeakable, disappearing for years on end, re-appearing as another company, asking fifty times the money for no reason.
      • devoutsalsa 3y ago
        I wonder if there’s a business model around sharing the results of security reviews. Even if Company A can’t fully trust the review of Company B, you could A could provide a lot of context for B to reduce the cost of starting an evaluation from zero.
  • version_five 3y ago
    Your company needs the maturity to manage that engineer. Companies with products have customer success and sales etc and their own engineering management and product hierarchy to translate your end user issue into a software fix. That doesn't happen automatically by staffing and engineer in house. How would a company even figure out the profile they need?
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I hear logic like this and suddenly I 100% understand how a startup can "disrupt the industry", even if 90+% of the time that is a huge exageration, if not an outright lie someone promises in a pitch. I guess if they can't find that lead, the lead will find, or rather found, a company for such a need. And I guess paradoxically, this is exactly how contracting firms form to begin with. So I guess startup culture isn't really that new.
    • justinclift 3y ago
      > How would a company even figure out the profile they need? Generally by asking the existing developers of the software project in question. Some of them might be the person you'd end up hiring anyway.
  • debarshri 3y ago
    I am engineer, now trying to sell enterprise software. May be I can shed some light. If a company says it is not their current focus even after paying 200k, you should looking into finding an alternative vendor who is willing to go above and beyond. A good vendor gets you by features and keeps you with exceptional service. I have seen vendors saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. In my opinion orgs should have service contract. It is more important when you are responding to RFP and you are a b2b org. If you dont have a service contract for tools and service you use, you will run into liabilities that you don't own and can delegate it to the vendor.
    • jiggawatts 3y ago
      > saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. These words were almost verbatim used this morning in a meeting. A small agile ISV was purchased by one of those big "holding companies" and now everything is "for consideration", "not on the roadmap", "not strictly required", or like you said "not their current focus". We've been raising issues like: "You're using frameworks and SDKs that went end-of-life years ago for Internet-facing security-critical components, how is that not your current focus!?" and hearing crickets in response. Support contract is in place, but there's no specific clause requiring them to do their job, so they're not doing it.
      • debarshri 3y ago
        I think you are not the target customer that the holding companies is looking for. I would try to see an out and look for another vendor, tool or alternative.
        • jiggawatts 3y ago
          Too much lock-in due to extensive customisations — which is precisely why the small ISV was a lucrative purchase for the holding company. They can safely milk their customers for enough years to recoup the investment.
        • lmm 3y ago
  • paxys 3y ago
    By that line of reasoning software companies should not be a thing at all and everyone should hire engineers and write all their software in-house. Hiring and maintaining a team of developers is hard, especially if the problem they are solving is not in your domain. Contracting a problem out to specialists is most often the more sensible option for both parties.
    • lmm 3y ago
      Buying off the shelf software is reasonable. Outsourcing for expertise - whether that's having an external party write software for you, customize existing software for you, or something else - usually fails, IME.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • patmorgan23 3y ago
    "The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frustrating. " Isn't the next part of this where the vendor receives an angry letter that contains the words "notice of default" and "filing suit to compel specific performance". If a vendor takes your money and says "JK we don't feel like doing that" and your contract let's them do that you need to fire you attorney (or who ever signed that contract)
• msy 3y ago
  The problem with this business model is it creates a tension between the OSS version and the paid versions - you want the OSS version to be good, but not such a good solution that nobody feels the need to pay for your SaaS/consulting/etc. That tension seems to inevitably lead to obvious features missing or functionality/knowledge that's needed to operate at any scale coistered away as closed source so the sponsoring entity can make some money. If the product is more infrastructural you also now have an established pattern (Elastic, Hashicorp etc) of switching to look-but-don't-touch licences to avoid being obliterated as a one-click service for the major cloud providers. Which isn't to say the article is wrong, I just wish they wouldn't pretend commerically backed OSS is some kind of kumbaya win-win for everyone instead of being effectively a trust growth hack for startups before the need to generate revenue inevitably leads them to turning the screws one way or another on the beloved community that helped them grow.
  • 38 3y ago
    > That tension seems to inevitably lead to obvious features missing or functionality/knowledge that's needed to operate at any scale coistered away as closed source so the sponsoring entity can make some money. I dont think this is a problem at all. I maintain a small module, and have had many feature requests and support requests over the years. Until I am making enough money to pay my rent, I dont feel one bit guilty about charging for these things. even down to me clicking the Merge Pull Request button. anything that takes even one second of my time, I am charging for. I put months and years of works into the code. and I put the code out in the world for free. If you want an additional feature, or any of my time, pay up.
    • tadfisher 3y ago
      With all due respect, your model as described is different: the way I read it is that you're charging for work, not charging for a product incorporating your work. The same tension doesn't exist, because you don't have an incentive to paywall a feature; if someone pays you, everyone benefits. Forgive me if I'm off-base with my interpretation of your comment.
      • 3y ago
• mindwok 3y ago
  The author calls out they are specifically talking about open source solutions that compete with paid offerings. IMO, the jury is very much still out on whether open source "wins" in this regard. In the past decade we've seen a huge rise of open source products, and in the last 5 years or so we've seen many of them move away from that. MongoDB, the Hashicorp stack, Elastic, Red Hat, MinIO, the list goes on. There are not that many truly open source, commercially competitive products remaining and many of them are fighting to prove it's a viable business model.
  • mholt 3y ago
    The Caddy project is fighting to show it can work. We are having moderate success. I just gave a talk about this a couple weeks ago at an internal company event and will be doing so again at GoWest in a few weeks. The premise is that open source licenses are what they are: they grant freedom, but not other things that companies would pay money for. Proprietary licenses do offer what companies need, but at the cost of freedom. I believe there is a third model that works in the middle without compromising freedom or reliability. By staying open source and filling the gap of what companies need through sponsorships, I think this may work for some. I'm currently redesigning the Caddy website to emphasize this and hope it will work!
    • mindwok 3y ago
      I love Caddy and have shilled to everyone I know, so thanks for your great work. I'm keen to hear more about your model, because I think the influx of companies abandoning their open source roots has shown the problems with the current approach. I am rooting for you folks!
      • mholt 3y ago
        Thank you!! Appreciate that encouragement.
    • revendell_elf 3y ago
      Caddy is far more simpler to understand than any any other server software. Thanks for building Caddy!
• iamnotsure 3y ago
  Free software is a protection against doing stupid things over and over again.
• shubham_y 3y ago
  We are also open Source community at Apache https://github.com/apache/age https://github.com/apache/age
• renewiltord 3y ago
  For me, OSS is all about being able to edit to get some long-tail functionality in. For both Kong and Airbyte, I didn't have to wait for some internal prioritization pipeline to finish.
• brap 3y ago
  I’m surprised it didn’t mention vendor lock-in, which is definitely a selling point for open source.
  • freedomben 3y ago
    Agreed. This isn't just a trivial point either. As a decision maker this is one of my top considerations. Every org and person is different of course and there are plenty of people that don't care about lock-in as long as it's a company they trust, but it's definitely not a zero either. When I worked for Red Hat as an OpenShift consultant, I met with many execs who were concerned about vendor lock-in. Going with OpenShift for them was a no-brainer
  • foolswisdom 3y ago
    It actually does hint at (the lack of) vendor lock in, when talking about the capability to switch to self hosted.
• PeterZaitsev 3y ago
  I think the key point which is missed here is - Open Source gives you the choice. It does not necesarry mean cheaper (in a moment) but it means if you're not happy with vendor pricing, quality or there are other factors in play, you have alternatives. With proprietary technology choosing technology means marrying vendor for life
  • tannhaeuser 3y ago
    Only open standards with multiple interworking implementations give you that choice, though. The cost of moving to something else is no different with commercial SW as it is with F/OSS when you have to start from scratch, as opposed to being able to switch to alternative implementations (such as a database or message middleware).
  • j-a-a-p 3y ago
    > With proprietary technology choosing technology means marrying vendor for life I learned the term Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the age that closed source would warn businesses to move to open source. I guess the roles have been reversed?
• throwaway892238 3y ago
  "Open Source" doesn't win, period, because it doesn't compete with anything. Open Source is not a business model or a product. It's an engineering widget. You can use it to build a product, or you can use it to make a jig to shore up an uneven table leg. Nobody cares about the license or whether they can read your code. They care if you build a product that solves their problem. You know why companies use Open Source, for the most part? It's free. Not because it's better than the non-Open Source alternative, because very often, it is not. And not because they can read the source code, because companies need a working product much more than they need the ability to write their own patch for a bug. And not because of some feel-good notion of sharing with a community. It's just cheap and plentiful. Which is great, for the consumer. But it's not easy to build a company on a free product. For the most part, Open Source products win by either being A) cheaper, B) Freemium, C) "Source-Available", D) being the incumbent, or E) a better product. Sometimes "a better product" really does win out, if a product is able to provide features competitors don't. But incumbents have had the time and resources to establish lots of features, a solid track record, and lots of support and integrations, so not going with the incumbent tends to be a bad idea. People prefer Source-Available when it's completely free, and Freemium if it's not completely free. All things being equal, cheaper wins.
  • AlotOfReading 3y ago
    I guess I'm lucky that the open source things I deal with are far and away better than the proprietary options. I'd choose Clang or GCC any day of the week yet another 7 figure proprietary toolchain with licensing terms with obvious bugs, for one recent example.
    • pjmlp 3y ago
      Meanwhile many HPC Linux clusters end up using ICC or xl compilers, for the special sauce optimizing to all those NUMA and MPI connected CPUs.
  • c0balt 3y ago
    > B) Freemium A good example of this would be open-core. It may be source available, like Grafana, but Premium features are paywalled (Grafana Enterprise for SAML, more datasources, ...). Other examples might include GitLab which is mostly source available but also has Freemium-ish model.
• musicale 3y ago
  > For some, this might be a tough pill to swallow. But a for-profit business exists for profit. No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. > Definitionally and practically. Profit is what allows the company to hire employees, grow, and sustain itself—it is quite literally what funds ongoing development That's gross profit. Regular (net) profit takes operating expenses (including R&D) and other business expenses (interest payments, etc.) into account. It is certainly possible for non-profit businesses - as well as public benefit corporations - to fund R&D.
  • maltalex 3y ago
    > No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. What? If Apple or FedEx could get customers to (sustainably) pay them without actually providing a product in return, do you think they would have kept making phones and delivering packages just for the hell of it?
    • musicale 3y ago
      > What? If Apple or FedEx could get customers to (sustainably) pay them without actually providing a product in return, do you think they would have kept making phones and delivering packages just for the hell of it? That's a strange counterfactual. Why would customers keep paying a company that doesn't provide any goods or services to anyone? They're not really "customers" anymore if all that is happening is money transfer to the company.
      • dpig_ 3y ago
        It's not really strange at all. It's a clear illustration of why your perspective is incomplete.
        • musicale 3y ago
          How are they "customers" if the company is no longer providing any goods or services to anyone and is just taking their money? > incomplete see "usually"
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• rubenfiszel 3y ago
  Interesting post and would like to bring nuance as the founder of an open-source alternative to Retool and Airplane: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill Our enterprise edition is clearly cheaper (between 2-5x cheaper based on customers migrating away from those) than our competitors but we bet on volume and lack of sales team to make it up for it in terms of margins. There are pragmatic reasons for it, our community/oss edition is featureful and include SSO so there is a temptation for our customers to just roll with the CE and we cannot be too greedy. One could argue that support should be sufficient since the jobs ran by windmill are critical, but the main strength of a product like this is reliability and since we achieve near 100% reliability, it isn't sufficient. We are not gonna intentionally make our product less reliable on CE. The other reason in my opinion is deeply rooted with the nature of open-source: software cost nothing to replicate and it would be a shame to have users not benefit from the right tools just so the pricing can extract as much $$$ as possible. So ultimately it comes down to the tension between being VC funded (and we are but to a much lesser extent that our prop alternative) and the pricing of open-source. I am deeply convinced that there is a compromise that satisfies everyone by having the different force in presence being kept-in-check. VCs want small seed companies to scale to become global companies; customers and users want to invest in a platform they know they won't have to regret later because of rent-seeking or lock-in practices. True OSS helps companies achieve global scale as long as their product is better (which make me agree with the substance of the post, being cheap is not enough) and also ensure that company can never or hardly employ dark patterns otherwise OSS fork of company's product will be too competitive against itself. Before being a founder, I was among the most skeptical of OSS with VC backing and I really understand why someone would have a hard stance on it. But I came to realize that good software takes not only lots of hard work, but a focus and a dedicated team that is hard to find without a core team that has strong incentives to make something that people want. So I see the future being dominated by companies that fall somewhere in the following spectrum: 1. OSS products that are public utilities and there are enough needs or the project is interesting enough to have a strong core team that doesn't require VC backing 2. OSS products that are more commercially oriented and have values but wouldn't exist without VC backing 3. OSS products that were able to bootstrap themselves completely and are COSS but without VCs And proprietary software to slowly become extinct as the world of software become more competitive everyday as the potential grow larger and the number of VCs that will fund open-source grow larger (and the ability to bootstrap those businesses also get easier).
• ignoramous 3y ago
  > What is a transparency problem? It’s when a solution being closed source creates distrust between the client and vendor. Eterprises don't care that much about code. And if they do, business continuity clauses may alleviate most of their closed source concerns. After all, how many financial firms switched to OpenOffice Calc from Excel? > She argues that Amplitude is pretty expensive, particularly prohibitive for some early-stage companies, and larger companies could save a fortune by using an open-source version. While this pitch might resonate with early-stage companies, those same price-conscious early-stage companies will either use an open-source version or a free tier. AWS' go-to-market (GTM) hinged on attracting startups and individual developers by offering them low cost (metered) services. They got this part very right, because Airbnb, Stripe, Twitch et al went on to become large enterprises and grew alongside AWS. There's not many things that can compete with low cost / free. You can always move upmarket later. Just ask ARM and Intel. For dev tool upstarts, open source has become the defacto GTM (it isn't, as TFA rightly points out, a business model). So, unless you're Snowflake level good (and you can fend off FOSS shops like Databricks), you're better off with an open core model.
  • tadfisher 3y ago
    I have not yet participated in an early-stage startup that cares about cost; they have mostly cared about time, and buying Amplitude/Segment/AWS/Heroku/etc is just seen as being faster than the alternatives, rightly or not. If you're rolling Postgres on the metal, your funders will either not care or they'll ask hard questions about how much time you wasted, and you'd better have some decent answers or some sympathetic investors.
  • jorlow 3y ago
    > Eterprises don't care that much about code. And if they do, business continuity clauses may alleviate most of their closed source concerns. After all, how many financial firms switched to OpenOffice Calc from Excel? This is true of tools like excel, but for things like server infrastructure (at least in big tech companies) they are very hesitant to put something into production without at least source code access (much preferring being able to compile it themselves).
• PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  "Profit" is a strange and ambiguous term here. I've been running an open source, libre project for closing in on 24 years now, and generating revenue from it for about 17 years. There's never been any "profit", but there has been revenue. I regard profit as what's left of the revenue after you pay the people who work on the project and any expenses, which is the way most corporations and accountants would view it. The only sort of open source project that needs "profit" defined this way is one funded by a capital investment of some kind, where the investor expects a "return". While there are some open source projects that fit this description, the vast majority do not. Also, as is typical for things linked from HN, this whole article seems very web-y and SaaS-y. There are other kinds of open source projects, believe it or not.
  • deaddodo 3y ago
    I mean, you answered your own conundrum here. Profit is an overlay of Revenue, minus some other overlay. In this case, your profit is 1:1 with your revenue. But you certainly have profit.
  • reverius42 3y ago
    Are you in the US? Do you report that revenue as personal income on your taxes? If yes, then I think it’s fair to call it profit (since you’re also presumably deducting expenses).
    • danans 3y ago
      That's true if it is a sole proprietorship, but not if it is a corporation of some kind. A corporation holds the profits (after expenses) on its books and they may (or may not) be distributed proportionally to shareholders. If it's not distributed, it is part of the value of the company.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      Yes, sole proprietor, all revenue reported as personal income ... hence I consider it income. It would be profit if I was organized as an LLC that agreed to pay me $X/year and took in $(X+Y) in revenue.
• mooreds 3y ago
  Disclosure: I work for a closed source product company, but write a lot of open source that pairs well with our product. What a silly claim by the author. Of course OSS wins by being cheaper (in terms of $$$ paid). I agree that cost is not the only way it wins, though. Points made by the author on how it can win: * extensibility * transparency I'd also add: * lower barrier to entry (for a subset of technical users, at least). If you want to try it, you download it. * optionality: in the spirit of libre open source, you should be able to stand it up yourself. If things go sideways with the company providing you the OSS app, you've lowered your risk. * if the user is a dev (the product is infra) "many eyes make for shallow bugs" Those are all compelling arguments. However, weighed against all of that is the profit motive and sustainability of a business. People, even software devs, like to eat :) . And businesses need to make money to employ people and push a product forward. Honestly, I don't think we've figured out how to build a pure big open source business outside of the following business models: * consulting/support (Redhat); pursuing this has poorer margins * loss leader for another service (like VSCode for the MS ecosystem). this isn't really a pure OSS business model * hosting/SaaS (but the clouds impinge; I opined a few years ago on this: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3438 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3438 ) (I'm leaving out open core or SSPL companies because I don't consider them to be 'pure' OSS companies, myself.) Maybe the answer is that we can't have a big open source business. Maybe smaller ones are just fine. I'd avoid VC though, in that case. Most don't like smaller businesses. FYI, you can also have some of the beneficial attributes of OSS: * transparency through clear communication and docs * extensibility through clear, stable APIs and docs even with a closed source company. Software companies have lots to learn from OSS as a development process.
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• maggoty 3y ago
  VLC trumps any sort of paid video player software, including the one provided by Microsoft. Been using it for years at work and its been flawless. In that scenario, it wins!
  • asabla 3y ago
    Couldn't agree more. So many softwares has come and went from my usual collection. But VLC still remains after so many years.
  • neop1x 3y ago
    And ffmpeg too. It is also used by commercial video editing tools, thunbnail generation, etc. Not many people use proprietary encoder software. And HW encoders in cpu/gpu are often awful (generating big files for good-enough quality).
• Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  Counterargument: Linux is on most servers, smart phones, and information appliances. Primarily because its scaling cost is near $0/host, and some users feed useful resources back into the digital karma pool. If the goal is to share an opensource project as widely as possible, than most will sell associated services to generate support revenue. Some operate as a nonprofit entity to offer tax breaks on supported project services. Trying to cram a GPL/BSD/Apache project into a 1990's shareware license model will usually fail. Beer is good... Milkshakes are good... A Beer-Milkshake is a terrible idea =)
  • RajT88 3y ago
    I had a beer milkshake once on Cannery Row. It could have been worse. (Also better)
    • Joel_Mckay 3y ago
      Sure, but was ruining 2 good drinks worth the experience. =)
      • RajT88 3y ago
        Definitely!
• kruhft 3y ago
  It's only free if your time is free.
• Uptrenda 3y ago
  I like that his blog is literally just pages on Github. It shows that there are so many free resources these days if you know where to look. That's cool to me.
• Anya200 3y ago
  [flagged]
• carapace 3y ago
  Win what? TFA is published on a platform owned by Microsoft. - - - - I always thought that the whole point of computers and software was to make machines to do the scut work so we could all take a break and explore the universe Star Trek-style. You don't win by making money, you win by obviating the need for money at all. Science has delivered technology and wealth (it's not evenly distributed, of course, but that's not the problem I'm talking about.) If we apply the technology we already have we can take care of everybody on earth (and mitigate the climate change) and you just sit around and write software or play video games or whatever you like. That's how FOSS wins: "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."
  • matheusmoreira 3y ago
    > You don't win by making money, you win by obviating the need for money at all. Yes, a post-scarcity society would be very nice indeed. That's why we need a total abundance of free and open source software not owned by corporations. If we don't make this software, we'll be subjected to their dystopian artificial scarcity where they charge you for nothing and create economies where there ought to be none.
    • oblio 3y ago
      I admire your optimism, but I think we already lost. Hopefully I'm missing some background long term trend that proves me wrong.
    • carapace 3y ago
      There is already an abundance of free and open source software, so much that it would take a lifetime even to catalog it. (One of the most inexplicable things to me is how people prefer to pay for proprietary software rather than learn to use free FOSSoftware. "Bigfoot lives on Endor.") We made the software already, is my point. We have the technology. It's just a matter of getting the word out, and logistics. The computers can solve the logistics. (This is Bucky Fuller's idea: the World Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Game ) We're not subjected to artificial scarcity now except by choice.
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  It is a good, but incomplete article, as TF is not addressed.
• andrewmcwatters 3y ago
  Sort of related only in the realm of software sales: A long time ago I sold a user interface update to a poorly designed game. I priced it at 2x the cost of the game ITSELF. And people still bought it, because it was professionally designed. That is, I as a professional designer, took time away from my full-time work to do what presumably this developer could not. The primary complaint as clearly noted in the comments of the digital distribution platform I sold on at the time was that the update was too expensive. And people obviously commented on how I price-positioned the software. But one point was obvious. The game itself was too cheap. When people are complaining about your price alone and still buying, it’s means there was nothing else worth complaining about. The birds will always want free food. Don’t cater to the birds. As a flattering addendum, the update was distributed illegally and got around to pirates quite well! I was happy with that because most customers paid. It was also clear that I was fulfilling a desired feature set that otherwise wasn’t being delivered. Some problems like that are nice to have as a symptom of creating something people want.
• nullcipher 3y ago
  > While the core product is typically maintained by a central engineering team, integrations or plugins are often built by community developers and then occasionally merged into the main branch. One of the things I really dislike about opensource deployments is plugins. Often the core team is happy to let something go to a plugin and 99.99% of the time plugins just get abandoned. It's worse when some projects "outsource" basic functionality like authentication (say via saml or oidc) to a plugin.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    Also it's really weird that in a open source business, contributions come from people who never get a cent of the benefits which the founders receive. This to me feels very disingenuous. Profit sharing should be built in as part of these "open source" projects.
• zubairq 3y ago
  Former Red Hat employee. Some valid points in the article and comments.
• jmpeax 3y ago
  > Minio is a great alternative to companies mindful of who has access to user data. Of course, AWS claims that AWS personnel doesn’t have direct access to customer data, but by being closed-source, that statement is just a function of trust. Can't a company claim to be hosting something via open-source software but using a closed-source in-house software masquerading with the same API endpoints as the open-source version? This still requires the same kind of trust as AWS.
  • the_common_man 3y ago
    Not really. If a company claims something and does something else, it's called cheating and one can take legal action. This is tangential to trust.
    • schnuri 3y ago
      I don’t understand your comment. Isn’t it the same if Amazon falsely claims to not have access to the data and if another company falsely claims to use some specific software?
  • hintymad 3y ago
    > Of course, AWS claims that AWS personnel doesn’t have direct access to customer data, but by being closed-source, that statement is just a function of trust. I'm not sure if this is a strong enough argument. Given the state of maturity in companies, most companies should really worry about their own employees or security vulnerability than Amazon's.
  • closeparen 3y ago
    A company can also genuinely state that it hosts customer data on-premise to protect it from the big bad cloud, but elide the part where everyone and their brother in the local IT consulting ecosystem has domain admin credentials for them & half the town in a KeepassX on a network drive. Don’t assume self-hosted means security-conscious. For most businesses, on-premise IT is treated like HVAC or electrical only more annoying. Anyone with a work shirt could con keys to the server room off the front desk.
• keepamovin 3y ago
  a typical open-source business needs profit to be the ultimate north star. I totally agree. We're making profit our north star in BrowserBox at Dosyago. It's a hard balance to strike, but absolutely necessary. Catering to the price-conscious is a losing battle. As for competing on price being bad...I guess that's true if you go free, but aside from that, I think there's markets/segments where that works. And if you have the solution that can support a lower COGS then you have the room for that too. A great case for an open-source solution is when a transparency problem is present. What is a transparency problem? It’s when a solution being closed source creates distrust between the client and vendor. I totally agree with that too. It's one of the reasons I thought going full open source would work for our cybersecurity market. But I think there's also the reliability concern: many companies are concerned that going with a small vendor may lock them into a dead end if the vendor goes out of business. Open source is like an escape hatch for the pressure of those concerns, by providing a guarantee that if you do go out of business they can keep using your product. I see this as less about licensing and more about access to the code. Breeding self-reliance in your clients is a recipe for scalability, and helps solves their reliability concerns. If you're the only source for updates and changes, you're a single point of failure. Open source is resilient in that way. Come check us out: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
  • WJW 3y ago
    Perhaps off-topic, but "north star" is such a hilarious business euphemism. The actual north star is ignored by 99+% of people on the northern hemisphere, not visible at all to people on the southern hemisphere and I bet most people would be completely unable to actually identify it in the night sky if asked. Now that I think about it, business north stars are also widely unknown and ignored so maybe the analogy is more apt than I thought...
    • keepamovin 3y ago
      Hahaha. Yeah I guess so. Well what it means for us is it's a priority. I guess that word harkens back to navigation on ships. I suppose nobody ever does that anymore. Hahaha
• foundart 3y ago
  For me as an engineer who influences technology acquisition, open source wins by being grokkable. - If my colleagues and I can see the source, we can decide whether or not we think it will fulfill the claims it makes. - Once we're using it, if we run into a bug or an unanticipated use case, we can, at a minimum, research a solution and suggest it in a bug report. Alternatively, we can open a PR. (edited for formatting)
  • kevincox 3y ago
    This is definitely valuable. It must be once a week that I read the source of a dependency to see what it is doing. Then I can make a quick workaround and usually a bug report.
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  When depending on open source projects it is harder to run into situations such as what happened to Adobe Flash, or Microsoft Silverlight. Or the entire career of this guy https://blog.visionarycto.com/p/my-20-year-career-is-technical-debt https://blog.visionarycto.com/p/my-20-year-career-is-technic...
• martypitt 3y ago
  Fantastic article. I'd love to see more people championing statements like "Profit, not usage, is a measure of success". I think there's a stigma about open source projects being run as commercial, profit-generating businesses, and I'm very happy to see more people championing the Commerical, Profitable OSS cause -- which everyone in the ecosystem benefits from. (More Profit == Keep Building More OSS). I happen to like the Open Core model here, where businesses adopt OSI OSS licenses for the core, and Source Visible licenses for the rest - which gives the balance of visibility, auditability, etc, whilst still enabling the project to be revenue generating, delivering longevity as well.
  • xtracto 3y ago
    I hate these new "open core" freemium companies. The best "open source " business is one that gets profit from doing something else and publishes some open source software on the side . Like react. Open core are just companies that want to throw around the "look we are cool, open source" mantra , but in reality are dealers giving you the first dose free to hook you up in their business. Where would we be if apache, linux, freebsd, openssl, firefox , and so many other 90s OSS had adopted that crappy model .
    • martypitt 3y ago
      > Open core are just companies that want to throw around the "look we are cool, open source" mantra , but in reality are dealers giving you the first dose free to hook you up in their business. Strong disagree. There are real material benefits to companies making their source code available - lots of them are espoused in this discussion. Things like Auditability, Debuggability, etc. These aren't about appearances, it's about giving additional benefits to the users. But it HAS to be backed by a sustainable business model. Otherwise, it's a hobby. Open Core, and other similar models, are about delivering the benefits of open source, with the security of knowing there's a viable business model sitting behind it. Also, as a community - we should be far more open to paying open source companies than we are. Statements like: > but in reality are dealers giving you the first dose free to hook you up in their business. Exactly! It's a business. They're paying salaries of people to create things to give you value. You should pay for it.
• peter_retief 3y ago
  I have always cringed at people calling open source "freeware", I had a boss many years ago who had this mindset, for him expensive software was a guarantee of success. For me, open source is the power of collective wisdom, the propriety software that I have seen through the years has always seemed a bit sad, lonely and unread.
• rushabh 3y ago
  Open source pretty much wins by being cheaper (in most cases free). 99+% of users never look at the source code. That's the reality.
• bambax 3y ago
  All very true. Price-conscious customers are not worth catering to. Non-price-conscious customers, well, don't care about price (to a (large) extent). Price is very rarely an issue.
• nickelpro 3y ago
  Dumb title, of course it does Author is trying to say Open Source businesses do not win by being cheaper. Open source codebases win all the time by being cheaper, no one pays for compression algorithms or network time daemons or media transcoders. Open source obliterated those markets entirely.
  • jameshart 3y ago
    Yes, the switch of context at the ‘Profit not usage is the measure of success’ heading, from talking about open source tools to open source businesses was so abrupt it gave me whiplash. I went back and reread the first paragraphs to check I hadn’t missed some words.
  • bee_rider 3y ago
    Yes, it actually seems like a pretty interesting post about open source code producing businesses. It is just annoying that the title is incorrect by literally one word.
• jongjong 3y ago
  I think a lot of open source projects aren't made open source by choice but by necessity. Sometimes making a product open source is the only way for it to gain any adoption at all. The author is focused on a tiny number of elite open source projects. They are not representative of the vast majority of open source projects. Some companies have the right business and/or government connections and they can easily sell lucrative licenses for their products but they are a minority. Most people and small businesses do not have that kind of network. Without the right business network, you will struggle to earn any money at all. It doesn't matter how good your product is or how much money it could save someone. Nobody will believe you, nobody will even try it out. The adoption hurdle is too big, even if the long term benefits could be massive. Making a product open source is the only way to get your toe in the door because it gives you a tiny chance of having your product noticed and that's really all that matters sometimes.
• incomingpain 3y ago
  Successful open source follows the freemium model.
• kristianpaul 3y ago
  Open Source wins by bringing common tooling and development environments. An ecosystems of choices from where to start your project.
• jrochkind1 3y ago
  > Granted, MongoDB eventually switched to a special SSPL license to add specific restrictions on Cloud Providers from distributing a service without contributing to the project, which isn’t OSI approved, but is open-source practically As an open source consumer (as well as author, but not as a business), I consider it "practically" a part of open source that I can choose to run open source software on any vendor or platform I want, not just ones who have a licensing deal with the software authors. This is a very practical matter. It may well be that you can't actually build a succesful business on actual open source. The arguments about how you can succeed with an open source business seem to be mostly based on making the source code _available_, with no need for it to be actually open source. It may be that "source-available" without actually being open source can be a viable business model in many more cases than actual open source. I think the sustainability/viabiilty of open source is indeed currently under question. But the difference between source-available software without an open source license, and actual open source licensed software, really does make practical difference to the consumer.
  • jeremyjh 3y ago
    > I can choose to run open source software on any vendor or platform I want, not just ones who have a licensing deal with the software authors. This is a very practical matter. The MongoDB license prevents cloud providers from reselling a Mongo IAAS. It does not restrict you from hosting your own database on any infrastructure you want (cloud or otherwise). Is there a license that does prevent you installing on specific clouds?
    • jrochkind1 3y ago
      I would like to pay someone I choose to install and manage it for me too, of course.
• ubermonkey 3y ago
  I thought this was well understood. TCO is a big number, and license cost is typically a small portion of it. FOSS can be a win because of stability and control; cost is rarely the driver.
• mbar84 3y ago
  My hypothesis about open source is that it's all about tax evasion. I can write some software for others to use, not charge them anything and thus no tax liability is generated. If they do the same, we've generated value for each other without the tax man getting a cut.
  • bee_rider 3y ago
    Couldn’t businesses just collaborate on closed source projects (source is open only to project members) and then not charge each other. Lots of open source programs (IMO, pretty much all the good ones) grow organically out of community efforts or out of academic projects.
• mproud 3y ago
  But sometimes it does
• ilikerashers 3y ago
  Posthog isn't truly open source as the author claims. It's "too complex" to run natively and is only recommended for "hobby" projects. They basically say, yeah our source code is there but if you want to run it yourself, forget about it. I was thinking of some clients I have that would benefit from this in their secure environments but was quickly chastened by their docs. Fair enough, they have to make money but seems like the ole bait-n-switch method of customer acquisition.
  • intelVISA 3y ago
    Posthog is a bit of a farce sadly. Don't hate the player, mind.
  • volkandkaya 3y ago
    They just kept adding features to the point where it became impossible to run on a "simple" stack. Is there any open source alternative that focuses just on product analytics?
    • XCSme 3y ago
      Not open-source, but self-hosted, check out UXWizz[0], I try as much as possible to keep the features count to a minimum and work just on improving them instead of adding new ones. [0]: https://www.uxwizz.com/ https://www.uxwizz.com/
  • XCSme 3y ago
    I keep saying this: open-source projects that promote self-hosting BUT earn their money by having their users NOT self-host their product (i.e. cloud offering), always end up crippling the open-source version or making it as hard to install as possible, especially if the product is built by a large corporation or VC-funded that requires constant growth.
• intelVISA 3y ago
  The only reason to keep something closed source is if you're trying to hide questionable behaviors (e.g. NVIDIA drivers, M$ Windows) or your code's embarassing (most enterprise software).
  • bigstrat2003 3y ago
    Or you know, if you're trying to make a profit on sales of the software itself. All the working open source business models work on selling service, not the software. Which is fine, but not everyone wants that business model.
    • intelVISA 3y ago
      Why would a client pay for a closed source wrapper over battle-tested open source libs? Excl. the rare case where the problem space requires a novel solution.
      • bigstrat2003 3y ago
        1. That's not what most closed source software is. It's kind of weird that you're equating closed source software to glorified open source wrappers, because most software (closed or open source) has a significant amount of work besides just "include some libs". 2. Even if it is a glorified wrapper, someone might want to pay so they don't have to do it themselves. Not everyone is a programmer, not every business wants to hire programmers (or their programmers are better used elsewhere).
• gspencley 3y ago
  > Profit, not usage, is a measure of success 99.999% of SaaS start-ups need to hear this
• kazinator 3y ago
  Open source wins by selling out to big corporations who lock users into service apps.
• app4soft 3y ago
  > “This product is X, but open source.” Mastodon.