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"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 c
by 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 agoI 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 agoMeanwhile 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.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago> You know why companies use Open Source, for the most part? But that's the thing. Most large companies generally don't, not unless that product is truly battle-tested. They are usually fine throwing out money to another company as long as they can get support. Support around an open source product is very hard to do unless you structure your company this way
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cpill 3y agoWe ended up paying for people to host stuff for us. the free OS aspect attracts us because we know we can host ourselves down the line when the team grows and also, that the people behind it aren't douche bags and want to make the world better in some small way.
- palata 3y ago> 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. Nitpick: source-available is not open source, by definition.