8 ms·

I feel like the problem is defined in the title. Open Source. Company. These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two thi

I feel like the problem is defined in the title. Open Source. Company. These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well. Over and over we see the same story playing out. Companies need to make revenues to sustain the employees. Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage. This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source. There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures. My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small.

EMIRELADERO 3y ago
Even if they end up not succeeding, OSS companies are a good thing for another reason: they shift the Overton window. Some companies are getting boo'd on HN and elsewhere for changing their license from OSI-style to source-available, whereas 10 years ago there would be no source available to the public at all. This is, overall, a positive development.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  Well, there's no harm to them if they stop sharing their source X months after switching to source-available model. It'll even be a net benefit since CoPilot will not devour their code, strip its license out and spit (sorry, emit) to anyone who asks the right questions. An OSI approved license allows building upon that work, more importantly GPL prevents these improvements to go private. Source-available provides "for your eyes only" view to the code, and is just window dressing when compared to other models. I fail to see a net benefit, just a staggered backtrack.
chii 3y ago
> decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge. That is what i associate with any open source company.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  I’m not convinced that Open Source is a marketing terms that matters much for many industries (SaaS, hardware, probably others). If anything the continued push back against people trying to stay aligned with the Open Source community and have commercial enterprises tells me that in many ways you’re probably better off not trying in the first place. I personally don’t think that’s the right message. It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition.
  - cuu508 3y ago
    > It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition. Proposal: SaaS. Offer your product as a paid hosted service. Sure, other players can take your shiny awesome product, and launch a competing service. Compete with them! As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.
    - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
      A closed source SaaS is the worst for customers in terms of risk. An open source SaaS runs into the freeloader problem: > As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes. That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS. It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers. The time advantage does not appear to matter there.
jraph 3y ago
> My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. I would suggest the contrary: if you want to build a company and believe open source is the right way to do it, please do try! We don't have enough open source companies, we need more successful examples of this. It's hard and there are traps one needs to not fall into. I personally think VC money is one of the biggest traps, it's absolutely critical you keep control of where and how the companies is going. If you don't have investors to feed, you may make enough money to pay the employees with a good strategy. You can even manage without open core, which incentivizes pushing the useful features outside the open core.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Your recommendation is based on what you want for yourself, not based on what’s good for the person starting the company.
  - jraph 3y ago
    I suggested, I didn't recommend. I chose my words carefully. Under the condition that the person believes open source is the right thing to do. You need to believe in what you do when you start a company. I also suggest based on the fact that I do work for such a company, which has been successful. Next year is its 20th anniversary. It's an amazing place to work at. You can create amazing work environments out of open source. And while it's quite rare, it's also far from being the only one. Another commenter says that I seem to ignore the consequences of a failure. I don't. However, I'm surrounded by open source companies and they all seem to be great places to work at. Join us! When you believe in open source, being able to work in agreement with these values is amazing. I can't imagine how stronger that must be for the one would indeed founded a whole business like this. It's time people stopped spreading this belief that open source and sustainable business cannot go together.
    - Arch-TK 3y ago
      Where do I find these open source companies? In the UK it seems like they don't exist. But maybe I am looking in the wrong places.
PoutCo 3y ago
I think you are missing an important point here. 1. Open source is about the code belonging to the community 2. Open source projects can not survive without funding - as you develop 3. So, both (open source and company) can be compatible if and only if funding belong to the community. In other world, if the open source company is decentralised and democratic. And that is what we need to fight for.
- wslh 3y ago
  The current code is perpetually licensed to the community, not owned by the community.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    That's the legal reality of it, but I think what the GP meant was that the idea is that code effectively belongs to the communes (of course, credit is still due). It doesn't matter if this is done by licensing or releasing into the public domain. That's just the means to an end.
mbesto 3y ago
Actually what you're referring to is specifically FOSS - free and open source which is used synonymously with 'open source'. Furthermore there is free as in gratis versus libre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_beer%22_and_%22freedom_of_speech%22_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be... > and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well. So depending on whether your source is free as in beer or free as in speech, dictates what business strategy you might have.
- PeterZaitsev 3y ago
  Well there is Open Source and Free Software, which are quite similar. There is also "Freeware" and "Freemium" terms which use "Free as in Beer"
silisili 3y ago
Very few companies compete on code alone. Those that do I understand the model a bit more, but still usually have the velocity to run away from copycats. Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  None of these companies open source everything, or even the most valuable parts.
  - silisili 3y ago
    Picking on Google here, their most valuable part by far is injecting ads into search. Most agree their search is nothing special, getting worse even. We've seen tens of companies write good enough search engines. You could write one 10x better tomorrow and still likely fail. Their code is not the secret sauce - their user lock in is. A lot of the same could be said for FB.
    - konschubert 3y ago
      If google’s search is nothing special, why are all other search engines worse, including yours?
      - marginalia_nu 3y ago
        A big part is that they have access to an enormous amount of click data and user data. This not only from being the dominant search engine, but also from sources like Chrome.
      - nrabulinski 3y ago
        At least a few search engines are either equally good or better. Kagi immediately comes to mind, but there have been others posted on HN over the years as well
      - subtra3t 3y ago
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
I think this applies to Product Companies. If you look at Europe there is very large number of Service Companies developing Open Source and they are doing very well. The key is - they are Not relying on having some form of monopoly in regards to such software for their success
xtiansimon 3y ago
“…the (traditional) _motives_ for those two things don't merge terribly well.” (My emphasis) Companies also hold their cards close tending to not share their insights, information, and plans.
Voultapher 3y ago
> So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage. I disagree with that part. You have the people who know and understand the code, that's worth a tremendous amount. This also applies for new features, who else is gonna be as proficient as your people at building on top of it? Also a lot of enterprise contracts are all about assured support, who is placed better than you to provide it? You have the people that have the best understanding of the code.
- bruce511 3y ago
  You cant "have" people. Yes, today a bunch of highly skilled, highly trained people happen to work for you. Tomorrow those same people get hired by your customers, strike out on their own, or join the competition. All the points you raise are true. But the company doesn't "own" the people, it can only exploit them for as long as they hang around.
hutzlibu 3y ago
"My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source" I don't think this is true in general, but maybe indeed in many cases. And a non profit organisation would be a better fit(tax reductible donations!), but those are not exactly easy to set up and a project in itself.
prmoustache 3y ago
This is overly simplified. You could have said "company" and "made in EU" and it wouldn't have been more or less true. Open source itself is not necessarily a problem but one over many factors that have there pros and cons. And for one struggling company doing open source there are hundred or thousands of struggling companies not doing anything opensource or benefiting from opensource without contributing.
abetusk 3y ago
The cathedral vs. the bazaar refers to a way of operating an open source project, not open source vs. closed source [0]. Raymond uses the example of Emacs vs. Linux (Stallman vs. Torvalds) where Stallman works in private, only allows a privileged few to contribute vs. Torvalds who accepts changes liberally. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
mistrial9 3y ago
valid point but reductionist by narrowing the terms that are considered at all before reaching a broad conclusion. Just as the essay mentions that software distribution is no longer a bottleneck, the "social ecosystem of inventors-builders-makers-users" is a far different proposal in 2024. Some here recall when "using a computer" was a niche activity, now "all of China, yes or no" is ordinary talk? Fish need to see the water - coders need to see the social ecosystems. In this small post, markets are a subset of social ecosystem, but a powerfully charged one.
Capricorn2481 3y ago
A lot of open source projects would die if it wasn't for the companies backing them.
nocombination 3y ago
> My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. The issue at hand is more about deciding how OTHER people/companies may or may not use your source-code to suit their own needs. If you decide Open Source, someone else can easily decide: actually, Company (and free labor to boot). But to your point, in the long term, Open Source is a better prospect (for the people not the companies). Think of all the problems with crappy IoT devices and bad security practices. Many devices _could_ have decades of life left in them, only to be bricked because the companies want to sell newer crap instead (for the companies not the people). And on-and-on. I think the whole idea of a new licensing model is a good starting point—like a forced NDA to keep a head-start. However, the same problem holds: nothing will prevent someone from stealing the source code either way—one license or otherwise—if it is freely available. But if there is a large community of contributors, the value prospect for everyone is huge. And, to top it off: now with AI—how can we prevent an AI from rewriting the sources in a way that appears "nothing like the original"?
graemep 3y ago
There are lots of successful open source companies. How much did IBM buy Red Hat for? How profitable was it? There are businesses making money out of every major open source project and contributing to it. The business model fails for reasons other than it just being open source: 1. trying to sell open source as a product rather than as a way to sell something else - services, hardware, whatever. 2. being the main developer - and therefore losing the benefit of sharing development costs. How is it a bazaar if there is only one organization developing it?
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  Red Hat is also highly criticized for their present day questionable reinterpretation of what the GPL allows them to do.
- ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  > "...Red Hat..." Successful tech companies don't sell themselves, particularly to has-beens like IBM.
  - growse 3y ago
    IBM pulled in $60b last year. For many tech companies (and especially their investors), selling out and realising a return is the very definition of success.
plumeria 3y ago
Or try to make a company and if it doesn’t work open source it? Blender comes to mind.
davidw 3y ago
A successful company needs to sell something scarce. Open source software is by definition not really a scarce good, so you need to find something adjacent to it that is, and that can be a lot trickier. https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...
- thayne 3y ago
  Proprietary software isn't exactly scarce either. It relies on copyright and patent law to enforce a monopoly.
  - davidw 3y ago
    > relies on copyright and patent law to enforce a monopoly Correct. As well as SaaS business models which make that even easier and less dependent on sometimes difficult to enforce rules to make the product scarce.
  - filleduchaos 3y ago
    So...it's scarce? I genuinely don't understand what the point of bringing up copyright here is. Apart from a tiny handful of materials, even physical products rely on legal protections against counterfeits and knockoffs to be scarce. Why do we talk about software as if it's the first and only thing to be artificially scarce?
    - thayne 3y ago
      No it isn't scarce. There isn't a limited supply. There is no point at which the software company would say "sorry, we're out of stock". Unless maybe you are selling physical media with the software on it. With SaaS, possibly you are constrained by the capacity of your infrastructure, but that isn't usually a practical concern unless you have incredibly unexpected growth.
      - davidw 3y ago
        It has had artificial scarcity introduced to provide an incentive to create it. It's certainly an imperfect system in many ways, but it kinda sort does create scarcity that drives revenue which pays programmers to keep working on the software.
thayne 3y ago
I don't thing that is necessarily the case. If your model is to sell the software as a SaaS, then yes it gives you a disadvantage, because someone else can just take it and sell the same thing without paying for development. Same thing if you sell a packaged product. If you sell support, you have a slight advantage, because you have more expertise in your product since you created it, and can make changes directly to it. But then it can be hard to find customers willing to pay, and you have an incentive to make the product difficult to use so more users require support. I think the ideal situation would be where you are paid for the development itself, rather than selling the resuling software. Maybe with a pool that interested parties can invest in for initial development, new features or continued maintenance, like kickstarter or bug bounties. But that probably wouldn't have the high margins that the software industry has become accustomed to.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Actually this is exactly how many, if not most, software companies are set up today. The interested parties in this case are users. They pay a small subscription each month. That subscription pays for development, support, hosting, and so on. Its the very definition of sustainable because it doesn't rely on "new sales" to fund existing customers. The overall cost is spread very thinly across the ones who are benefiting.
Ologn 3y ago
> decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. Google releases Android source code. While people would like even more of it released, I can and have compiled LineageOS and put it on an Android device. I could even go more in and get a Pinephone (I do not have one, but have a Pine watch). From another open source company. Google released Angular and more OSS. Facebook released React. Red Hat built a giant OSS business before being swallowed up by IBM - b2b companies to get swallowed up by big b2b companies. On a smaller scale, Health Market Science released a generic database Java library I used. They needed to write some generic software to use, then open sourced it if anyone found it useful. Doing so did not threaten their business, LexisNexis acquired HMS. Open source is released within and without companies. Lots of successful companies release open source. Most of what I use is open source - from my System76 laptop and desktop, to my Android and LineageOS phones, to my Pinetime watch. I suppose for people who don't program it the appeal level is different, but I do program.
seba_dos1 3y ago
> This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source. There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures. Then it's good that "bazaar" vs. "cathedral" is completely orthogonal to "free software/open source" vs. "non-free".

EMIRELADERO 3y ago

Even if they end up not succeeding, OSS companies are a good thing for another reason: they shift the Overton window. Some companies are getting boo'd on HN and elsewhere for changing their license from OSI-style to source-available, whereas 10 years ago there would be no source available to the public at all. This is, overall, a positive development.

bayindirh 3y ago
Well, there's no harm to them if they stop sharing their source X months after switching to source-available model. It'll even be a net benefit since CoPilot will not devour their code, strip its license out and spit (sorry, emit) to anyone who asks the right questions. An OSI approved license allows building upon that work, more importantly GPL prevents these improvements to go private. Source-available provides "for your eyes only" view to the code, and is just window dressing when compared to other models. I fail to see a net benefit, just a staggered backtrack.

chii 3y ago

> decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge. That is what i associate with any open source company.

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
I’m not convinced that Open Source is a marketing terms that matters much for many industries (SaaS, hardware, probably others). If anything the continued push back against people trying to stay aligned with the Open Source community and have commercial enterprises tells me that in many ways you’re probably better off not trying in the first place. I personally don’t think that’s the right message. It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition.
- cuu508 3y ago
  > It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition. Proposal: SaaS. Offer your product as a paid hosted service. Sure, other players can take your shiny awesome product, and launch a competing service. Compete with them! As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    A closed source SaaS is the worst for customers in terms of risk. An open source SaaS runs into the freeloader problem: > As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes. That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS. It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers. The time advantage does not appear to matter there.

jraph 3y ago

> My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. I would suggest the contrary: if you want to build a company and believe open source is the right way to do it, please do try! We don't have enough open source companies, we need more successful examples of this. It's hard and there are traps one needs to not fall into. I personally think VC money is one of the biggest traps, it's absolutely critical you keep control of where and how the companies is going. If you don't have investors to feed, you may make enough money to pay the employees with a good strategy. You can even manage without open core, which incentivizes pushing the useful features outside the open core.

konschubert 3y ago
Your recommendation is based on what you want for yourself, not based on what’s good for the person starting the company.
- jraph 3y ago
  I suggested, I didn't recommend. I chose my words carefully. Under the condition that the person believes open source is the right thing to do. You need to believe in what you do when you start a company. I also suggest based on the fact that I do work for such a company, which has been successful. Next year is its 20th anniversary. It's an amazing place to work at. You can create amazing work environments out of open source. And while it's quite rare, it's also far from being the only one. Another commenter says that I seem to ignore the consequences of a failure. I don't. However, I'm surrounded by open source companies and they all seem to be great places to work at. Join us! When you believe in open source, being able to work in agreement with these values is amazing. I can't imagine how stronger that must be for the one would indeed founded a whole business like this. It's time people stopped spreading this belief that open source and sustainable business cannot go together.
  - Arch-TK 3y ago
    Where do I find these open source companies? In the UK it seems like they don't exist. But maybe I am looking in the wrong places.

PoutCo 3y ago

I think you are missing an important point here. 1. Open source is about the code belonging to the community 2. Open source projects can not survive without funding - as you develop 3. So, both (open source and company) can be compatible if and only if funding belong to the community. In other world, if the open source company is decentralised and democratic. And that is what we need to fight for.

wslh 3y ago
The current code is perpetually licensed to the community, not owned by the community.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  That's the legal reality of it, but I think what the GP meant was that the idea is that code effectively belongs to the communes (of course, credit is still due). It doesn't matter if this is done by licensing or releasing into the public domain. That's just the means to an end.

mbesto 3y ago

Actually what you're referring to is specifically FOSS - free and open source which is used synonymously with 'open source'. Furthermore there is free as in gratis versus libre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_beer%22_and_%22freedom_of_speech%22_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be... > and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well. So depending on whether your source is free as in beer or free as in speech, dictates what business strategy you might have.

PeterZaitsev 3y ago
Well there is Open Source and Free Software, which are quite similar. There is also "Freeware" and "Freemium" terms which use "Free as in Beer"

silisili 3y ago

Very few companies compete on code alone. Those that do I understand the model a bit more, but still usually have the velocity to run away from copycats. Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
None of these companies open source everything, or even the most valuable parts.
- silisili 3y ago
  Picking on Google here, their most valuable part by far is injecting ads into search. Most agree their search is nothing special, getting worse even. We've seen tens of companies write good enough search engines. You could write one 10x better tomorrow and still likely fail. Their code is not the secret sauce - their user lock in is. A lot of the same could be said for FB.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    If google’s search is nothing special, why are all other search engines worse, including yours?
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      A big part is that they have access to an enormous amount of click data and user data. This not only from being the dominant search engine, but also from sources like Chrome.
    - nrabulinski 3y ago
      At least a few search engines are either equally good or better. Kagi immediately comes to mind, but there have been others posted on HN over the years as well
    - subtra3t 3y ago

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

I think this applies to Product Companies. If you look at Europe there is very large number of Service Companies developing Open Source and they are doing very well. The key is - they are Not relying on having some form of monopoly in regards to such software for their success

xtiansimon 3y ago

“…the (traditional) _motives_ for those two things don't merge terribly well.” (My emphasis) Companies also hold their cards close tending to not share their insights, information, and plans.

Voultapher 3y ago

> So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage. I disagree with that part. You have the people who know and understand the code, that's worth a tremendous amount. This also applies for new features, who else is gonna be as proficient as your people at building on top of it? Also a lot of enterprise contracts are all about assured support, who is placed better than you to provide it? You have the people that have the best understanding of the code.

bruce511 3y ago
You cant "have" people. Yes, today a bunch of highly skilled, highly trained people happen to work for you. Tomorrow those same people get hired by your customers, strike out on their own, or join the competition. All the points you raise are true. But the company doesn't "own" the people, it can only exploit them for as long as they hang around.

hutzlibu 3y ago

"My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source" I don't think this is true in general, but maybe indeed in many cases. And a non profit organisation would be a better fit(tax reductible donations!), but those are not exactly easy to set up and a project in itself.

prmoustache 3y ago

This is overly simplified. You could have said "company" and "made in EU" and it wouldn't have been more or less true. Open source itself is not necessarily a problem but one over many factors that have there pros and cons. And for one struggling company doing open source there are hundred or thousands of struggling companies not doing anything opensource or benefiting from opensource without contributing.

abetusk 3y ago

The cathedral vs. the bazaar refers to a way of operating an open source project, not open source vs. closed source [0]. Raymond uses the example of Emacs vs. Linux (Stallman vs. Torvalds) where Stallman works in private, only allows a privileged few to contribute vs. Torvalds who accepts changes liberally. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

mistrial9 3y ago

valid point but reductionist by narrowing the terms that are considered at all before reaching a broad conclusion. Just as the essay mentions that software distribution is no longer a bottleneck, the "social ecosystem of inventors-builders-makers-users" is a far different proposal in 2024. Some here recall when "using a computer" was a niche activity, now "all of China, yes or no" is ordinary talk? Fish need to see the water - coders need to see the social ecosystems. In this small post, markets are a subset of social ecosystem, but a powerfully charged one.

Capricorn2481 3y ago

A lot of open source projects would die if it wasn't for the companies backing them.

nocombination 3y ago

> My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. The issue at hand is more about deciding how OTHER people/companies may or may not use your source-code to suit their own needs. If you decide Open Source, someone else can easily decide: actually, Company (and free labor to boot). But to your point, in the long term, Open Source is a better prospect (for the people not the companies). Think of all the problems with crappy IoT devices and bad security practices. Many devices _could_ have decades of life left in them, only to be bricked because the companies want to sell newer crap instead (for the companies not the people). And on-and-on. I think the whole idea of a new licensing model is a good starting point—like a forced NDA to keep a head-start. However, the same problem holds: nothing will prevent someone from stealing the source code either way—one license or otherwise—if it is freely available. But if there is a large community of contributors, the value prospect for everyone is huge. And, to top it off: now with AI—how can we prevent an AI from rewriting the sources in a way that appears "nothing like the original"?

graemep 3y ago

There are lots of successful open source companies. How much did IBM buy Red Hat for? How profitable was it? There are businesses making money out of every major open source project and contributing to it. The business model fails for reasons other than it just being open source: 1. trying to sell open source as a product rather than as a way to sell something else - services, hardware, whatever. 2. being the main developer - and therefore losing the benefit of sharing development costs. How is it a bazaar if there is only one organization developing it?

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
Red Hat is also highly criticized for their present day questionable reinterpretation of what the GPL allows them to do.
ThrowawayR2 3y ago
> "...Red Hat..." Successful tech companies don't sell themselves, particularly to has-beens like IBM.
- growse 3y ago
  IBM pulled in $60b last year. For many tech companies (and especially their investors), selling out and realising a return is the very definition of success.

plumeria 3y ago

Or try to make a company and if it doesn’t work open source it? Blender comes to mind.

davidw 3y ago

A successful company needs to sell something scarce. Open source software is by definition not really a scarce good, so you need to find something adjacent to it that is, and that can be a lot trickier. https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...

thayne 3y ago
Proprietary software isn't exactly scarce either. It relies on copyright and patent law to enforce a monopoly.
- davidw 3y ago
  > relies on copyright and patent law to enforce a monopoly Correct. As well as SaaS business models which make that even easier and less dependent on sometimes difficult to enforce rules to make the product scarce.
- filleduchaos 3y ago
  So...it's scarce? I genuinely don't understand what the point of bringing up copyright here is. Apart from a tiny handful of materials, even physical products rely on legal protections against counterfeits and knockoffs to be scarce. Why do we talk about software as if it's the first and only thing to be artificially scarce?
  - thayne 3y ago
    No it isn't scarce. There isn't a limited supply. There is no point at which the software company would say "sorry, we're out of stock". Unless maybe you are selling physical media with the software on it. With SaaS, possibly you are constrained by the capacity of your infrastructure, but that isn't usually a practical concern unless you have incredibly unexpected growth.
    - davidw 3y ago
      It has had artificial scarcity introduced to provide an incentive to create it. It's certainly an imperfect system in many ways, but it kinda sort does create scarcity that drives revenue which pays programmers to keep working on the software.

thayne 3y ago

I don't thing that is necessarily the case. If your model is to sell the software as a SaaS, then yes it gives you a disadvantage, because someone else can just take it and sell the same thing without paying for development. Same thing if you sell a packaged product. If you sell support, you have a slight advantage, because you have more expertise in your product since you created it, and can make changes directly to it. But then it can be hard to find customers willing to pay, and you have an incentive to make the product difficult to use so more users require support. I think the ideal situation would be where you are paid for the development itself, rather than selling the resuling software. Maybe with a pool that interested parties can invest in for initial development, new features or continued maintenance, like kickstarter or bug bounties. But that probably wouldn't have the high margins that the software industry has become accustomed to.

bruce511 3y ago
Actually this is exactly how many, if not most, software companies are set up today. The interested parties in this case are users. They pay a small subscription each month. That subscription pays for development, support, hosting, and so on. Its the very definition of sustainable because it doesn't rely on "new sales" to fund existing customers. The overall cost is spread very thinly across the ones who are benefiting.

Ologn 3y ago

> decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. Google releases Android source code. While people would like even more of it released, I can and have compiled LineageOS and put it on an Android device. I could even go more in and get a Pinephone (I do not have one, but have a Pine watch). From another open source company. Google released Angular and more OSS. Facebook released React. Red Hat built a giant OSS business before being swallowed up by IBM - b2b companies to get swallowed up by big b2b companies. On a smaller scale, Health Market Science released a generic database Java library I used. They needed to write some generic software to use, then open sourced it if anyone found it useful. Doing so did not threaten their business, LexisNexis acquired HMS. Open source is released within and without companies. Lots of successful companies release open source. Most of what I use is open source - from my System76 laptop and desktop, to my Android and LineageOS phones, to my Pinetime watch. I suppose for people who don't program it the appeal level is different, but I do program.

seba_dos1 3y ago

> This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source. There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures. Then it's good that "bazaar" vs. "cathedral" is completely orthogonal to "free software/open source" vs. "non-free".