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It is, however, also incredibly realistic. People are not using open source for the hippie philosophy. They are using it because it is free (as in beer), but

by smokel 3y ago

It is, however, also incredibly realistic. People are not using open source for the hippie philosophy. They are using it because it is free (as in beer), but even more importantly: they are using it because non-free licenses are a terrible pain in the ass. Legal aspects are a headache, and the amount of effort to get someone in your company to pay even a tiny amount for some library or service is a serious hurdle. I would not be surprised if adopting a non-free library would take a typical company ~40 man hours of work. At current rates, that translates to quite an expensive license.

bluGill 3y ago
Just getting open source adopted in my company takes around 10 man hours, and that is for something like a compiler that is only for internal use. If we will ship/expose it to customers we do due dalliance that probably amounts to 40+ man-hours to verify we can accept the license terms for that use and that the project doesn't have some hidden license issue (someone copied in code with a different license, link to something with a different license...). Getting close source is even more work though - now we need someone to negotiate license terms (that is make sure our proposed use is compatible with the license we buy). We also make sure there is no risk of using their code (what if the closed source binary library has some AGPL3 code in it). I'm not even sure how to go through that process.
api 3y ago
That may be true, but a lot of the creators of open source do in fact do it for the "hippie philosophy." That disconnect will eventually kill it. Why work hard to just be free labor for SaaS companies and people who don't care about you?
- salmo 3y ago
  The problem I’ve seen historically is when a company is founded around one project or ecosystem. Someone like Microsoft or Google could take software like this, pay the original developer, and still see tons of ROI offering it as a canned cloud service. And to a certain degree they don’t care about the profitability of that 1 thing if it helps sell the rest of their system. Quite honestly, they won’t care about competition using it if it’s already common. People want X, they’re using it, you can offer it. You’re paying a handful of people for street cred, a guarantee it will continue to work well with your stuff, and input into direction. Folks like RedisLabs, MongoDB, Hashicorp, etc. think they can do the same with a marketplace offering. But they’re reliant that the particular product is profitable on its own. They’re also reliant on the cloud customer being willing to establish another relationship with another vendor, even when they can automatically deploy and bill through their existing provider. We’ve seen folks behind OSS projects hop from company to company over time and the project continues to thrive. I haven’t seen a company restrict a license and the project do so… at least that I can think of. I might be wrong.

by smokel 3y ago

bluGill 3y ago

Just getting open source adopted in my company takes around 10 man hours, and that is for something like a compiler that is only for internal use. If we will ship/expose it to customers we do due dalliance that probably amounts to 40+ man-hours to verify we can accept the license terms for that use and that the project doesn't have some hidden license issue (someone copied in code with a different license, link to something with a different license...). Getting close source is even more work though - now we need someone to negotiate license terms (that is make sure our proposed use is compatible with the license we buy). We also make sure there is no risk of using their code (what if the closed source binary library has some AGPL3 code in it). I'm not even sure how to go through that process.

api 3y ago

That may be true, but a lot of the creators of open source do in fact do it for the "hippie philosophy." That disconnect will eventually kill it. Why work hard to just be free labor for SaaS companies and people who don't care about you?

salmo 3y ago
The problem I’ve seen historically is when a company is founded around one project or ecosystem. Someone like Microsoft or Google could take software like this, pay the original developer, and still see tons of ROI offering it as a canned cloud service. And to a certain degree they don’t care about the profitability of that 1 thing if it helps sell the rest of their system. Quite honestly, they won’t care about competition using it if it’s already common. People want X, they’re using it, you can offer it. You’re paying a handful of people for street cred, a guarantee it will continue to work well with your stuff, and input into direction. Folks like RedisLabs, MongoDB, Hashicorp, etc. think they can do the same with a marketplace offering. But they’re reliant that the particular product is profitable on its own. They’re also reliant on the cloud customer being willing to establish another relationship with another vendor, even when they can automatically deploy and bill through their existing provider. We’ve seen folks behind OSS projects hop from company to company over time and the project continues to thrive. I haven’t seen a company restrict a license and the project do so… at least that I can think of. I might be wrong.