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I think the key point is this; >> (By the way, all new software without accompanying support & guidance is doomed to fail. And if that software comes from a do

I think the key point is this; >> (By the way, all new software without accompanying support & guidance is doomed to fail. And if that software comes from a dominant player, you’ll just have to deal with that by the way.) There's a temptation to conflate the software license with the software business. This is natural, but places software as the primary value in the chain. From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part. I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. And a big part of that effectiveness is that staff can run it. And when it all goes wrong there's someone to call. I'm buying a -relationship-, not software. Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc. In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it.

kmac_ 2y ago
That's the main point. No one buys software, they buy solutions. Accounting is a good example. I use a SaaS solution, but it doesn't matter because I could also take all my invoices to an accountant, and the effect would be the same. Also, mixing open licenses into business doesn't usually make sense. I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source.
- quonn 2y ago
  > I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source. I totally agree with this. And not just businesses, individuals too.
- nvk6 2y ago
  Large Corps arent exactly well known to handle the Explore part of the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff. On the flip side lot of open source devs are going to get 100x more productive in the Exploit part than the avg coder monkey at large corp. Nothing is obvious and predictable about where that story goes in an ever growing ever changing system. Large corps will keep funding whoever gets the job done. While AI might replace lot of Large Corps activity which is basically on the Exploit side of the Tradeoff.
chii 2y ago
> They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it. and they'd tell you to pay up 10x, or lose this stability in the future; If it was an open source software, you will have the option to go to a competing vendor.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Is there a single example of multiple vendors selling support for the same open-source piece of software, where I can just hire a different vendor if I no longer like my current one, without changing anything major in my operations? You could say that Canonical and IBM RedHat compete on offering Linux support, but the reality is that it's not that much harder to switch from RHEL to Ubuntu than switching to any other OS, so I don't think this counts.
  - roywashere 2y ago
    It works, but just for _some_ solutions. For instance, there are multiple providers of support for PostgreSQL. And there are many companies offering support/consulting for WordPress. IBM RedHat is the steward of RHEL, and Canonical is of Ubuntu, so if you want support from them there are no real other options, but they do work with multiple different ISVs. If you want to stay 'independent' and have the most leverage you can take a linux which is not from a bigco, such as Debian. I'm really worried about cloud-lock-in for bigger companies. My previous company switched large amounts of product to AWS, when I asked about how this was feasible after doing back-of-the-envelope calculations they said: well you should not consider list price, nobody is paying list price, we get discounts. This reminded me of an ISP I worked for in 2006 that invested in large amounts of Solaris machines because they got big discounts instead of going for the much more obvious Linux route. Then after two years or so the new (Oracle at that time?? I'm not sure) sales rep paid a visit and they said, when they were not able to sell MORE new servers: OK screw the discounts, from now you're paying list price. So that got them stuck in a real bad place. I'm afraid the same might happen to companies who move to cloud providers as well. And then I've not even touched on issues such as privacy, security, business continuity, and losing the skill to actually run your own hardware
whoitwas 2y ago
License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyone used them for free, then they were acquired by giant companies who charge for their use.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  How is software an utility?
  - whoitwas 2y ago
    analogy: A similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar.
    - DeathArrow 2y ago
      What is the working analogy here? Where is the similarity?
      - fungiblecog 2y ago
        The rest of us understood it
- pjmlp 2y ago
  It would exist as I knew it until 2000's, and hence why I see a parallel where current non-copyleft adoption has taken us back to.
  - whoitwas 2y ago
    That's the point. It wouldn't exist. It's not possible without research and OSS. You can't write off the entire foundation of CS before a date. Well you can, but it's ignoring history.
    - 2y ago
DeathArrow 2y ago
>I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. So you would pick a software costing 1 million over a software that is 90% as effective but costs 1 thousand?
- sph 2y ago
  Weird question. There is no 100% effective software, there is no way to measure effectiveness (what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness") and it all depends on the budget. If it fits your budget, and a commercial product has a good sales team (vs a cheaper opensource one with zero marketing), the commercial product is gonna get chosen even if it costs infinitely more. That's basically IBM and Oracle's play book.
  - DeathArrow 2y ago
    I haven't make any claim about 100% effective software. However, one software can be less effective than another. Saying that one is 90% as effective than the other is just to help visualise things. > what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness" I work for a SaaS company. Our marketing and product teams work hard to convince potential customers that our software fulfills their needs at a reasonable cost. When we buy services and software we don't look at any of the marketing materials, there are very trough analysis of costs/benefits being made, dollars and even cents are counted. Every cost that can be cut while we can still deliver something to our customers will be cut.
    - sph 2y ago
      I run a SaaS company as well. We are outliers, especially if you are selling to other tech people, who are technically proficient and don't value their time very much—they'd rather spend hours writing their own half-arsed solution than paying someone else $5/month. I know how hard it is to sell to someone that believe your product is nothing more than "a shell script written over a weekend" (paraphrased comment from my Show HN) Outside of tech, that's not how it works. They don't have in-house developers. They don't read HN. When they need a database, they ring up a large vendor and spend hundred of thousands a year for Oracle, when a PostgreSQL container would do just fine. They often don't even care they could pay zero, simply because PostgreSQL doesn't come with a phone number to call when the DB crashes.
auggierose 2y ago
So if Adobe open-sources all of their software tomorrow, that would not impact their business? > In truth the license doesn't matter. Come on. What matters is the way the business extracts value from you, and the license is part of that. Especially when the software you produce is so great that nobody needs to be called, because it just works.
- repelsteeltje 2y ago
  I think the OP framing is about the enterprise / government framing, so Adobe maybe isn't the best example. Still, the licence doesn't matter - while probably being a bit of an overstatement - is somewhat true. If my enterprise relies on an Adobe service, it's primarily about my relationship with them, not the product license. ... But of course, product price and therefore revenue will decline if competitors can sell my product too or customers can download and use it for free.
  - auggierose 2y ago
    > If my enterprise relies on an Adobe service, it's primarily about my relationship with them, not the product license. That is forgetting why your enterprise relies on an Adobe service. It is because nobody else has software that does their job as well as Adobe does. This discussion is non-sensical to me. Of course the license matters.
lifeisstillgood 2y ago
Years ago I tried to build a certification / service team out of independent software vendors and open source systems - ie you could buy 1 years of support for Apache httpd from any certified vendor (ie they knew enough about httpd) It’s hard but I still think that’s the way to support OSS
eru 2y ago
> In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it. The license matters indirectly: if it's open source, you know that as a fall-back other suppliers might be able to step up and take over, if your original guys fail or get too insufferable.
- acka 2y ago
  Moreover, if you have an issue with OSS software and have competent people in your own IT team, they could attempt to fix the problem and get results faster than going through the whole incident-report-blame-the-victim-finally-have-them-confirm-your-repro-wait-for-next-version-release-which-hopefully-includes-the-fix ordeal. Then if you contribute the fix back to the project, the community of users benefits as well, with possible free publicity for your organization to boot.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    That's the theory, but in practice that's not how it works. Firstly, of course, most customers don't have any programming skills at all, so the point is moot. But let's limit ourselves to customers that do have IT departments. It's worth noting that IT departments are already busy. Deploying resources because you found a bug in PostgreSQL is unlikely. But ok, you found a bug. And we happen to have a highly paid C programmer on staff. Let's ask him to take a look. He's not familiar with PostgreSQL architecture- do it'll take a few days to download the source, make a build, hope the build is close to our version, and deploy to production. (This has already cost the business more than a enterprise support contract from Postgres but whatever...) He then spends a month working through various subsystems to determine the exact flow that leads to your bug. (I'm gonna ignore all the cases where the "bug" isn't a bug.) He makes a tweak, merges it into the current build, and deploys. He even submits the PR which may or may not be accepted. Until it is he's regularly pulled from his task to update the PostgreSQL source and rebuild. Everyone else plagues him either PostgreSQL questions twice a week now. His manager gives him a 'poor' rating at the next review because the thing he was actually hired to do is not getting done. Unless the company is selling to other PostgreSQL developers, there's no "free publicity". That's not how publicity works. So yes, your scenario is possible, but its simply not how things happen. You complain to the IT department - they add PostgreSQL enterprise support to the next budget. They're not looking to take on extra load unnecessarily. Yes, the major contributers to big OSS projects are tech companies contributing full time programmers. And that's a good thing. But customers do not have the time or resources (or inclination) to go down this road. Frankly, it's too hard (in most cases) to just build the software, much less understand the code to make changes.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
the_gipsy 2y ago
Software license may not consciously matter to end users, but they do have a huge impact on everything else. That is, the end user would not have the software, or would have vastly different software, if the licenses were different. They just don't know and don't care about the licensing details and effects, like so many other technical aspects.
mkleczek 2y ago
This is as long as you don't take _risk_ into account. RedHat providing OSS licensed software is _less_ risk than RedHat providing proprietary closed source operating system.
otabdeveloper4 2y ago
> In truth the license doesn't matter. It only doesn't matter if you don't care at all about software supply chain risks. This is not a sane position in 2024 to hold.
danlitt 2y ago
> From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part. This is only because true most of the time businesses use a lot of publicly funded work without paying for it. If software development were entirely private, I'm sure businesses would find excuses that actually no it has to cost 100x what it would cost otherwise. Everything you say about maintainability and stability is true. But writing software that can be operated as a service in the first place is substantially harder. It's just not as easy for a company to capture.
morningsam 2y ago
>Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc. >In truth the license doesn't matter. It's funny to bring that up in the context of Red Hat who have started to circumvent the GPL by terminating their relationship with anyone who tries to actually make use of the rights granted by it. "The license doesn't matter" because they've found a loophole in it, but it clearly does matter in that they had to do so in the first place and weren't able to adhere to its spirit due to business concerns. [1]: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis... [2]: https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-08-redhat-gets-around-gplv2-license-intention-with-contract-law/ https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-08-redhat-gets-around...
gbraad 2y ago
Red Hat also does the verification against standards which allow them to be used: https://access.redhat.com/articles/compliance_activities_and_gov_standards https://access.redhat.com/articles/compliance_activities_and... Not every distribution does/can.

kmac_ 2y ago

That's the main point. No one buys software, they buy solutions. Accounting is a good example. I use a SaaS solution, but it doesn't matter because I could also take all my invoices to an accountant, and the effect would be the same. Also, mixing open licenses into business doesn't usually make sense. I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source.

quonn 2y ago
> I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source. I totally agree with this. And not just businesses, individuals too.
nvk6 2y ago
Large Corps arent exactly well known to handle the Explore part of the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff. On the flip side lot of open source devs are going to get 100x more productive in the Exploit part than the avg coder monkey at large corp. Nothing is obvious and predictable about where that story goes in an ever growing ever changing system. Large corps will keep funding whoever gets the job done. While AI might replace lot of Large Corps activity which is basically on the Exploit side of the Tradeoff.

chii 2y ago

> They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it. and they'd tell you to pay up 10x, or lose this stability in the future; If it was an open source software, you will have the option to go to a competing vendor.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Is there a single example of multiple vendors selling support for the same open-source piece of software, where I can just hire a different vendor if I no longer like my current one, without changing anything major in my operations? You could say that Canonical and IBM RedHat compete on offering Linux support, but the reality is that it's not that much harder to switch from RHEL to Ubuntu than switching to any other OS, so I don't think this counts.
- roywashere 2y ago
  It works, but just for _some_ solutions. For instance, there are multiple providers of support for PostgreSQL. And there are many companies offering support/consulting for WordPress. IBM RedHat is the steward of RHEL, and Canonical is of Ubuntu, so if you want support from them there are no real other options, but they do work with multiple different ISVs. If you want to stay 'independent' and have the most leverage you can take a linux which is not from a bigco, such as Debian. I'm really worried about cloud-lock-in for bigger companies. My previous company switched large amounts of product to AWS, when I asked about how this was feasible after doing back-of-the-envelope calculations they said: well you should not consider list price, nobody is paying list price, we get discounts. This reminded me of an ISP I worked for in 2006 that invested in large amounts of Solaris machines because they got big discounts instead of going for the much more obvious Linux route. Then after two years or so the new (Oracle at that time?? I'm not sure) sales rep paid a visit and they said, when they were not able to sell MORE new servers: OK screw the discounts, from now you're paying list price. So that got them stuck in a real bad place. I'm afraid the same might happen to companies who move to cloud providers as well. And then I've not even touched on issues such as privacy, security, business continuity, and losing the skill to actually run your own hardware

whoitwas 2y ago

License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyone used them for free, then they were acquired by giant companies who charge for their use.

DeathArrow 2y ago
How is software an utility?
- whoitwas 2y ago
  analogy: A similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar.
  - DeathArrow 2y ago
    What is the working analogy here? Where is the similarity?
    - fungiblecog 2y ago
      The rest of us understood it
pjmlp 2y ago
It would exist as I knew it until 2000's, and hence why I see a parallel where current non-copyleft adoption has taken us back to.
- whoitwas 2y ago
  That's the point. It wouldn't exist. It's not possible without research and OSS. You can't write off the entire foundation of CS before a date. Well you can, but it's ignoring history.
  - 2y ago

DeathArrow 2y ago

>I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. So you would pick a software costing 1 million over a software that is 90% as effective but costs 1 thousand?

sph 2y ago
Weird question. There is no 100% effective software, there is no way to measure effectiveness (what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness") and it all depends on the budget. If it fits your budget, and a commercial product has a good sales team (vs a cheaper opensource one with zero marketing), the commercial product is gonna get chosen even if it costs infinitely more. That's basically IBM and Oracle's play book.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  I haven't make any claim about 100% effective software. However, one software can be less effective than another. Saying that one is 90% as effective than the other is just to help visualise things. > what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness" I work for a SaaS company. Our marketing and product teams work hard to convince potential customers that our software fulfills their needs at a reasonable cost. When we buy services and software we don't look at any of the marketing materials, there are very trough analysis of costs/benefits being made, dollars and even cents are counted. Every cost that can be cut while we can still deliver something to our customers will be cut.
  - sph 2y ago
    I run a SaaS company as well. We are outliers, especially if you are selling to other tech people, who are technically proficient and don't value their time very much—they'd rather spend hours writing their own half-arsed solution than paying someone else $5/month. I know how hard it is to sell to someone that believe your product is nothing more than "a shell script written over a weekend" (paraphrased comment from my Show HN) Outside of tech, that's not how it works. They don't have in-house developers. They don't read HN. When they need a database, they ring up a large vendor and spend hundred of thousands a year for Oracle, when a PostgreSQL container would do just fine. They often don't even care they could pay zero, simply because PostgreSQL doesn't come with a phone number to call when the DB crashes.

auggierose 2y ago

So if Adobe open-sources all of their software tomorrow, that would not impact their business? > In truth the license doesn't matter. Come on. What matters is the way the business extracts value from you, and the license is part of that. Especially when the software you produce is so great that nobody needs to be called, because it just works.

repelsteeltje 2y ago
I think the OP framing is about the enterprise / government framing, so Adobe maybe isn't the best example. Still, the licence doesn't matter - while probably being a bit of an overstatement - is somewhat true. If my enterprise relies on an Adobe service, it's primarily about my relationship with them, not the product license. ... But of course, product price and therefore revenue will decline if competitors can sell my product too or customers can download and use it for free.
- auggierose 2y ago
  > If my enterprise relies on an Adobe service, it's primarily about my relationship with them, not the product license. That is forgetting why your enterprise relies on an Adobe service. It is because nobody else has software that does their job as well as Adobe does. This discussion is non-sensical to me. Of course the license matters.

lifeisstillgood 2y ago

Years ago I tried to build a certification / service team out of independent software vendors and open source systems - ie you could buy 1 years of support for Apache httpd from any certified vendor (ie they knew enough about httpd) It’s hard but I still think that’s the way to support OSS

eru 2y ago

> In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it. The license matters indirectly: if it's open source, you know that as a fall-back other suppliers might be able to step up and take over, if your original guys fail or get too insufferable.

acka 2y ago
Moreover, if you have an issue with OSS software and have competent people in your own IT team, they could attempt to fix the problem and get results faster than going through the whole incident-report-blame-the-victim-finally-have-them-confirm-your-repro-wait-for-next-version-release-which-hopefully-includes-the-fix ordeal. Then if you contribute the fix back to the project, the community of users benefits as well, with possible free publicity for your organization to boot.
- bruce511 2y ago
  That's the theory, but in practice that's not how it works. Firstly, of course, most customers don't have any programming skills at all, so the point is moot. But let's limit ourselves to customers that do have IT departments. It's worth noting that IT departments are already busy. Deploying resources because you found a bug in PostgreSQL is unlikely. But ok, you found a bug. And we happen to have a highly paid C programmer on staff. Let's ask him to take a look. He's not familiar with PostgreSQL architecture- do it'll take a few days to download the source, make a build, hope the build is close to our version, and deploy to production. (This has already cost the business more than a enterprise support contract from Postgres but whatever...) He then spends a month working through various subsystems to determine the exact flow that leads to your bug. (I'm gonna ignore all the cases where the "bug" isn't a bug.) He makes a tweak, merges it into the current build, and deploys. He even submits the PR which may or may not be accepted. Until it is he's regularly pulled from his task to update the PostgreSQL source and rebuild. Everyone else plagues him either PostgreSQL questions twice a week now. His manager gives him a 'poor' rating at the next review because the thing he was actually hired to do is not getting done. Unless the company is selling to other PostgreSQL developers, there's no "free publicity". That's not how publicity works. So yes, your scenario is possible, but its simply not how things happen. You complain to the IT department - they add PostgreSQL enterprise support to the next budget. They're not looking to take on extra load unnecessarily. Yes, the major contributers to big OSS projects are tech companies contributing full time programmers. And that's a good thing. But customers do not have the time or resources (or inclination) to go down this road. Frankly, it's too hard (in most cases) to just build the software, much less understand the code to make changes.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

the_gipsy 2y ago

Software license may not consciously matter to end users, but they do have a huge impact on everything else. That is, the end user would not have the software, or would have vastly different software, if the licenses were different. They just don't know and don't care about the licensing details and effects, like so many other technical aspects.

mkleczek 2y ago

This is as long as you don't take _risk_ into account. RedHat providing OSS licensed software is _less_ risk than RedHat providing proprietary closed source operating system.

otabdeveloper4 2y ago

> In truth the license doesn't matter. It only doesn't matter if you don't care at all about software supply chain risks. This is not a sane position in 2024 to hold.

danlitt 2y ago

> From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part. This is only because true most of the time businesses use a lot of publicly funded work without paying for it. If software development were entirely private, I'm sure businesses would find excuses that actually no it has to cost 100x what it would cost otherwise. Everything you say about maintainability and stability is true. But writing software that can be operated as a service in the first place is substantially harder. It's just not as easy for a company to capture.

morningsam 2y ago

>Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc. >In truth the license doesn't matter. It's funny to bring that up in the context of Red Hat who have started to circumvent the GPL by terminating their relationship with anyone who tries to actually make use of the rights granted by it. "The license doesn't matter" because they've found a loophole in it, but it clearly does matter in that they had to do so in the first place and weren't able to adhere to its spirit due to business concerns. [1]: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis... [2]: https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-08-redhat-gets-around-gplv2-license-intention-with-contract-law/ https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-08-redhat-gets-around...

gbraad 2y ago

Red Hat also does the verification against standards which allow them to be used: https://access.redhat.com/articles/compliance_activities_and_gov_standards https://access.redhat.com/articles/compliance_activities_and... Not every distribution does/can.