5 ms·

A “Perfect Storm” Moment for Multibillion-Dollar Open Source Companies

58 points by amitkumar01 13y ago

michaelneale 13y ago
I have not seen the term "perfect storm" used to mean something positive like this - perhaps this is normal? (sorry, no comment on article comment, just was perplexed by headline).
- emeidi 13y ago
  I agree, I also read the headline in a way that something terrible is going to happen to OSS vendors ...
- dochtman 13y ago
  Agreed, looks like Wikipedia also agrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm
- _delirium 13y ago
  From some spot-checking, it looks like it's minority usage, but not too rare. Looking at the top 10 or so stories that come up with https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=perfect+storm https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0... I see a few that use it in the positive sense: "Being Santa: a perfect storm of fun", "What the perfect storm of cloud, Big Data and the Internet of Things...", "A perfect storm has been brewing for palladium this month which has pushed the metal impressively north-bound..."
  - koralatov 13y ago
    The Wikipedia's page on it has an interesting origin[1]: The Oxford English Dictionary has published references going back to 1718 for “perfect storm,” though the earliest citations use the phrase positively, as in a “perfect storm” of applause. It also notes that the phrase, is nearly synonymous with "worst-case scenario," although the latter carries more of a hypothetical connotation. The phrase is relatively rare in normal British English usage, and it's usually used in the ``worst-case scenario'' sense. To me, the word `storm' brings with it a negative connotation, but I suppose it's logical enough, albeit a little strange, that it could be used to describe a positive set of circumstances. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm
- arethuza 13y ago
  Is there a term for this kind of thing - where a word or phrase ends up being used in a way that is almost the exact opposite of how it started? ["meritocracy" is another example]
  - decode 13y ago
    Words that can mean one thing and also the opposite thing are called auto-antonyms or contronyms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
    - ForHackernews 13y ago
      "Cleave" is a great example: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleave?s=t http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleave?s=t
      - arethuza 13y ago
        "Outstanding" is a good one as well e.g. The outstanding areas of a research project
tenfourty 13y ago
I completely agree that open source is/has taken over the world - and that that is a fundamentally good thing for everyone on this planet. I did notice some things that aren't quite right though so here are some comments from a Red Hat employee - though these are my opinions and not necessarily those of my employer. > The tenet of open source has always been to give away the “open core” for free, and then charge for additional features. and >Companies can try a simple version of an open source app for free, and if they like it, can pay for value-added enterprise features. This is not actually true for the way Red Hat sells it's products, in fact we do something that is quite the opposite but far more powerful. All features are in our community projects like Fedora or JBoss Wildfly, these features might be a mix of whatever is the latest and greatest that people want as well as all the normal bits that you'd expect. When we make an enterprise ready product out of these community projects like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or JBoss Enterprise Application Server (EAP) our focus is actually on stability and longevity, in other words something that we can stand behind and support for up to 10 years or more! So we actually remove or don't pull in features from the project that aren't ready yet (which we know because we employ a lot of the professional engineers that are committers). We then have a rigorous testing process before releasing these enterprise ready products to our subscribers. One of the key bits that people don't understand is that once we release an enterprise product we will then back port from the latest and greatest community version all security and bug fixes for the supported life of the enterprise product. Two things to note about this, the enterprise versions are open source as well and we follow an upstream first approach so bug fixes and security patches are applied to the upstream version as well as to the stable enterprise version so upstream has all the latest fixes BUT it also has all the latest features and changes so it's more like our R&D version that you can play with and do some development on but wouldn't be something we would stand behind for production environments. I wanted to point this out as this is fundamentally different from the open core model you describe and which I seriously object to as an approach because it still locks you into the vendor who is selling you the extra bits. > The first wave of open source leaders, including Red Hat, relied almost entirely on the community to build their products. I'm not sure this statement is entirely true, Red Hat has been a top committer to the Linux kernel and to the JBoss projects for many many years and in fact around half of our company are professional engineers working on open source projects!
emeidi 13y ago
... says a guy working for a company heavily invested in an OSS vendor. But please, dear reader, don't expect any bias or even wishful thinking. (Disclaimer: I use OSS software heavily and admire it, but I'm always sceptical when I read statements like "The time is now to make money in open source")
- koralatov 13y ago
  At least in this case, he leads with the fact he has a financial interest in the field: ``At Index Ventures, we have been investing...''. Too many similar pieces either bury that important piece of information, or omit it entirely.
davexunit 13y ago
>The open source movement arose when developers realized they could create software in a community-driven environment, letting everyone add knowledge in return for sharing in the collective product. The author is simplifying history here to serve his own purpose. The open source movement was born out of the free software movement that had been around for 15 years prior. This rebranding was done in order to market free software to businesses by removing the ethical and political arguments and replacing them with technical ones. >The tenet of open source has always been to give away the “open core” for free, and then charge for additional features. I disagree. I don't see many admirers of "open core" model. The community was so happy that MySQL became "open core" that distributions have started switching to MariaDB.
- tbrownaw 13y ago
  This rebranding was done in order to market free software to businesses by removing the ethical and political arguments and replacing them with technical ones. I thought the rebranding was driven by the Free Software people casting out those with insufficient revolutionary fervor.
- e15ctr0n 13y ago
  The term "open source" was created by Eric Raymond (ESR)[1] on 8 February 1998 when Mozilla was in the process of making its source code public. This has been described in detail in the book 'Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution'[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Open_source [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/open-source.html http://www.catb.org/esr/open-source.html [3] http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/raymond2.html http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/raymond2.html

58 points by amitkumar01 13y ago

I have not seen the term "perfect storm" used to mean something positive like this - perhaps this is normal? (sorry, no comment on article comment, just was perplexed by headline).

emeidi 13y ago
I agree, I also read the headline in a way that something terrible is going to happen to OSS vendors ...
dochtman 13y ago
Agreed, looks like Wikipedia also agrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm
_delirium 13y ago
From some spot-checking, it looks like it's minority usage, but not too rare. Looking at the top 10 or so stories that come up with https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=perfect+storm https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0... I see a few that use it in the positive sense: "Being Santa: a perfect storm of fun", "What the perfect storm of cloud, Big Data and the Internet of Things...", "A perfect storm has been brewing for palladium this month which has pushed the metal impressively north-bound..."
- koralatov 13y ago
  The Wikipedia's page on it has an interesting origin[1]: The Oxford English Dictionary has published references going back to 1718 for “perfect storm,” though the earliest citations use the phrase positively, as in a “perfect storm” of applause. It also notes that the phrase, is nearly synonymous with "worst-case scenario," although the latter carries more of a hypothetical connotation. The phrase is relatively rare in normal British English usage, and it's usually used in the ``worst-case scenario'' sense. To me, the word `storm' brings with it a negative connotation, but I suppose it's logical enough, albeit a little strange, that it could be used to describe a positive set of circumstances. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm
arethuza 13y ago
Is there a term for this kind of thing - where a word or phrase ends up being used in a way that is almost the exact opposite of how it started? ["meritocracy" is another example]
- decode 13y ago
  Words that can mean one thing and also the opposite thing are called auto-antonyms or contronyms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
  - ForHackernews 13y ago
    "Cleave" is a great example: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleave?s=t http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleave?s=t
    - arethuza 13y ago
      "Outstanding" is a good one as well e.g. The outstanding areas of a research project

tenfourty 13y ago

I completely agree that open source is/has taken over the world - and that that is a fundamentally good thing for everyone on this planet. I did notice some things that aren't quite right though so here are some comments from a Red Hat employee - though these are my opinions and not necessarily those of my employer. > The tenet of open source has always been to give away the “open core” for free, and then charge for additional features. and >Companies can try a simple version of an open source app for free, and if they like it, can pay for value-added enterprise features. This is not actually true for the way Red Hat sells it's products, in fact we do something that is quite the opposite but far more powerful. All features are in our community projects like Fedora or JBoss Wildfly, these features might be a mix of whatever is the latest and greatest that people want as well as all the normal bits that you'd expect. When we make an enterprise ready product out of these community projects like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or JBoss Enterprise Application Server (EAP) our focus is actually on stability and longevity, in other words something that we can stand behind and support for up to 10 years or more! So we actually remove or don't pull in features from the project that aren't ready yet (which we know because we employ a lot of the professional engineers that are committers). We then have a rigorous testing process before releasing these enterprise ready products to our subscribers. One of the key bits that people don't understand is that once we release an enterprise product we will then back port from the latest and greatest community version all security and bug fixes for the supported life of the enterprise product. Two things to note about this, the enterprise versions are open source as well and we follow an upstream first approach so bug fixes and security patches are applied to the upstream version as well as to the stable enterprise version so upstream has all the latest fixes BUT it also has all the latest features and changes so it's more like our R&D version that you can play with and do some development on but wouldn't be something we would stand behind for production environments. I wanted to point this out as this is fundamentally different from the open core model you describe and which I seriously object to as an approach because it still locks you into the vendor who is selling you the extra bits. > The first wave of open source leaders, including Red Hat, relied almost entirely on the community to build their products. I'm not sure this statement is entirely true, Red Hat has been a top committer to the Linux kernel and to the JBoss projects for many many years and in fact around half of our company are professional engineers working on open source projects!

emeidi 13y ago

... says a guy working for a company heavily invested in an OSS vendor. But please, dear reader, don't expect any bias or even wishful thinking. (Disclaimer: I use OSS software heavily and admire it, but I'm always sceptical when I read statements like "The time is now to make money in open source")

koralatov 13y ago
At least in this case, he leads with the fact he has a financial interest in the field: ``At Index Ventures, we have been investing...''. Too many similar pieces either bury that important piece of information, or omit it entirely.

davexunit 13y ago

>The open source movement arose when developers realized they could create software in a community-driven environment, letting everyone add knowledge in return for sharing in the collective product. The author is simplifying history here to serve his own purpose. The open source movement was born out of the free software movement that had been around for 15 years prior. This rebranding was done in order to market free software to businesses by removing the ethical and political arguments and replacing them with technical ones. >The tenet of open source has always been to give away the “open core” for free, and then charge for additional features. I disagree. I don't see many admirers of "open core" model. The community was so happy that MySQL became "open core" that distributions have started switching to MariaDB.

tbrownaw 13y ago
This rebranding was done in order to market free software to businesses by removing the ethical and political arguments and replacing them with technical ones. I thought the rebranding was driven by the Free Software people casting out those with insufficient revolutionary fervor.
e15ctr0n 13y ago
The term "open source" was created by Eric Raymond (ESR)[1] on 8 February 1998 when Mozilla was in the process of making its source code public. This has been described in detail in the book 'Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution'[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Open_source [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/open-source.html http://www.catb.org/esr/open-source.html [3] http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/raymond2.html http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/raymond2.html