5 ms·

I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmen

by seiji 12y ago

I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. Interesting approach, but I bet those companies also aren't high growth tech startups/companies. The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue. They aren't looking for new ways to pay for things they legally get for free. My favorite example is Redis at Twitter: Twitter has over 30,000 Redis servers deployed around the world using a total of over 500 terabytes of RAM (half a petabyte!), and they certainly have no interesting in paying for Redis. If Redis were typical "commercial software" licensed per-core or per-other-shennigans, they'd be paying over $70 million per year for Redis. (Redis is a unique position because the core dev team of Redis has always been small so it's easier to measure the direct exploitation involved versus other projects with thousands of amorphous developers like Linux or Hadoop or Apache.) Many open source projects are essentially corporate welfare. We work, make products companies use to make money/become more efficient/grow faster, the companies use the software for free to get richer, then nobody contributes back any of the gains.

caniszczyk 12y ago
I don't want to argue your point and you should read heavily into the "tragedy of the commons" problem that plagues many open source communities, but companies can give back in many ways, in terms of bug fixes, features and improvements to the projects they use (at least wise companies do). In Twitter's case, we've also contributed to the Redis ecosystem via twemproxy: https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy Twemproxy helps scale some of the traffic for the top websites in the world: https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy#users https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy#users
- seiji 12y ago
  can give back in many ways The standard way society compensates persons for useful goods and services is by exchanging currency, not by bartering favors or by saying "look! we made a billion dollars using your software, here, have these free 40 lines of code as a bug fix. thx." Unrelated note: every time I see these (needlessly?) optimized string compare statements, I fall out of my chair laughing and/or crying: https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy/blob/a36fdae2a8a3c166d9d580fc5973f35c02713c39/src/proto/nc_redis.c#L1044 https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy/blob/a36fdae2a8a3c166d9...
  - jorendorffmoz 12y ago
    I guess what I'm saying is, I don't see how your (or anyone's) interests would be served by the cost of Redis being a lot higher.
    - seiji 12y ago
      Open source software succeeds because there's no friction for trying new things. So, initial cost will always be zero. People love seeing their software used for new things, so nobody wants to prevent adoption. At the same time, nobody wants to support billion dollar companies for free. It's a perverse inversion of incentives. Redis gets feature requests from companies all the time (implement X! It'll save us from lots of complexity and internal support time!), but they don't want to pay for it. Redis also gets support requests from big companies (where employees have already exited or sold stock back or are out buying Teslas), and I get to answer their questions for free too. I'm really happy Redis is running your multibillion dollar company and I'm certainly happy you see no irony in asking for free support when your company is visibly hemorrhaging idle cash. Sometimes you just have to say http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fupm&defid=5405986 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fupm&defid=54....
    - zem 12y ago
      ideally, what you want to say is "here's my software; if you need a good, free solution you're welcome to use it. however, if you're making millions off a stack that my work is essential to, i would like a share". cory doctorow has made a similar argument about copyright and the absurdity of one-size-fits-all: > We're trying to retrofit the rules that governed multi-stage rocket ships (huge publishing conglomerates) to cover the activity of pedestrians (people who post quotes from books on their personal blogs). And the pedestrians aren't buying it: they hear that they need a law degree to safely quote from their favourite TV show and they assume that the system is irredeemably broken and not worth attending to at all. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/26/copyright-cory-doctorow http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/26/copyright-...
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    The standard way people indicate to society that they would like to exchange currency is by setting a price for their product. It doesn't seem particularly fair to say "here world, use my open source project for free," and then get mad that people use it for free. And in fact, I don't think antirez is saying that. It looks to me like other people, who didn't build Redis in the first place, are the ones saying that.
jorendorffmoz 12y ago
I do want to argue the point. :) The strange miracle of open source software is that when companies use something like Redis to make a lot of money, they end up investing in it, they contribute work to the project, and the community does gain from their contributions. In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time. Most open source development is commercial. To take an example from my day job: Bloomberg (the financial media giant) sponsored Andy Wingo (of Igalia, that guy is a genius) to contribute support for ES6 generators to both Mozilla's JS engine and Chrome's. An example of his amazing work: http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefox-now-twenty-two-times-faster http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefo... Companies use all things to get richer. That's the operating principle of companies. The competing model to open source is commercial software, in which the company owning the software has a monopoly over it and uses it to get richer... and the companies licensing it still use it to get richer. In corporate welfare, the money given to companies is taken from someone else's pocket. Open source software is cheap because it eliminates the artificial costs of copyright monopolies.
- seiji 12y ago
  In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time. It's a matter of project scale too. Nobody cares about exploiting Hadoop because it's millions of lines of low quality code written by thousands of day-job developers. But, if a project is clearly the work of, say, 2-5 individual developers, it's easier to see how those individuals are creating much more value than anybody is possibly compensating them for. The main complaint seems to be "offering things for free then expecting good things to happen" doesn't work. So the only solution is "offer things for free and also provide support/services/hosting/accoutrement to companies with big pockets." The trick is: how do you incentive companies to pay in the first place? There's the mongodb model: market, popularize, and aggressively sell broken software so people must buy support or else nothing works at all, or there's the RedHat model: target big companies and become their source of trust/knowledge for complicated things the buying company doesn't want to manage/understand themselves. It can be difficult to sell highly popular, non-broken, simple software. It works, people use it, there are no problems, so, why pay, even when it runs your multi-billion dollar company (especially when the free support resolves all issues in less than 20 minutes anyway)?
famousactress 12y ago
That's pretty much exactly the point. I think this is a commitment that probably ought to be baked in from the beginning, before a company scales. It's hard for a large company to make a commitment like this commensurate with it's size without making the commitment early and scaling it along with everything else. As for size, NBB is the second largest craft brewer in the country and Patagonia is a very large player in outdoor apparel. >The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue. Right. Fuck that, because that's not actually (ever) really the goal. Money's always a means to some end, so another way of looking at this is to put a stake in some particular end that you want to share with everyone at the company. That's culture. Culture is shared values, and this is a way to make culture measurable and something the organization is held accountable for over time. Yet another way to look at this is what happens if when Larry and Sergey decided on "Don't be Evil" someone told them "That's adorable, but why don't you think harder about how to turn this into something measurable".
conner_bw 12y ago
History repeats itself, this book needs to come back in style... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthropists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthro...
nathan_long 12y ago
> Many open source projects are essentially corporate welfare. You say "many", implying not all. What differentiates the "corporate welfare" category of OSS in your mind? > We work, make products companies use to make money/become more efficient/grow faster, the companies use the software for free to get richer, then nobody contributes back any of the gains. It seems more complex than that to me. I contribute to OSS, but I also owe my career to OSS. I learned to program using an OS language, an OS database, an OS editor, etc, and still use such tools. I never would have started learning if all that had cost money. So the "welfare" goes to companies, but also to individuals, who may come back and contribute. Companies have also hired me based on my OSS contributions, which incentivizes me to do more. "We give, they get" is oversimplified, at least in my case. I got, I gave, I got more, I continue giving.
applecore 12y ago
Salesforce follows a “1-1-1 model”[1], where 1% of the company's product, equity and time is pledged to improve communities around the world, and they're the definition of a high-growth tech company. [1]: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/about-us/ http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/about-us/
ktorn 12y ago
I agree. Let's close this issue: https://github.com/ABISprotocol/ABIS/issues/1 https://github.com/ABISprotocol/ABIS/issues/1

by seiji 12y ago

caniszczyk 12y ago

I don't want to argue your point and you should read heavily into the "tragedy of the commons" problem that plagues many open source communities, but companies can give back in many ways, in terms of bug fixes, features and improvements to the projects they use (at least wise companies do). In Twitter's case, we've also contributed to the Redis ecosystem via twemproxy: https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy Twemproxy helps scale some of the traffic for the top websites in the world: https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy#users https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy#users

seiji 12y ago
can give back in many ways The standard way society compensates persons for useful goods and services is by exchanging currency, not by bartering favors or by saying "look! we made a billion dollars using your software, here, have these free 40 lines of code as a bug fix. thx." Unrelated note: every time I see these (needlessly?) optimized string compare statements, I fall out of my chair laughing and/or crying: https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy/blob/a36fdae2a8a3c166d9d580fc5973f35c02713c39/src/proto/nc_redis.c#L1044 https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy/blob/a36fdae2a8a3c166d9...
- jorendorffmoz 12y ago
  I guess what I'm saying is, I don't see how your (or anyone's) interests would be served by the cost of Redis being a lot higher.
  - seiji 12y ago
    Open source software succeeds because there's no friction for trying new things. So, initial cost will always be zero. People love seeing their software used for new things, so nobody wants to prevent adoption. At the same time, nobody wants to support billion dollar companies for free. It's a perverse inversion of incentives. Redis gets feature requests from companies all the time (implement X! It'll save us from lots of complexity and internal support time!), but they don't want to pay for it. Redis also gets support requests from big companies (where employees have already exited or sold stock back or are out buying Teslas), and I get to answer their questions for free too. I'm really happy Redis is running your multibillion dollar company and I'm certainly happy you see no irony in asking for free support when your company is visibly hemorrhaging idle cash. Sometimes you just have to say http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fupm&defid=5405986 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fupm&defid=54....
  - zem 12y ago
    ideally, what you want to say is "here's my software; if you need a good, free solution you're welcome to use it. however, if you're making millions off a stack that my work is essential to, i would like a share". cory doctorow has made a similar argument about copyright and the absurdity of one-size-fits-all: > We're trying to retrofit the rules that governed multi-stage rocket ships (huge publishing conglomerates) to cover the activity of pedestrians (people who post quotes from books on their personal blogs). And the pedestrians aren't buying it: they hear that they need a law degree to safely quote from their favourite TV show and they assume that the system is irredeemably broken and not worth attending to at all. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/26/copyright-cory-doctorow http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/26/copyright-...
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  The standard way people indicate to society that they would like to exchange currency is by setting a price for their product. It doesn't seem particularly fair to say "here world, use my open source project for free," and then get mad that people use it for free. And in fact, I don't think antirez is saying that. It looks to me like other people, who didn't build Redis in the first place, are the ones saying that.

jorendorffmoz 12y ago

I do want to argue the point. :) The strange miracle of open source software is that when companies use something like Redis to make a lot of money, they end up investing in it, they contribute work to the project, and the community does gain from their contributions. In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time. Most open source development is commercial. To take an example from my day job: Bloomberg (the financial media giant) sponsored Andy Wingo (of Igalia, that guy is a genius) to contribute support for ES6 generators to both Mozilla's JS engine and Chrome's. An example of his amazing work: http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefox-now-twenty-two-times-faster http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefo... Companies use all things to get richer. That's the operating principle of companies. The competing model to open source is commercial software, in which the company owning the software has a monopoly over it and uses it to get richer... and the companies licensing it still use it to get richer. In corporate welfare, the money given to companies is taken from someone else's pocket. Open source software is cheap because it eliminates the artificial costs of copyright monopolies.

seiji 12y ago
In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time. It's a matter of project scale too. Nobody cares about exploiting Hadoop because it's millions of lines of low quality code written by thousands of day-job developers. But, if a project is clearly the work of, say, 2-5 individual developers, it's easier to see how those individuals are creating much more value than anybody is possibly compensating them for. The main complaint seems to be "offering things for free then expecting good things to happen" doesn't work. So the only solution is "offer things for free and also provide support/services/hosting/accoutrement to companies with big pockets." The trick is: how do you incentive companies to pay in the first place? There's the mongodb model: market, popularize, and aggressively sell broken software so people must buy support or else nothing works at all, or there's the RedHat model: target big companies and become their source of trust/knowledge for complicated things the buying company doesn't want to manage/understand themselves. It can be difficult to sell highly popular, non-broken, simple software. It works, people use it, there are no problems, so, why pay, even when it runs your multi-billion dollar company (especially when the free support resolves all issues in less than 20 minutes anyway)?

famousactress 12y ago

That's pretty much exactly the point. I think this is a commitment that probably ought to be baked in from the beginning, before a company scales. It's hard for a large company to make a commitment like this commensurate with it's size without making the commitment early and scaling it along with everything else. As for size, NBB is the second largest craft brewer in the country and Patagonia is a very large player in outdoor apparel. >The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue. Right. Fuck that, because that's not actually (ever) really the goal. Money's always a means to some end, so another way of looking at this is to put a stake in some particular end that you want to share with everyone at the company. That's culture. Culture is shared values, and this is a way to make culture measurable and something the organization is held accountable for over time. Yet another way to look at this is what happens if when Larry and Sergey decided on "Don't be Evil" someone told them "That's adorable, but why don't you think harder about how to turn this into something measurable".

conner_bw 12y ago

History repeats itself, this book needs to come back in style... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthropists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthro...

nathan_long 12y ago

> Many open source projects are essentially corporate welfare. You say "many", implying not all. What differentiates the "corporate welfare" category of OSS in your mind? > We work, make products companies use to make money/become more efficient/grow faster, the companies use the software for free to get richer, then nobody contributes back any of the gains. It seems more complex than that to me. I contribute to OSS, but I also owe my career to OSS. I learned to program using an OS language, an OS database, an OS editor, etc, and still use such tools. I never would have started learning if all that had cost money. So the "welfare" goes to companies, but also to individuals, who may come back and contribute. Companies have also hired me based on my OSS contributions, which incentivizes me to do more. "We give, they get" is oversimplified, at least in my case. I got, I gave, I got more, I continue giving.

applecore 12y ago

Salesforce follows a “1-1-1 model”[1], where 1% of the company's product, equity and time is pledged to improve communities around the world, and they're the definition of a high-growth tech company. [1]: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/about-us/ http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/about-us/

ktorn 12y ago

I agree. Let's close this issue: https://github.com/ABISprotocol/ABIS/issues/1 https://github.com/ABISprotocol/ABIS/issues/1