The strange economics of open-source software
philipotoole.com
The strange economics of open-source software
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: The strange economics of open-source software
#2"Behind all the REST endpoints, the AWS ELBs, and the HAProxy systems, sits some of most closely-guarded software in the world."
I'm not sure, "closely-guarded" is the term I would use.
Re: The strange economics of open-source software
#3I'm not sure I agree with the notion that OSS is where all the innovation is happening. There's certainly plenty of innovation there. But most innovation still seems to be privately funded developments (esp startups) which get open sourced. Or not.
Has there been any empirical work on assessing it in recent times? Maybe post 2010?
Re: The strange economics of open-source software
#4Most of widely popular open-source software are to empower developers, which doesn't actually aim at creating end user experiences. Most end user software (games for e.g.) are neither free nor open-sourced. So I wouldn't agree that "Today it is almost taken for granted that the source code for most software is freely available."
Re: The strange economics of open-source software
#5I don't find it strange at all, and looking at a proper classical economist - they would have no trouble explaining it.
Most people, when understanding economics tend to make the jump directly to money/cash when explaining prices and market action.
But to be correct you have to look at utility. There's little question as to why companies install open source software - the TCO can be lower. But why do people contribute their time in building it?
The answer is that the reward of being part of an OSS team brings great utility to a developer, and this is true even for marginally successful OSS projects. So people exchange their time for intangibles like reputation, credibility markers ( the author casually drops in which projects he is involved in) as well as the ability to leverage involvement into actual cash like well paid consultant gigs, books or successful blogs.
So there isn't any strangeness going on at all. OSS makes sense from a company point of view, and it makes sense from an individual developer point of view.
Re: The strange economics of open-source software
#6Wow, I was expecting a little more economics in a post titled "the strange economics of OSS." It is too bad the post makes such grand claims without any modicum of effort to back them up with data; these are very interesting research questions. The two most hand wavy claims have to be "it is almost taken for granted that the source code for most software is freely available" and " it is at larger, older firms, that the least amount of open-source software is written." As far as the former goes you really have to ignore Apple's ecosystem, video games and anything related to industrial automation or espionage in order to make such a claim. As far as the latter claim goes IBM, Intel, Oracle, HP, Texas Instruments etc are often at the top of contributions to the Linux kernel by company. To be honest thee latter claim is rather empty without some methodological framework that defines "older company" and "most open source software."
Re: The strange economics of open-source software
#7It's shifted towards consulting. You build great OS projects and people pay you to make it work for their company correctly.
Re: The strange economics of open-source software
#8To the contrary. I think the perceived success of FLOSS is mainly due to the fact that there is more big companies with the incentive to make big softwares free. This is not what OP says.
I don't say it's not progress. But if we end up doing all the same things the same way, the prize is not that bright.
Re: The strange economics of open-source software
#9It's always tough to explain to non-developers that the fact that they can, on their own laptops, install roughly the same stack as a multi-million/billion startup in a relatively instantaneous amount of time. And with one line of HTML, include a design framework that came from the result of countless dev-hours to refine. The software is indeed valuable, but it's not tangible or immediately useful in the way that Formula One cars, if given away to everyone from an infinite supply, would make people drive incredibly fast even if not well enough to win a race.
Another factor is that much of the best open-source software is similar to the best Unix tools: they do their one job very well. Being able to install all of them at your leisure is not much more advantageous than having grep, curl, and awk installed but no text files to work with or knowledge about how to use pipes.
I was trying to think of closed-source, focused software that is most definitely better than their open-source rivals. Not counting full-featured suites such as MS Office/Google Drive versus LibreOffice, or GIMP vs Photoshop...the first thing I can think of is ABBYY FineReader for OCR, which I've never used but the results of which seem to blow Tesseract out of the water, even though Tesseract is very good. But perhaps its niche is not broad enough to attract the level of open-source development in the same way that software and database architecture has.
Re: The strange economics of open-source software
#10Great piece. Our startup supports http://deeplearning4j.org and http://nd4j.org, and it's a great feeling having the open-source wind at your back. Talented strangers helping to fix and grow your project.
To use a couple economists' terms, positive externalities are generated when code is open-sourced, and the beneficiaries are the companies contributing, because together they're making something greater than any one firm could build alone.
Our software is orders of magnitude better simply for having been opened to hundreds of pairs of eyes. The QA is intense.
Engineers at closed-source deep-learning startups chafe under their gag orders, especially since so much of what's closed quickly becomes outdated. Lack of transparency can easily hide lack of competence.