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Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

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Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#91

Post by lmeyerov »

agibsonccc wrote: post #89
ageek123 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The key distinction people are missing is that these companies don't monetize open source directly. Instead open source is used as a means of building a user base that will indirectly generate revenue in other ways This isn't a distinction, it's the definition of open source. By definition if you have an open source company, you're making money through some channel other than keeping the software proprietary and se…

Well that depends. You can make money from open source. It more comes down to HOW which is rather than licensing code or subscription licenses BECAUSE the software is closed. I agree at what you're getting at though.

Most of these companies are a freemium variant of open source. You get a bit free, and then pay for proprietary bits, e.g., admin tools and not getting hacked.

This has been a big question for our company. Ultimately, one of our viewpoints has been that the current breed of open source companies, especially with VC pressure, struggle to align with the community after a couple years and reality sets in.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#92

Post by agibsonccc »

lmeyerov wrote: post #91
agibsonccc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that depends. You can make money from open source. It more comes down to HOW which is rather than licensing code or subscription licenses BECAUSE the software is closed. I agree at what you're getting at though.

Most of these companies are a freemium variant of open source. You get a bit free, and then pay for proprietary bits, e.g., admin tools and not getting hacked. This has been a big question for our company. Ultimately, one of our viewpoints has been that the current breed of open source companies, especially with VC pressure, struggle to align with the community after a couple years and reality sets in.

Right. We're open core ourselves. In our case the algorithms which researchers can benefit from aren't the same as what the businesses pay for (GUIs, integrations,support,..) which allows us to serve both fairly well.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#93

Post by lmeyerov »

agibsonccc wrote: post #92
lmeyerov wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these companies are a freemium variant of open source. You get a bit free, and then pay for proprietary bits, e.g., admin tools and not getting hacked. This has been a big question for our company. Ultimately, one of our viewpoints has been that the current breed of open source companies, especially with VC pressure, struggle to align with the community after a couple years and reality sets in.

Right. We're open core ourselves. In our case the algorithms which researchers can benefit from aren't the same as what the businesses pay for (GUIs, integrations,support,..) which allows us to serve both fairly well.

So let's play this out:

Community user: this is awesome, let me add this bugfix

Company: bugfix tweaked/improved & in mainline. Come speak at our conference!

Community user: cool. Now here's this admin tool.

Company: uh,no,sorry,please keep that out of the main repos.

Community user: but admin is pretty central...

When the center of the community actively dissuades core contributions, which is what we see, the alignment isn't working.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#94

Post by meanduck »

ageek123 wrote: post #88
agibsonccc wrote: post #87

There seems to be a lot of confusion around open source projects vs companies. There are plenty of for profit companies around open source software that are venture backed: Mesos(mesosphere) Spark(Databricks) Flink (Data Artisans) Zeppelin (NFLabs) Scala (typesafe) Linux (Red hat) Hadoop (Horton, Cloudera, MapR) Elasticsearch (Elastic) PredictionIO (PredictionIO Inc) Meteor (Meteor Inc) Deeplearning4j (My company sky…

> The key distinction people are missing is that these companies don't monetize open source directly. Instead open source is used as a means of building a user base that will indirectly generate revenue in other ways This isn't a distinction, it's the definition of open source. By definition if you have an open source company, you're making money through some channel other than keeping the software proprietary and se…

I think Open Source has been overloaded to mean something else so that profit can be made while being morally superior.

IMO Open Development is what open source originally meant. Open development is only sustainable if devs == users, otherwise devs going to burn out eventually. Open source companies (as per your defintiton) are profitiable because the oss is not the primary product but a feature. Their primary products are indeed closed.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#95

Post by nl »

bobwaycott wrote: post #75
nzoschke wrote: post #71

We're working on open source cloud infrastructure at Convox (YC S15). http://convox.com/ https://github.com/convox/rack The current technology goal is to build a high quality "batteries included" way to setup and operate AWS for engineering teams. We are working for a low complexity, high reliability system: * 1 command installer to provision a VPC, container cluster, and other important AWS services * 1 command to d…

Doesn't running on AWS make this decidedly and automatically not open-source infrastructure? [edit]—typos

By the examples given in the linked article I'd say something running against AWS qualifies.

(I'd assume that AWS is just an initial implementation anyway - and clearly that makes sense in this market)

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#96

Post by nzoschke »

bobwaycott wrote: post #75
nzoschke wrote: post #71

We're working on open source cloud infrastructure at Convox (YC S15). http://convox.com/ https://github.com/convox/rack The current technology goal is to build a high quality "batteries included" way to setup and operate AWS for engineering teams. We are working for a low complexity, high reliability system: * 1 command installer to provision a VPC, container cluster, and other important AWS services * 1 command to d…

Doesn't running on AWS make this decidedly and automatically not open-source infrastructure? [edit]—typos

The article is also talking about the software tools that glue everything together.

> Open source infrastructure refers to all the tools that help developers build software. On a deep level, it includes physical things like servers, but closer to the surface, it also includes things like programming languages, frameworks, and libraries.

I also don't follow the AWS -> not open logic.

I lease resources in someone else's data center. I use proprietary software services when they make building my business software easier.

AWS is not an turtles all the way down open stack, but their docs are good, have open source clients for all their APIs, and offer up standard Linux and Docker systems.

Convox is open source software. It makes setting everything up easy and ensures total access and visibility into your resources. It also adds open protocols like we hooks and syslog to integrate with your other systems.

You can't get the source to AWS to run it yourself, and you have to accept Amazons pricing, but it's still a very open ecosystem.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#97

Post by nzoschke »

ralmidani wrote: post #51

I'm the founder of a startup working on free software applications. Making money off free software infrastructure is hard, because infrastructure is meant to be used by developers. A developer knows (or can learn) how to implement, manage, and maintain your piece of free software infrastructure, so how can you convince a developer to pay you for support? Applications, on the other hand, can be targeted at non-develop…

I agree with your general explanation of the challenges.

I like the example Automattic sets. They give away the WordPress engine, but also run it as a subscription service.

Running software is hard, and there are plenty of people that will exchange money for an SLA, both service availability and support response time.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#98

Post by adelevie »

someguydave wrote: post #74
_iie2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at 18F, here's my hot take: It's been pretty well established that needlessly (male) gendered language makes people feel excluded. Actually, that's too nice. That kind of language excludes people. Period. It communicates that the speaker does not contemplate a non-male audience. I do not know about the communities that you moderate, but constantly assuming a male audience at a place like 18F is wrong factually…

My objection isn't to the cuteness of the bot - it's to the waste of taxpayer's money. Could you really look an elderly taxpayer in the eye and tell them that building slackbots with their bottom dollar is a great idea without feeling a tinge of guilt?

Employees who are happy and feel included are going to produce better work (and a better return on the invested tax dollar) than those who aren't. I'd also expect second-order benefits such as helping us recruit from a wider, more diverse pool of applicants.

Of course there are boundaries to the happiness-increases-productivity dynamic, but quickly coding up a Slack bot seems well within the safe range.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#99

Post by adelevie »

scrollaway wrote: post #42
_iie2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at 18F, here's my hot take: It's been pretty well established that needlessly (male) gendered language makes people feel excluded. Actually, that's too nice. That kind of language excludes people. Period. It communicates that the speaker does not contemplate a non-male audience. I do not know about the communities that you moderate, but constantly assuming a male audience at a place like 18F is wrong factually…

This is turning into a debate, so let me apologize; it was meant as a one-off comment on how silly and counterproductive it is (imv) to write a bot for such things. If this bot isn't actually negatively affecting anybody, more power to you. I certainly won't be the one to tell you what you can and can't do within your company. Putting myself in those shoes, I would personally find it incredibly rude, and I highly dou…

> The person is assuming ill-intent on behalf of the speaker.

This is where these kinds of issues typically go off the rails. With male-gendered language as the default, I doubt very many people intend to do anything wrong. It's how I learned to speak and I'm sure it's how many others did, too.

A silly nudge from a Slack bot, is just that--not an accusation or a judgment of character.

I was thinking about this a bit more last night, and I thought of another reason why the bot is great: it doesn't discriminate. It doesn't matter if you are in leadership at 18F, a guest user in our Slack, an employee who started two weeks ago, male, female, or something else. The bot doesn't care.

There's a bit of politics to how people get "called out"--e.g. who wants to pull the boss aside and correct their behavior? The end result is likely to be that certain employees get corrected and other employees don't. A bot avoids all of this.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#100

Post by agibsonccc »

lmeyerov wrote: post #93
agibsonccc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. We're open core ourselves. In our case the algorithms which researchers can benefit from aren't the same as what the businesses pay for (GUIs, integrations,support,..) which allows us to serve both fairly well.

So let's play this out: Community user: this is awesome, let me add this bugfix Company: bugfix tweaked/improved & in mainline. Come speak at our conference! Community user: cool. Now here's this admin tool. Company: uh,no,sorry,please keep that out of the main repos. Community user: but admin is pretty central... When the center of the community actively dissuades core contributions, which is what we see, the alignm…

Right. I'm talking about for our particular industry. This definitely isn't true of all.
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