11–20 of 257 posts
I use Free Software not because the price, but rather so I can be Free. So I can know I am free to use software I develop with it in whatever way I want.
I find the push to market open source by limiting it’s use one of the most distasteful things in recent software history.
I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
Managing your own PostgreSQL with HA and replication is a ton of work. And for many small to medium sized companies, using a hosted service makes sense.
But open source has a problem today, there is a huge lack of contribution in some projects. The older the project is, the more it seems to struggle.
Say I build a system for detecting of pigs leave their pen. Open sourcing it lets people build models for sheep, cows, and chickens. With resources I improve those models and provide additional tuning for onsite locations. There is an open source solution with code and community models, but I provide an “accuracy guaranteed”, upgrades, and maintainence.
We can even lease the hardware (cameras, field GPU boxes, etc.), want a new model for kids in a school yard, no problem! I’ll do that for you, it’ll be $100k and I retain rights to the model.
Firstly, the discussion at the front about the music industry is quite insightful, but I'd go further - they didn't want to sell convenience at first. Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on mandated inconvenience through DRM and other legal actions. Always remember that if the music industry had won unopposed you'd have to pay a license fee to set a MP3 as your ringtone, as well as having to license every copy on every device separately.
Secondly, about mongodb: I'm reminded of https://www.gwern.net/Complement "Commoditize Your Complement", but in reverse.
Open source software is by definition commoditized. Everyone can have a copy at no cost. So what is an "open source VC funded" company doing? Creating complements and selling those. It's just that there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS. It's not a law of nature that e.g. Redhat should be the best people to provide consultancy on RHEL.
The music industry did not expect their product to become free to distribute at the margin, but every company operating as an "OSS startup" has to know from the start that their software can't be charged for directly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elastic? They basically build a lot of extra (and very useful) functionality outside elasticsearch and sell that.
They still suffer from the same problem: AWS is selling it's own elasticsearch service. It comes with a set of severe restrictions and is way less capable than elastics own offering, but it's improving and I see it used more and more often.
Then again the reverse is also true. Just look at all the software providing an S3 compatible API.
I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their Unbreakable Linux)
Red Hat did a smart thing and used their open source offerings to deliver business value outside of the product space. It's an approach that most other successful OSS companies seem to have have followed.
I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
Almost exclusively designed to deal with the issue described in the article, of preventing public clouds from running this as a service.
They also published another article about how to make money as an open-source company: https://blog.timescale.com/how-open-source-software-makes-mo...
It's surprising that someone setting out to write about the changing economies of open source ends up missing the point so thoroughly. These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source.
What they aren't likely to want to pay for is a site license from some company trying to sell them a MongoDB under terms practically identical to what Oracle does for Oracle DB. That's the "CD" model the article could make a comparison to.
I don't think we're ever going to have something like an open source version of the Oracle model that's equally sustainable, just like the notion that you're going to buy an entire album to listen to one song isn't coming back.
Rather, open source is going to be something where you might run a database like PostgreSQL, and if you're a big enough user contribute to its development, either yourself or by paying some support company of core devs. That company might also provide support, or you could go with another provider for that etc.