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AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

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Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#71

Post by cpitman »

cat199 wrote: post #60
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #5

Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 Guys, charge for your work. Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. That just invites another company that has that ancillary as their core competency to come and do it much bet…

> the dream of a megacap open source company is dead https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RHT/ Market Cap 31.055B S&P 500 Component Or does this exemplify your point w/r/t RH for-fee bolt-on addons?

Red Hat does not have any "for-fee bolt-on addons", everything we ship is open source (or will be soon after acquisition of a closed-source company).

Responding to some of the other comments, Red Hat revenue is nearly all from providing enterprise support for completely open source software. This is critically different from "services", ie consulting. These are yearly contracts that provide clients insurance if/when they have a production issue, a new major vulnerability is disclosed, etc, that someone knows the technology from the ground up and also knows the details of their deployment and can get them back into a good state. Our support+engineering teams are top notch, so retaining customers year over year is relatively easy.

I work in Red Hat Consulting, which is a much smaller share of overall revenue. It doesn't scale nearly as well, since you only get revenue periodically for weeks to months at a time, with a lot of overhead to sell and manage assignments.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#72

Post by [deleted] »

donatj wrote: post #11

Honestly at this point I would rather use Closed Source software than Open Source that isn’t “Free as in Speech”. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At least closed source is honest about its intentions. 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 o…

[deleted]

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#73

Post by buster »

reacweb wrote: post #32

When you give money to redhat, you buy insurance that if you encounter a problem, they will support you. It is expencive, but there is clearly a lot of work involved in producing new release. IMHO redhat deserves its money. When you give money to Oracle, you are financing lawyers who try to find the best way to make you pay more without improving the software.

Except now you're paying IBMs lawyers ;)

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#74

Post by Beltiras »

boulos wrote: post #38
Beltiras wrote: post #29

I don't see why big companies like Google, AWS and the like wouldn't fund open source development, precisely because they have realized great returns using those softwares to reap monetary benefit. If I were a CEO and my core business was built on OSS, I would allocate budget to help the projects used within my organization. It's just common sense to do so. Reality might be different but then that makes for some real…

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Actually, we do precisely this. Google contributes heavily to Linux, KVM, LLVM, and so on in addition to the open source projects we launched (Android, Chromium, Kubernetes to name some popular ones). Our marketing team decided to highlight this on https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud/ which does an okay job. Feedback welcome, and I’ll pass it along to them.

That's very good. Does Google also donate money to OSS projects they use? Postgres? Redis? uWSGI? Gunicorn? MySQL? I'd imagine they are heavily used in many projects within Google.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#75

Post by Beltiras »

pwaivers wrote: post #46
Beltiras wrote: post #29

I don't see why big companies like Google, AWS and the like wouldn't fund open source development, precisely because they have realized great returns using those softwares to reap monetary benefit. If I were a CEO and my core business was built on OSS, I would allocate budget to help the projects used within my organization. It's just common sense to do so. Reality might be different but then that makes for some real…

I think the argument from this article is that the core business for AWS is not the OSS. Their core business is to provide "performance, scalability, and availability". So it is a financial reality that they can (and should) replace the software if they want to.

I read the final point as saying that therefore they won't support OSS. I think that would be misguided.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#76

Post by scarface74 »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

Two comments: 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 yo…

I realize that the idea of “Commoditizing Your Complements” has gained new life lately on HN, but let’s give credit where it’s due - Joel Spolsky in 2002.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#77

Post by homarp »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #40
vnorilo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if blender is comparable at all. There's a lot more to a game engine than rendering, and AFAIK blender is not even intended for real time animation. Ogre is an open source 3d engine, although I don't know about its funding: https://www.ogre3d.org/

Maybe Godot engine is more comparable?

Yes, Godot is more comparable. And indeed https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/108347697531294925... does mention Godot

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#78

Post by scarface74 »

jimmychangas wrote: post #41
pjc50 wrote: post #14

Two comments: 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 yo…

> there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS There are no guarantees that they will provide the best complements to their own product, but the common sense is that they will. From a marketing perspective, I think it makes complete sense, especially when selling to enterprise customers.

But they don’t.

The best complement for server side software is often being able to do it reliably, globally, redundantly, managed, on demand, and cheaply. The only three companies that can do that reliably as far as most customers are concerned are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#79

Post by cpitman »

StriverGuy wrote: post #35
matwood wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it succinctly, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell expertise in Linux.

Arguable this is what MongoDB, Inc. sells as well. A big part of their package for enterprise clients is optimization and consulting services.

Consulting is not the main driver of Red Hat revenue, the main thing Red Hat sells is Support.

Support is something enterprise customers want, and they will sign yearly contracts to get it. In return, if/when they have a production issue, 0-day vulnerability, etc, they have someone to contact (or may have contacted them!) to help them resolve the issue. And Red Hat has experts in both support and engineering, meaning resolution can be anything from a config change to a rapidly released patch. Happy customers renew year after year.

I work for Red Hat Consulting. This is a very different beast, consulting involves selling lots of short to medium term projects with the occasional long project, then trying to optimally staff those projects. You only get revenue while consultants are on the ground. It's not surprising to me that an open source company that relies only on consulting wouldn't be sustainable.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#80

Post by dkrich »

I don't like the assertion that the only thing that was valuable on CD's was the convenience, not the music. I'd argue that the copyright itself is the reason the music industry had pricing power. As everyone knows, they lost the pricing power with the rise of piracy platforms and it became too costly to try and keep the market cornered as services like Spotify and Pandora started to make deals with several labels. At some point the major labels had to throw their hands up and and capitulate. It's worth noting however, that the most powerful artists- people like Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks retained their distribution rights and did not capitulate for a long time. This is further evidence that the copyright is what creates the shortage that creates the pricing power.

It's really no different from the pharmaceutical industry. The cost of making the first pill of a new drug is billions of dollars. The cost of the second is basically zero. Yet drugs are extremely expensive because the companies that develop them have complete pricing power for several years because nobody else is allowed to manufacture that drug.

I think the point he's making whether directly or indirectly, is that MongoDB made a miscalculation in open sourcing their software at all. I would agree with that except that one would have to wonder whether there is anything so unique about MongoDB's software that would enable them to exert much pricing power. In other words, would MongoDB risen to the level popularity they did if the software was not open source?

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