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Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

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Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#161

Post by [deleted] »

christophilus wrote: post #149
mythz wrote: post #86

Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…

This just made me wonder: what if all of the major OSS companies joined forces, started a new cloud company whose purpose was to send revenue back to all of its underlying OSS projects. Each then promotes that cloud as its #1 recommended cloud, and use their collective visibility to grow that into a contender? One can dream...

[deleted]

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#162

Post by ken »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #129
csallen wrote: post #128

> You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. First, this isn't true. Plenty of people make a living doing each of the above. (Art is somewhat of a special case, because some will say that what you're doing isn't art by definition if it's attached to some functional purpose like a business model. But you don't have to listen to those people.) Second, these thing…

I think a more apt description would be "You can't PLAN to make a living making music". Certainly, lots of people successfully make a living with music, arts, sports, etc. However, there's a lot out of the individual's control in those fields.

You can't plan to be the next Beatles (just as you can't plan to be the next Microsoft), but you can absolutely plan to make a living in the arts (just as you can plan to make a living in software).

When people look at a field from the outside, they only see the celebrities, but this is a completely unrepresentative sample. As Phil Greenspun once put it, "I can't decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson, a musician like Britney Spears, or an actor like Harrison Ford."

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#164

Post by eeZah7Ux »

bunderbunder wrote: post #93
mythz wrote: post #86

Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…

I'm starting to suspect that the major cloud vendors are well along on pulling a classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" gambit on that front. I'm sure there are a percentage of people operating in the cloud who stick judiciously to an open-source stack, and remain masters of their own future as a result. But it seems more common to spread some open source icing on top of a cake made out of ingredients like Beanstalk,…

In the 1980s the lock-in was in hardware: you buy this server, you get our OS and software stack.

In the 90s and 2010s it was software: you buy this software because others are not compatible with it.

Today's lock-in is cloud services. Will people ever learn?

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#165

Post by galaxyLogic »

How about selling adds that are embedded into source-code?

The target-audience of the adds would of course be coders because who else reads source-code. Maybe not a big audience but the adds could be permanent.

And what would the donors be advertising? Maybe development tools but also themselves as a potential employer. It would be basically VERY targeted marketing because only coders would see it.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#166

Post by wongarsu »

Insanity wrote: post #35
est31 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot engine has this model. They are getting donations from patreon [1], enough to pay 2 people full time at the center of the project. Wikipedia is another project which is doing this very successfully. But in general, those methods bring you much less money than if you were proprietary, because as you rightfully point out, most people are "freeloaders". [1]: https://www.patreon.com/godotengine

to nitpick, but to me the term 'freeloaders' has a negative connotation and I don't think it should in the case of FOSS. Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS. Apart from that, you make good points :)

>Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS

The original point is to be able to debug, audit and modify the software you are running. And as far as I can tell that's still the core principle (note for example how there's no FOSS licence that prohibits sale of the software, and there is in fact niche FOSS software you have to buy to obtain).

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#168

Post by anth_anm »

krupan wrote: post #50

It feels to me like there was a lot of social pressure over the last 10 years or so for open source projects to use the most permissive open source license they could. You were cool and "more free" if you used Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses. I wonder if this is coming back to bite us now. Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software. Would things be different for the companies we've been talking…

Cloud providers don't distribute the software. GPL doesn't really help, except to make them more afraid about using wrong.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#169

Post by quadrangle »

anth_anm wrote: post #159

The answer is more aggressively copyleft licensing (AGPL, and others). If APIs are copyrightable that's a very unfortunate thing, but it would also make it possible to protect FOSS IP much more aggressively. Mongo wouldn't be getting destroyed by Amazon, for example.

That doesn't solve public goods funding dilemmas, that only works if you do the non-free/libre/open license option and you're making some upstream thing for use in proprietary products.

Copyleft is only a business model if you tie it to non-FLO products, which defeats the point.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#170

Post by everdev »

gnat wrote: post #160
everdev wrote: post #100

> Open Source Doesn't Make Money Because It Isn't Designed to Make Money What? RedHat - $34B MuleSoft - $6.5B Elastic - $5B Cloudera + Hortonworks - $5B Pivotal Software - $4.7B MongoDB - $3.5B

Those are businesses. Businesses are designed to make money. Open Source is a category of licenses designed to facilitate distribution of software. I feel like much of the problems mentioned in this thread come down to people wanting to be paid to write software but not building a business that lets them do that. They spent all their time working on the software and not the business. The book "The E Myth" about entre…

OK, following that logic then there isn't much money in anything besides business.
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