I wish it were possible to scale the price of a piece of software with the amount of money that people make with it.
Then you could make money from big companies, and let individuals and small startups use your software for free.
Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
181–190 of 454 posts
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#182not sure, lot of companies make Money with Open Source (redhat, SUSE, Gitlab) or companies like Github, which earns money with Open Source, without selling Open Source products... Maybe the problem isn't if the code is closed or not, but the product itself?
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#183Its 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…
Kyle Rankin gave a (very good) keynote at FOSDEM 2019 about this topic, harkening back to the Unix wars, Sun etc. He has some really nice one-liners. Video is available here:
https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#184Its 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…
Cloud companies pay by hiring developers to improve opensource.
This way everybody using opensource benefits. The original opensource contributers benefit twice: their software gets improved, and they have marketable skills as cloud companies will be interested to hire them to work on opensource projects.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#185The list of commercial open source software companies with revenue > 100M https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17nKMpi_Dh5slCqzLSFBo...
Short list. Includes many who have never made a profit, and at least one (Coinbase) which is completely not an open source software company.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been building & running a niche website since 2015 that requires around 20hrs/wk in support, social media, and continued software development (all code gpl on github). It's become one of the most (if not the most) used software resources in my community, and users seem appreciative of my efforts. But I very rarely get donations. Previous appeals on social media for donations have resulted in small bumps that qui…
This is speculative, but I think you have a real advantage being in a niche community. You say users seem appreciative of your efforts -- let them know who they're appreciating and exactly how they can best show their appreciation! I think a Wikipedia-style open letter or banner as another commenter suggested could really serve you well. If you let your community know, honest and ugly, that you can't continue to do t…
Thanks for the advice, I think you are right. Due to your comment I've just been going through https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_reports for ideas. Marketing, social media, and fundraising are all skills that I definitely need to improve on.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#187Its 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…
Cloud companies pay by hiring developers to improve opensource. This way everybody using opensource benefits. The original opensource contributers benefit twice: their software gets improved, and they have marketable skills as cloud companies will be interested to hire them to work on opensource projects.
So you are saying they should do it for the “exposure”.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#188Its 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…
Cloud companies pay by hiring developers to improve opensource. This way everybody using opensource benefits. The original opensource contributers benefit twice: their software gets improved, and they have marketable skills as cloud companies will be interested to hire them to work on opensource projects.
You mean Cloud Companies are using the wealth created from hosting other's OSS to finance their own OSS efforts.
By no means are their OSS investments altruistic, Cloud companies by far benefit the most from OSS and no OSS developers aren't winning. Being able to hire OSS developers using funds generated from hosting their OSS efforts is some weird definition of winning, which they're using towards strengthening the software ecosystem around their cloud infrastructure - increasing its value.
The power and value of OSS is swinging sharply away from Indie OSS developers towards the major tech cloud monopolies - where they can now afford to outspend, out compete, out reach and out last any competing Indie OSS efforts.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors Why is that unfortunate? It has enabled a cycle of OSS to user AND OSS to vendor to vendor enrichment to user...since you can always modify the code at will. The best of both worlds, until you get into that special "extension" problem that GPL3 tried to lock down.
Because they get to use their money and power and seep wealth out of things they had no part in creating. It's disgusting.
You get to do that, too. If you want to benefit from open source software, you can. That's the whole point. What's your dream?
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#190Its 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…
Kyle Rankin gave a (very good) keynote at FOSDEM 2019 about this topic, harkening back to the Unix wars, Sun etc. He has some really nice one-liners. Video is available here: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/
"The Eternal Mainframe"
http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...