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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

#191

The list of commercial open source software companies with revenue > 100M https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17nKMpi_Dh5slCqzLSFBo...

Most of these companies have paid, closed source products as well so it's not a given their revenue is attributable to open source.

Is there a list of companies that are actually, completely, open source and still have revenue > 100M? I think that is the list OP would be interested in.

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

#192
post #143
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is because the people in companies currently using open source aren't people with control over the purse-strings. They're the people focused on getting a product out the door. The marketing department on the other hand, expects to have to pay to put the company name on things. So naturally, they'd be happy being listed as a partner, sponsor, patron, etc.

No, more a function of businesses having obligations not to waste their shareholders' money. By definition, donations are optional things. A donation be heavily questioned afterward if it is allowed to go through at all. But buying marketing, or support, is a perfectly sensible thing for a business to do.

So what you're saying is, the people currently using the software don't have control over the purse strings?

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

#193
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Fair and equatable distribution wouldn't factor into any consideration for Companies paying developers and cloud hosting companies to run their businesses. IMO the best way would be for all OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to impleme…

> puzzled why Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and Mongo DB aren't already coming together

At some point would it be collusion? I think collusion needs consumers, but the consumers of the cloud vendors would be harmed?

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

#194
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...

Maybe it won't be a new hyper cloud but an existing one https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-plat...

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

#195
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…

There is a huge cost. Maintainers have major time commitments, and we hear jobs looking for people's OSS contributions. Which is cool and all until you realize that some people work at Facebook on React and get to publish to OSS as their day job, and some people like myself have kids and a proprietary software job.

So I fully support companies offering their software free, except to run commercially.

To note, about 8 years ago I saw many companies and people open sourcing interesting software. This was for personal gains... They were a consulting company. ThoughtBot was a good example, they made tools, they made blogs about ruby on rails, they also sold their professional services. And it worked.

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

#197
(nobody cares much, and it's not developed by some community bazaar style, Google calls all the shots, and the good stuff -google apps- are not Open Source). >And now the OSS worlds is a convoluted mess. Not really. >It costs way more to make Ruby on Rails work than just installing IIS and writing some C#. Yeah, no. If anything RoR is famous for its ease of development. And it costs nothing (besides programmers, which you need in any case), which is why cash-strapped startups prefer RoR and other FOSS solutions over MS. >Now those who said Microsoft was bullying them are the bullies. Non sequitur. >OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. Non sequitur. OSS is as free as ever (and better than ever). >No one wants to pay for code at all anymore. Less want to pay for code, though billions still buy software and pay for services.

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

#198
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair and equatable distribution wouldn't factor into any consideration for Companies paying developers and cloud hosting companies to run their businesses. IMO the best way would be for all OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to impleme…

> puzzled why Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and Mongo DB aren't already coming together At some point would it be collusion? I think collusion needs consumers, but the consumers of the cloud vendors would be harmed?

Collusion is secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy in order to cheat or deceive others.

As with any standardization efforts this is just cooperation, there's nothing secretive, illegal or deceitful about it - they'd just be coming together to standardize on a License to build a sustainable business model that prevents cloud monopolies from using their OSS efforts to compete against them.

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

#199
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair and equatable distribution wouldn't factor into any consideration for Companies paying developers and cloud hosting companies to run their businesses. IMO the best way would be for all OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to impleme…

> puzzled why Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and Mongo DB aren't already coming together At some point would it be collusion? I think collusion needs consumers, but the consumers of the cloud vendors would be harmed?

No, I don't think so - they are not in competition among themselves. They just share a common threat because they chose a similar type of conducting business.

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

#200
post #179
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, 1000 times. We need a good license in the spirit of Commons Clause: source available, feel free to use, but don't sell (just written better and hopefully supported by wider community). The most curious thing about this is that when a company behind a successful OSS project decides to change a license that would extract some of that value back to the actual creators and maintainers of OSS, they get the backlash…

Definitely agree that the best way to force cloud companies into revenue sharing back would be for OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to implement a system to revenue share back to the creators of OSS their hosting. [1] https://news.yc…

That would be awesome. The thing that each of these licenses lacks is recognition. When someone says it's GPL, every developer knows what the tradeoffs are. With Fair Source 25 license? Not so much.
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