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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

#201

Post by capkutay »

The biggest hypocrisy is when a company that's actively and aggressively trying to monetize the open source project, with ambitions to go public, shame companies like Amazon and Microsoft for doing the exact same thing.

And they talk about how it harms the development community...exactly how does it harm the average OSS developer if Amazon or Microsoft or Google are adopting the project and making it easier to deploy in cloud scenarios?

Seems like a 'have your cake and eat it too' scenario. These companies benefitted from massive adoption thanks to open source being developer friendly and free, yet they want it to be just restrictive enough that only their company can monetize it.

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

#202

Post by jason0597 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #30

It's very easy to get people to pay for hosting. In Mozilla's case, I would love to see some sort of cloud hosting for Rust. I also wish I could write front end in Rust but maybe I'll just have to wait for webassembly. I can't imagine that some sort of rust to js compiler (kinda like kotlin) would be too hard and this would be a killer application. Matei Zaharia (of the Spark fame) and friends are working on weld, ht…

>I'll just have to wait for webassembly.

Isn't webassembly already out?

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

#203

Post by adamnemecek »

jason0597 wrote: post #202
adamnemecek wrote: post #30

It's very easy to get people to pay for hosting. In Mozilla's case, I would love to see some sort of cloud hosting for Rust. I also wish I could write front end in Rust but maybe I'll just have to wait for webassembly. I can't imagine that some sort of rust to js compiler (kinda like kotlin) would be too hard and this would be a killer application. Matei Zaharia (of the Spark fame) and friends are working on weld, ht…

>I'll just have to wait for webassembly. Isn't webassembly already out?

It is but it’s not like production ready.

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

#204

Post by pjmlp »

skybrian wrote: post #33
softwaredoug wrote: post #9

Years ago open source was about companies collaborating on commoditizing an obvious solution AWAY from the market. The economic case for open source isn’t about value added product companies, but a kind of commercial pooling of resources to create cost reduction and easier software maintenance on stuff nobody wants to buy or maintain... Of course orgs have lost site of this. The sad reality is 99.999% of orgs are OSS…

You say that like OSS "freeloading" is a bad thing when it's basically by design. If the result of previous pooling of resources is that there is a lot of open source software that you (or a vendor) can just pick up and use, isn't that just things working out as intended? Isn't this what users and vendors being free to do what they want really means? It seems like many of us are conflicted about whether open source s…

Not everyone might feel comfortable to keep working on their pet project when life gets thought and there isn't any money getting in.

Yes, others might pick it up, but it is seldom the case.

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

#205

Post by pjmlp »

krupan wrote: post #58
cperciva wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RedHat's business is not selling GPL software. They probably sell more BSD/MIT/Apache software than GPL software, but they're not in the business of selling software at all. They're in the business of selling support .

Those are good points. As I think about it some more, it's not even just support that they sell (as in, you can call them up when there's a bug). The large enterprises they sell to value: - support - training - ease of install - ease of upgrade - indemnity (e.g., Red Hat promises to pay your court costs if someone sues for patent infringement) - stability (long term support releases) Those are all things that plain o…

Which are all things that usually no consumer pays for, hence the big failure of trying to sell FOSS desktop software.

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

#206

Post by jrudolph »

amenod wrote: post #176
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, 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…

I think AGPL is a fairly good choice for anything that's potentially used as a hosted service. All the big enterprises I've worked with so far have a policy that forbids AGPL'd software and rather purchase commercial licenses. SMEs & Startups may make different choices but depending on your product they may not represent the relevant majority of the market anyway.

Ayende from RavenDB (which is a great no-nonsense document DB) has written an interesting blog series [0] on how they approach OSS while still making money from it and keeping their interests aligned with users and customers. TL;DR they license the full server and all modules as AGPL, offer free community (commercial) license that don't skimp on core features (clustering, authn/z), treat support as a cost-center.

Appears to work well for them and I personally find their mode of operation sympathetic.

[0] https://ayende.com/blog/posts/series/186113-A/making-money-f...

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

#207

Post by tzakrajs »

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...

Google and friends would just open source their internal rewrites of projects which had been locked out.

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

#208

Post by tzakrajs »

mythz wrote: post #131
reallydude wrote: post #121

Earlier 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 none of the Indie OSS developers that have donated their free time and energy into creating it will be rewarded with any of the value they've created from their efforts. Because there will only ever be 3 major multi-billion tech companies that stand to benefit most from OSS. Because they own their markets, where they can wait to find out what OSS software has become successful and either just profit from it b…

It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. Open Source software was never meant to pay the bills of open source developers, it was meant to open source code to the public and allow free use. To somehow read this narrative that indie developers are losing because others profit from their work is facile and not helpful.

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

#209

Post by aidenn0 »

hodgesrm wrote: post #47
rburhum wrote: post #25

I think doing the argument of "open source vs business focused" is incorrect. I would just make the comparison of "business focused vs not business focused". If it is open source or not, that is just a detail of the business strategy. One of the main problem that we technologist fail at is that a lot of the times we assume technology == product. When we do this, we completely overlook all the necessary infrastructure…

I was going to write this comment but you did it already. ;) Another common criticism of OSS goes along the lines of "it does not monetize value fully." In other words it creates value but the authors don't collect on it completely. However, the same statement is true of proprietary software. Anybody who has sold proprietary products knows that what you recover is a fraction of the cost of your users doing it themsel…

The problem is that the "cost of doing it themselves" for OSS is downloading and building your source, whereas for proprietary software, it's the cost of writing it.

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

#210

Post by _bxg1 »

> That’s what we think the world should be like, but we all know it isn’t. You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. I think this underlies many of this moment’s critiques of capitalism: there’s too many things that are important, even needed, or that fulfill us more than any profitable item, and yet are economically unsustainable.

Great quote; tucking it away for later. This is why democratic socialism is essential. Money is a lossy codec for true value.

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