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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

#211

Post by tzakrajs »

anth_anm wrote: post #155
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 they get to use their money and power and seep wealth out of things they had no part in creating. It's disgusting.

Open source software is like oxygen, big companies can burn really big fires and individuals can light their candle with it. We are all responsible for replenishing the oxygen in the air by planting trees. If the oxygen dies, so do the fires. Likewise companies have pinned their futures on OSS. They are investing.

Edit: please downvote me dogmatic stallman types

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

#212

Post by carapace »

Ever since I was a kid, I assumed that computers and robots would soon solve all production scarcity problems (or that we would make Star Trek-style "replicators" that worked by manifesting holographic images, whatever) and there would be a world of plenty, no one would have to go hungry or homeless or even work at bad jobs. I thought that all I had to do was write good software and give it away and sooner or later everything would take care of itself economically.

Instead we have smartphones, computers that function as pocket strip-malls with addictive games and back-alley scams.

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

#213

Post by 0815test »

mythz wrote: post #179
amenod wrote: 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…

Haven't we tried this already? The AGPL is a bona-fide OSS license, and is standard enough that it's actually endorsed by the FSF for public-facing services, in addition to being OSI-certified. Cloud vendors avoid it like the plague, rightly or wrongly - which is what we were going for, right? Yet many "OSS-lite" companies have rejected it as not going far enough. It's mind-boggling.

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

#214

Post by bluesign »

amenod wrote: post #178
jaabe wrote: post #37

I think you can make money on Open Source, but I think you need partners to do so. I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven open source community called OS2. We’re around 60 members, and we’ve recently won a national award for tech-reuse issued by our ministry of digitisation and around 10 interest groups. We don’t build the code ourselves. We do own, review and manage the code. We h…

> I think you can make money on Open Source > We don’t build the code ourselves. Ha, ha, well put. That much everyone agrees on, and Amazon especially so. :) The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS ?

> 'Our local development houses still make money, both from development but also from SAAS.'

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

#215

Post by mythz »

tzakrajs wrote: post #208
mythz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, so everyone should be happy working for the "exposure" so they can be snapped up by Cloud Companies using the wealth created from hosting their OSS efforts who will then be put to work on strengthening their cloud monopolies.

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

#216

Post by jwildeboer »

I’m finishing my 14th year at Red Hat as we speak. In that time Red Hat had two digit growth every single year. We employ around 13000 people. And in all those years I have read at least one article per week claiming that it isn’t possible to make money with open source. Weird.

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

#217

Post by [deleted] »

mythz wrote: post #215
tzakrajs wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, so everyone should be happy working for the "exposure" so they can be snapped up by Cloud Companies using the wealth created from hosting their OSS efforts who will then be put to work on strengthening their cloud monopolies.

[deleted]

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

#218

Post by antt »

capkutay wrote: post #201

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…

You can write a drop in replacement for that company because it is open source. Can you write a drop in replacement for Windows or even Word?

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

#219

Post by pbalau »

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…

There are 0 people that make a living making art (and music, as a subset of art). All the people you think of are selling art. They are doing things that they believe they can sell, either for money or for status.

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

#220

Post by jahewson »

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…

What you're describing is a situation where OSS isn't creating wealth. Hosting is.
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