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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

#221

Post by reallydude »

tzakrajs wrote: post #211
anth_anm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> big companies can burn really big fires and individuals can light their candle with it.

Big companies start as individuals. I don't think your comment effectively communicates your intent...maybe something about wealth distribution or how corporations are immoral. I don't completely disagree with these concepts.

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

#222

Post by amenod »

0815test wrote: post #213
mythz wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Cloud vendors avoid it like the plague, rightly or wrongly

I don't think they do, actually? MongoDB felt a need to change their license from AGPL to SSPL. That said, I'm on "not going far enough" side of the argument. I don't care if they distribute their code, I want them to stop competing with my service, or to pay the royalties. Alternatively, they are free to develop their own product. Note that that doesn't go for users - users are free to install and use the software as they see fit. But providing competing service which is based on the work of those that bigtech competes with, simply does not seem fair to me.

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

#223

Post by __blockcipher__ »

evanweaver wrote: post #187
ako wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert (exposure) and then capitalizing w/ a consulting business makes sense.

The core issue is that consulting scales at O(n) where n is your personal time investment. It's not like offering a service where you spend all your time working on the service and get to experience exponential growth.

Basically, if you choose to commit to free software / OSS, you can't expect to get directly paid for it. Now, I know that that's not always ideal and ends up in tragedy-of-the-commons situations where the OSS devs don't get paid enough, but that's the reality of the situation to me.

Restrictive licenses don't solve the problem, because these same cloud behemoths can just pull an open distro on you.

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

#224

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

phoe-krk wrote: post #137
mythz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have your production systems running on a cloud vendor it becomes increasingly difficult to move off it regardless if you're only using OSS components, there's an inherent risk with every migration that grows the more services you use and years you host on it that needs to be offset with any migration and given the major cloud vendors are comparatively priced, there's little incentive to invest their time an…

...but that is generally regarded to be economically irresponsible in itself preventing you from leveraging the best features available in each cloud. This is only true as long as the costs of maintaining a cloud provider abstraction layer are greater than the costs of being locked in to a single vendor. I believe that some businesses, once they are armed with an abstraction toolkit like this, will be able to employ…

The problem of leaky abstractions can't be solved by slapping yet another abstraction on top. The best case is that you become locked into your cloud provider abstraction layer instead of the cloud providers themselves - and then what stops them from becoming just as monopolistic?

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

#226

Post by ako »

evanweaver wrote: post #187
ako wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

No, for the employability.

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

#227

Post by jondubois »

burtonator wrote: post #52

I'm currently experimenting with this directly. Specifically trying to make Open Source sustainable but for a consumer project. I think Open Source really works for infrastructure projects and it's possible to do really well either working on a system like Kubernetes or Elasticsearch. Not so well for projects that are more focused on consumers. My app, Polar, is focused more on consumers and is an app for people to m…

Compared to infrastructure projects, I think that consumer-facing open source projects are much easier in terms of finding users but much harder in terms of monetization.

My infrastructure pub/sub project is relatively popular https://socketcluster.io/ but I can definitely see quite a few monetization opportunities (in addition to doing occasional consulting on the side) but I haven't capitalized most of the big opportunities yet - In a large part because my focus is still very much on adoption (which is often at odds with monetization).

I think it will be possible to monetize it later through optional commercial plugins and performance optimizations.

In terms of adoption, it's been steady linear growth since the beginning so it feels like constant struggle but at least it doesn't seem to be stopping; in fact it appears to be getting easier as time passes. I deal mostly with companies, startups and blockchain projects.

That said, I've known authors of very popular back end software projects that have had a really hard time monetizing but I think this is because they were more like standards-compliant libraries than 'infrastructure'.

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

#228

Post by lowercased »

coldtea wrote: post #148
anon1m0us wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You downvote because it wasn't obvious to you?

No, because it's random and mostly wrong ramblings. > Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Not really. They hated it for abusing their monopoly, and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. > Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. Not really. Some believed software must be free as in beer and speech, most didn't care. They certainly didn't hate MS for it.…

> OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent.

I watched an MS-supporter at a MS 'dev camp' day conference give a lecture on web hosting. His position - restated multiple times - was that hosting with IIS was cheaper than with Apache/Linux, but hosting companies were in cahoots to artificially inflate the cost of IIS hosting, because it let them justify paying linux admins more. Something about you could programmatically script IIS much faster/easier than Linux, and it was cheaper to integrate with Active Directory, but hosting companies wanted to make MS look bad so they charged more (and made a bigger profit) on MS hosting.

Honestly, even typing it out doesn't make much sense. I tried to get him to clarify the position some at the time (this was... probably 2010-2012 time frame) and... I got some nonsense answer. It was truly nonsensical. But he was passionate. I half-expected the word 'illuminati' to pop up in his presentation.

Linux/Apache is "more expensive" for hosting, but companies charge more for Windows because the Linux people at those companies want to drive people away from Microsoft. I think that was the gist of it...

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

#229

Post by tzakrajs »

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.

I never said they should work for exposure or that they should be happy with this system.

Do the corporations creating products with OSS have a more positive impact on the world than when they purchased their software? If so, isn’t that beneficial to developers? Isn’t it empowering as a developer to know that your software powers businesses and markets? Why do developers contribute code in the first place?

If Indie oss developers provide say 49% of the contributions to open source project ought they expect the same representation or recompense as a project with 90% indie developer contributions?

More philosophically: After you create something, how long do you get to own or control that thing and how it is used?

How long do indie oss developers think they should be able to dictate the future of the project? Is corporate investment in open source actually welcome?

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

#230

Post by cthalupa »

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…

Well, let's take a look at ElasticSearch, since that's the current hot topic.

If Lucene followed the same logic being espoused here, then ElasticSearch as we know it wouldn't exist, because they wouldn't be able to use Lucene, which is an incredibly core component to ES. Elastic employs several people to work on Lucene full time at this point, so they're "giving back" in that regard, but they're still making money off of pre-existing open source.

What is the litmus test for this being okay? No one seems to be upset at Elastic for making money off Lucene, but the idea of the big cloud vendors making money off of ES is upsetting to a lot of people. If Amazon or Microsoft employed a handful of people to work on ElasticSearch full time does it become okay then?

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