Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by otikik » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 8:46 PM UTC

Maybe it will not make "Lamborghini collection" money, but I have been making "buy a house and raise a family" money from it for the last 8 years. I know I'm privileged in this regard.

In my last 3 gigs, one of them was fully opensource (the Madrid City Hall decided to build a direct democracy platform) and the two others have been "open core", where there was an open-source component accompanied by an "enterprise offering" which was closed source, with extra features. Money was made by selling this "enterprise version", plus support, to other companies. This money pays for my salary, which involves mostly the open source side of things. The Open Source version is a "foundation" and a very good "marketing tool" amongst other developers. There's an ecosystem built on top of the open source version and we have some pull requests from the community. The main drive behind new features is still our internal dev team.

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

#232

Post by tzakrajs » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 8:50 PM UTC

What I am hearing is “Hey corporations, we have this great open source project and everyone should adopt it (including you!) just don’t try to contribute your changes upstream because they are toxic and serve your dirty, corporate needs. This project should serve the needs of the indie developer first, non-commercial developers second and commercial developers last.”

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

#233

Post by ako » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 8:50 PM UTC

mythz wrote: post #188

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.

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…

If you look at linux, the biggest part of the source code has been created by professional developers employed by large companies (ibm, google, intel, oracle).

Without the backing and investments of commercial companies, Linux would not be the success it currently is. So in the end everyone benefits in some way, although maybe not financially.

Same goes for a lot of other succesfull opensource projects: without commercial backing it would not be as succesfull.

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

#234

Post by marssaxman » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

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

I have been a follower of stallmanism for many years, and I think his voice is a crucial antidote to the all-money, all-control centralized software culture that developed as the early computer revolution encountered mainstream capitalism, but I think you are completely spot-on in your analysis.

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

#235

Post by throwaway86576 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

I think you need to examine niches carefully. I was able to create an open source piece of software that allowed me to sell over $50,000 worth of ebooks (training manual) over the course of 5 years. Eventually I was able to sell the entire software for a small five figure sum.

The money involved was not huge but it was great to have. Users did not care that the software was OSS. They cared that is solved a problem and the ebook I sold made it even easier. That is how OSS makes money - by solving problems.

OSS is not a business strategy, it is just a software license. You do not "make money" by adopting a software license, whatever it's moral merits. You need a business that solves a problem and OSS can be part of that.

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

#236

Post by Guthur » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

anth_anm wrote: post #152

bunderbunder wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to suspect that the major cloud vendors are well along on pulling a classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" gambit on that front. I'm sure there are a percentage of people operating in the cloud who stick judiciously to an open-source stack, and remain masters of their own future as a result. But it seems more common to spread some open source icing on top of a cake made out of ingredients like Beanstalk,…

Embrace, Extend, Engulf? I'm not sure what you call it when Amazon can pretty much just take your project over when you piss them off. Mongo is getting EEE'ed.

Imo mongo tried to change the rules of the game to be in their favor and AWS reacted in their best long term interests. And whether or not you like it that's fair, AWS were not in breach of the original software contract.

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

#237

Post by Kuraj » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

Kuraj wrote: post #99

I've had this idea in my head for some time but I wonder when browsers will start suppressing address bar content changes while the input is active and it's in the "dirty" state. It's really annoying to make a typo, realize it, try to correct it, and ending up hitting return on a malformed url AGAIN because the site finished loading in the meantime.

Oh crap, wrong thread. Sorry about the off-topic.

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

#238

Post by dancek » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

bolzano wrote: post #81

Insanity wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to nitpick, but to me the term 'freeloaders' has a negative connotation and I don't think it should in the case of FOSS. Being able to use it for free is quite literally the point of FOSS. Apart from that, you make good points :)

Do you mean free as in beer, or free as in speech here? I'm still honing my understanding of FOSS, and I'm not 100% sure that FOSS means free as in beer.

Free software is about freedoms, but also tends to be available for free. Consider this: if I sold a piece of free software for $1000 and the buyer was free to share its source code, wouldn't they? Even if no actual user shared the code, a trader could buy the software and sell it onward for $500 to as many people as possible. The next trader would buy for $500 and sell copies for $100, etc.

Now, the software might be difficult to build or run or use, and the vendor might be actually selling binaries, or the software as a service, or documentation, or consultation, etc. Those can be valid business models even if the source code is freely available.

So theoretically, yes, free software could cost money. But its source code tends to be free as in beer, too. Freedom is much more valuable than the saved money, and that's why free beer gets scoffed at.

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

#239

Post by bsder » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

At a miniscule fraction of the value they created.

These people deserve to have so much money that they can simply work on open source for free, forever. I haven't seen anybody in that position yet.

This isn't even like a musician wherein some record company fronted capital, the companies benefiting from open source didn't front anything for these developers.

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

#240

Post by mythz » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

tzakrajs wrote: post #229

mythz wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

The topic and answers are on why it's unfortunate that Cloud Monopolies are reaping most of the wealth from OSS and why they're happy to keep the status quo which grows their monopolies bigger each passing year.

Never that there were no benefits - that was addressed in my initial statement. OSS does bring benefits to everyone using it where its made some products and services financially possible.

But it still stands that the majority of the wealth being created from OSS is going towards building Cloud Monopolies and a fraction of that wealth being used to finance their own proprietary and OSS efforts that will outspend and out compete Indie OSS efforts - the trend of which will go towards most people switching to use commercially-backed Cloud OSS software where it exists.