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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

#241

Post by mythz »

cthalupa wrote: post #230
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…

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 of…

There's no line after, there will only ever be the 3 multi-billion dollar cloud monopolies at the end of the food chain, the toll booth collecting rent for hosting others OSS efforts.

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

#242

Post by amenod »

bluesign wrote: post #214
amenod wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.'

I stand corrected. I stopped reading after that statement, while I should have read further. Thank you for correcting me.

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

#243

Post by peterwwillis »

The whining about cloud vendors making money off OSS is sour grapes, plain and simple.

OSS exists in the spectrum of a gift economy. Once you give it away, you don't get to expect something in return, or expect them to use it in a particular way. You gifted it away. In fact, the original OSS definition explicitly stated you could not discriminate against fields of endeavor. But I guess envy is stronger than idealism.

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

#244

Post by minitech »

pbalau wrote: post #219
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.

That distinction seems like a bit of a nitpick.

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

#245

Post by marssaxman »

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…

There are many ways to be rewarded for one's efforts. When I give my source code away it's not because I'm being exploited, it's because I'm doing the work for some other motivation. Keeping the code locked up afterward doesn't benefit me. It's a lot of work to start and maintain a business, and it's often more hassle than it's worth to try to charge for software. If I have some motivation to create a thing, and that thing has been created, what do I lose by sharing it?

I can only do so many things at a time. I can't possibly run as many businesses at a time as it would take to charge money for all the code I write. So, why not give it away?

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

#246

Post by funkymike »

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 ?

> The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS?

Contributors to OSS are giving away their time and energy. That seems to be at the core of open source. I'm not going to demand you pay for what I produce - I'm going to give it to you for free with minimal restrictions in the belief that I will also benefit from others doing the same.

It seems to me that asking how to make money by giving away one's work doesn't really make sense. If you value it highly enough to think you should be paid, then why give the work away for free in the first place. No one picks up trash from the side of the road motivated by cleaning up their community then asks how they can get paid for it after the fact. Either you are motivated to give away your time and energy; or you really want a paid job, but one where you feel like you are giving back to society more meaningfully than just helping a company make more money.

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

#247

Post by gunta »

jszymborski wrote: post #172

I'm tempted just to say dual AGPL-Commercial dual-licensing, and granting MIT-style licenses for non-profit/academic use on request... although I know that's not workable for all cases

Ive been thinking that this is really the current best solution to the problem.

I want to try this, is there any project who has implemented this MIT/Apache licenses on request?

Ideally we need first a system to do the request approval a la https://cla-assistant.io

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

#248

Post by cthalupa »

bsder wrote: post #239
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…

> 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 fro…

>At a miniscule fraction of the value they created.

Two things here:

1) In a sane business climate, you will never extract more than some fraction of the value you create. If you receive as much value as you create, then there is no purpose in anyone using whatever you've built, because they gain nothing from it.

2) If your goal is extracting as much of the created value for yourself as possible, open source software licenses are not designed in such a manner as to do so.

If you want to get the same benefits of proprietary software, write proprietary software. There's nothing wrong with doing so.

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

#249

Post by solomatov »

jchallis wrote: post #26
jerkstate wrote: post #21

Open source software is infrastructure, not a commodity. Anyone has access to build on top of it. There is no question that open source enables enormous amounts of commerce, probably more so than equivalent closed-source software would. In that way, open source very much does make money in the same way that highways and airports make money.

Tollroads and airports both have gate fees. OSS does not have gate fees. How are these the same?

There's a problem. It's relatively easy to administer toll gates. It's not so easy to administer software licensing. We might get what it used to be with proprietary software 10-20 years ago, when there were no transparency about pricing etc, and it all resulted in "we will look at you and decide how much we will be able to make you pay" kind of pricing.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

Justsignedup wrote: post #195
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…

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…

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