Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ianbicking.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 454 posts

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

#251

Post by gunta »

ffn wrote: post #151

What if the problem with open-source not making money isn't the open-source part, but the money part? Our current economic system focuses on money as a medium of "equivalent exchange", as in there's no free lunch and a dollar you spend on buying a piece of butter necessarily means you can't spend that same dollar on a gun (same thing for the butter merchant). This exchange is based on a contractual agreement that bin…

Perhaps form a global NPO where participant countries give x% of all their taxes to donate to OSS projects

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

#252

Post by amenod »

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…

You have a valid point, and I don't have the answers to your concerns yet. I am sure best practices that protect Lucenes of the world will develop, given chance. For example ES could buy out rights for independent development, or they could simply pay part of their income to the original developers.

Having constraints for selling and building on other people's work doesn't mean that one shouldn't be able to do it, just that previous link in the chain should be financially rewarded for it.

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

#253

Post by solomatov »

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.…

>and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS.

The GUI of their OS at that time is still superior to what linux desktop provides us with today.

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

#254

Post by keepper »

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…

I could not agree more with this.

The reality is that Cloud Computing is the biggest threat to OSS at the moment. ( as my comments on this show lol ). I'm a big proponent of the idea of elastic computing. My fear is that the current "cloud"/elastic computing providers are more akin to off-shore outsourcing than to real technological advance. A short term solution, that will have serious and major repercussions down the line.

And yes, I do get all the benefits. I've been long enough in the industry ( and on most sides ), to have built both small and massive datacenters, and have built both public and private elastic infra. But this is way too much consolidation, and way too many possible harmful long term effects. We should have made running infra easier... not go the "lease" model 100%. :-/

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

#255

Post by [deleted] »

lowercased wrote: post #228
coldtea wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

[deleted]

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

#256

Post by cthalupa »

mythz wrote: post #241
cthalupa wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, I guess the question is:

What about Open Source makes you believe this is the bad outcome?

The cloud companies make their money providing the physical infrastructure, their expertise in working with the product, support, etc. when hosting it for you. You're not paying them to have access to ElasticSearch - you've already got ElasticSearch.

Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic? Why shouldn't they have the option of getting their hosting from someone that they already get other hosted services from?

If there had been a similar attitude behind the development of open source webservers, the web as we know it would almost certainly not exist today. If httpd had been licensed in such a way that you couldn't make money off of providing it as a hosted service, and no open source alternative had come into existence, I doubt we'd all be sitting on HN right now. It never got concentrated like it has today with the big three, but nothing in the license prevented it from occurring.

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

#257

Post by marcosdumay »

cwyers wrote: post #17
tacostakohashi wrote: post #11

I wonder what would happen if someone started an open source software "vendor" run along the lines of public radio / podcasts. Open source licensed (using a regular GPL or other license, nothing new or tricky), but a prominent encouragement to donate it you find it useful. Those donations could then be used to hire full-time developers, and work on the kinds of software that is currently not well served by open-sourc…

Depends on your market. If it's direct to consumer, you're basically in the same boat as shareware/freeware back in the day, and it's a model that _can_ work. If your market is businesses, then no. There is no budget for donations at most businesses. There is a budget for _buying_ things.

Even more. There is a budget for buying things even when there is a perfectly good free version that does everything the business needs. One just needs to add "support", or "customization" into the features. Those are not free for the seller, but business will gladly overpay.

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

#258

Post by anonytrary »

> with an open source license it’s harder to force someone to pay for a product

Most OSS business models don't try to sell the actual OSS. Usually a separate, commercial product is built on top of the actual OSS.

> You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children.

For everyone else smashing their keyboards, I think his point is: It's hard to make good money as an average artist, whereas it's easy to make good money as an average software engineer.

> This is where the Free Software mission has faltered despite so many successes: software that people actually touch isn’t free or open.

The point is that those commercial applications almost always depend on FOSS. If you have a better idea, go and build a better commercial product. You'll probably depend on similar FOSS.

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

#259

Post by soulbadguy »

acolytic wrote: post #106
soulbadguy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the donations tax deductible ? How did you guys arrive at the 30% figure ? Seems quite high to me

Donations are not tax-deductible for now. We might do that later if people ask for it. 30% includes all payment processing costs and other costs for both users and projects, so there is a flat 70% remaining for projects that doesn't get deducted further. We do this to keep things simple and make it clear how much projects can get. Payment processing alone costs $0.3 + 3% with Stripe, so at $10/month that's a fixed $0…

First thanks for doing this.I was actually looking for a good and efficient way to give back to OSS.

30 % seems more inline with apps store etc... which are closed, for profit entities. Other crowd founding venue charge around 5 % which is the level i would personally feel comfortable with.

The way the donation are distributed is interesting and seem to be geared toward people wanted to give back to communities on which they are actually contributing (time spent on the documentation pages). Personally i am looking for a way to give to project i use the most, (firefox, vim , zsh etc...) and also project that i use and particularly need funding.

Any plans for the entreprise market ?

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

#260

Post by scroot »

minitech wrote: post #244
pbalau wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A nitpick? On Hackernews?
Post reply on HN