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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

#271

Post by EduardoBautista »

prepend wrote: post #269
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…

“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” Why is it unfortunate. OSS developers are volunteering and donating their talent. Is it unfortunate that homeless people reap the benefit from patrons who sponsor charitable homeless shelters? Or is it unfortunate that students realize w…

They are not all volunteering. The Linux kernel, for example, is maintained mostly by paid individuals from all sorts of companies such as Red Hat, IBM, and even Microsoft.

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

#272

Post by davidjnelson »

donatj wrote: post #268
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…

"Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors" I think you're forgetting the end users of the applications running on the open source regardless of cloud provider. The value they are reaping is near limitless.

Also those companies building those applications with open source for end users are reaping near limitless value.

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

#273

Post by dfox »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #127
bolzano wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'm not 100% sure that FOSS means free as in beer. It doesn't. The only requirements for licenses like GPL, etc. is that anyone who you distribute a binary to can ask you for the source code, and you must provide it for a reasonable fee (for GPL it's "for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source", and you must provide the source on request for as long as you offer…

The ability to somehow acquire the source is one of the requirements, but from the making money PoV it is not that significant.

What is significant for this discussion is that another GPL requirement is that whoever you distribute software to is permitted to redistribute however they see fit.

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

#274

Post by prepend »

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…

I don’t think it’s fair to say we “need” these non-OSS licenses as they exist.

People are free to use them for their projects. More power to them.

Assuming that all OSS projects are exploited or missing out is wrong.

The reason apl/mit are so popular is because they encourage use. I suspect that projects that try to use common core or whatnot will not meet with success because of the limitations of those licenses. Although I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.

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

#275

Post by mythz »

cthalupa wrote: post #256
mythz wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cloud providers were only possible because they can host OSS without licensing restriction or costs, they've worked out that they could charge for computing by providing hosting and is where they've put their billion dollar Cap-Ex into building impenetrable moats.

Hosting OSS isn't the only thing that creates value, but it's where most of the revenue is now being derived since no-one pays for OSS, only to host it. The generated wealth is then be used to finance other proprietary and OSS efforts that can outspend and out resource anyone else they choose to compete with, who need to rely on a different source and business model for their sustainable income.

Cloud hosting is the primary business model that allows investing in developing OSS as they'll still get paid in the end, in this way OSS bringing the cost of software down to zero becomes a loss-leading marketing expense (and competitive advantage) that allows mass free bait distribution of their software which everyone else is at a disadvantage to compete against.

Essentially OSS is strengthening cloud monopolies by bringing the cost of software development to zero with the majority of wealth created going to making major tech cloud providers more wealthy and powerful each passing year.

> Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic?

Because AWS didn't put any of the investment in creating it, they're reaping the benefits from Elastic's investments and can undercut them since they don't have to fund any of the development and have access to an bigger economy of scale no-one else has access to.

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

#277

Post by hinkley »

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.

Nitpicking aside, if you consider that most of the money is made by people working with musicians and not the musicians themselves, then 'the money is in selling art' is pretty true.

I wonder which is more lucrative? Starting a band, or putting equal resources and time into buying lottery tickets. I bet the gap is narrower than people would be comfortable with.

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

#278

Post by StreamBright »

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…

Those cloud vendors opensourced projects that made it possible for other companies to exist. How many companies are based on Tensorflow alone?

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

#279

Post by andyferris »

Something has to be both valuable (useful) and rare in order for people to pay for it. Useful by itself is not sufficient. A piece of open-source software can't be considered scarce if you are allowed to make a copy for microcents.

Only through legally enforced IP protections do people even pay for classic proprietary software - it's a kind of artificial scarcity (there's no moral judgement there, just an observation). But yes, hosted services and so-on are also rare (it costs more than microcents for someone else to set up an equivalent hosted service).

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

#280

Post by noir_lord »

solomatov wrote: post #253
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.…

>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.

I’m sorry but I disagree, Cinnamon on Fedora is as good a desktop GUI in its day as win2k was in its and imo considerably better than win10 and I started on DOS3.22 so I’ve used them all even ME.

It’s fast, stable, well laid out and very easy to configure.

It also plays well with both gtk and qt apps.

It took a long time but Linux did catch up it’s just by the time it did desktops are less relevant to average people.

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