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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

#321

Post by isostatic »

nostrademons wrote: post #82
sanxiyn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freemium model is vastly more profitable. There is a reason every game company is switching to it.

For some numbers - Diablo 3 was one of the best-selling AAA titles with 12 million copies sold in its first year, about 30 million within the first 3 years. The entire Civilization franchise has sold about 40 million copies - Civ 5 & 6 each sold about 8 million copies. At $50/copy, that's about $200M per game, ranging up to about $1.5B for a bestseller over multiple years. By comparison, Wargaming (a mid-level F2P pu…

> It's also interesting to compare this to movies - games are now comparable to or even exceeding blockbuster movies in revenue potential

This is nothing new, but it's still shocking -- at least for those like me that still remember the days of the ZX Spectrum, where blockbuster hits were programmed in bedrooms

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

#323

Post by chii »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #224
phoe-krk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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?

> locked into your cloud provider abstraction layer instead of the cloud providers themselves

but the assumption is that this layer is free (due to OSS), and the "owners" of this layer cannot pull the carpet under you by raising prices.

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

#324

Post by jrockway »

kelnos wrote: post #310
jrockway wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it, though? I feel like the nuts and bolts of cloud services are super commoditized and I can pick up and leave whenever I want. Kubernetes on Amazon (where I am) is going to be close enough to Kubernetes on GCP, and even close enough to just buying some servers and running Kubernetes myself. I don't know all the details of how I will do load balancing when doing it myself, but I work at an ISP and I'm sure the ne…

That's only true if you limit yourself to the base infra offerings, or offerings that have direct mostly-compatible alternatives elsewhere. If I use DynamoDB, I'm stuck with AWS, absent an expensive, difficult migration. Even with Kubernetes, moving from EKS to your own cluster means spinning up your own k8s masters, which might not be in $RANDOM_DEVELOPER's wheelhouse. And IIRC AWS has their own special things for d…

But that's not a cloud provider thing, that's just the same-old locking yourself into proprietary software that we've been doing since computers were first invented. "We have to renew the license on our Fortran compiler because nothing else has the features we use" is exactly the same "I'm stuck on DynamoDB".

As for Ingress, Amazon does have an ingress controller that configures an Application Load Balancer with kubernetes Ingress API objects. I feel like this locks you in less because again, Ingress is standardized. The problem with Ingress specifically is that the standard doesn't cover things people actually want their ingress controller to do, so every implementation has their own set of features. We use nginx... you better believe there are literal nginx.conf snippets inside the Kubernetes API objects to get things to do what we want. So this is just a case of Kubernetes being bad, not really cloud provider lockin. I'm more stuck on nginx than on Amazon.

(As for load balancers; again, Amazon has proprietary configuration parameters that won't be portable, but they don't really do anything important. You can make your Amazon load balancer terminate TLS (a bad idea), and pick which of the 3 Amazon load balancer types you want to use. Switch to Google, and that won't work... but you also probably won't care. The Load Balancer API spec seems to do what people want, so it's relatively commoditized and you won't be sad when you switch providers. We actually have to have a wildcard certificate specifically because Amazon's classic load balancers are so bad. Would be happy to not terminate TLS in the load balancer and have Envoy or Nginx terminate TLS and ask letsencrypt for a new certificate every couple months.)

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

#325

Post by specialist »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #116
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,…

The lock in is far more complete than it ever was in the Microsoft era, with Microsoft of the 90s, you could mostly still choose to just stop buying their crap, and stick with what you had while you migrate, or work out an alternative. The minute you stop paying a cloud vendor, your entire infrastructure vanishes in a cloud of smoke, and if you relied on their "value add" proprietary services, you are left with basic…

Chewing on your observation...

During the 90s, the big lock-in strategy was thru proprietary file formats. With cloud, exfiltrating one's own data can get real spendy real quick.

But it seems the lock-in is the fit & finish of one's production env. K8s was the new religion at my last gig. But interop & migrating between on-prem, AWS, Google wasn't easy. All the fiddly bits, like managing VPCs, creds and certs, load balancing tweaks, autoscaling rules, backups, ad nauseam.

Maybe things have gotten easier. Maybe we were doing it wrong. (I'm certain that I had no idea what I was doing.) But I couldn't shake the feeling our effort to leave AWS (if we wanted) was gonna fail.

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

#326

Post by suls »

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…

Did you mean ThoughtWorks?

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

#327

Post by mamon »

The pattern that I see emerging now is that companies treat Open Source as a way of offseting software maintenance cost. They will create something for their internal use, and once product is feature complete and relatively stable, they will open source it, so that they can receive free bugfixes, which I guess they merge upstream.

Some examples include Google with Kubernetes, Netflix with their cloud tooling (Eureka, Ribbon, etc.), LinkedIn with Kafka, Yahoo! with Hadoop, and many others.

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

#328

Post by chii »

marssaxman wrote: post #245
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…

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…

> what do I lose by sharing it?

absolutely nothing. Which is indeed one particular type of OSS model. The best kind imho.

But this thread has been talking about business models which involve using OSS to get a customer in the door who will then pay the business for other things (such as hosting/services). Under the OSS, this business model seems to be failing as major corporations start to encroach.

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

#329

Post by mamon »

everdev wrote: post #170
gnat wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are businesses. Businesses are designed to make money. Open Source is a category of licenses designed to facilitate distribution of software. I feel like much of the problems mentioned in this thread come down to people wanting to be paid to write software but not building a business that lets them do that. They spent all their time working on the software and not the business. The book "The E Myth" about entre…

OK, following that logic then there isn't much money in anything besides business.

That's exactly how it works: profits from business go to shareholders and executives, who are business people first and may have no idea about their company's business domain (how many GMC executives would be able to repair your car?)

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

#330

Post by vortico »

Plugin-hosting open-source software is great for money. If you build a platform and sell software that extends its functionality, you can may be able to sufficiently fund the platform. You have a huge advantage over third parties (which you shouldn't try to restrict) because customers prefer plugins developed by the original vendor of the platform.

I did this with https://vcvrack.com/ and it has been successful IMO.

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