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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

#331

Post by papa_bear »

suls wrote: post #326
Justsignedup wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I had heard of ThoughtBot, but not ThoughtWorks. Seems like both are relevant examples:

https://github.com/thoughtbot

https://github.com/thoughtworks

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

#332

Post by _jal »

dragonwriter wrote: post #285
EduardoBautista wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of which make good money selling support services and/or cloud infrastructure, and have decided to donate the fruits of the labor they are buying because doing so helps drive those businesses. So, again, the developer labor is donated, by parties that are not blind to the market impacts. Where is the problem?

No problem, if you stop your analysis at what's legal and what's not.

If you care about where these trends are taking us, there's plenty to complain about, and you can easily find those problems by reading the conversation you're replying to.

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

#333

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

ken wrote: post #162
SkyPuncher wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a more apt description would be "You can't PLAN to make a living making music". Certainly, lots of people successfully make a living with music, arts, sports, etc. However, there's a lot out of the individual's control in those fields.

You can't plan to be the next Beatles (just as you can't plan to be the next Microsoft), but you can absolutely plan to make a living in the arts (just as you can plan to make a living in software). When people look at a field from the outside, they only see the celebrities, but this is a completely unrepresentative sample. As Phil Greenspun once put it, "I can't decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson,…

You can make money in music, but it's very difficult to make money making music, which I think is essentially the same analogy here.

A band I love called Periphery is fairly popular, they do global tours etc. They have been very vocal that the band itself generates no revenue. They are happy to break even because they love making music. Instead they use their influence to extend their brand, such as pedals, pickups, clothing brands, etc. They absolutely make money in music, but they don't make money making the music.

You can make money in Open Source, but you're unlikely to make money developing of Open Source. But, if you do contribute or maintain OSS, then you can likely get a job at any of the million companies that need a dev. So you're still making money and you're still in OSS, but they are separate.

I think that was the point OP was making here. Someone makes money on art, but the actual creation of that art isn't likely being paid out to the creator, just all the components that bring it to the consumer.

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

#334

Post by linkregister »

Guthur wrote: post #236
anth_anm wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh well, if it's legal I guess it's ok. Why debate or discuss anything? The case is closed everybody, it's legal!

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

#335

Post by flukus »

krupan wrote: post #50

It feels to me like there was a lot of social pressure over the last 10 years or so for open source projects to use the most permissive open source license they could. You were cool and "more free" if you used Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses. I wonder if this is coming back to bite us now. Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software. Would things be different for the companies we've been talking…

If mongo had gone with the GPL/AGPL they would also have options like dual licensing, which is what they seem to be attempting.

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

#336

Post by hyperpallium »

Can you design a license that increases the proportion paid to Labor (as opposed to Capital)?

NB: I don't mean more hours are required; I mean workers get paid more per hour.

Labor prices only seem to change with supply and demand. If you're making lots of money, and labor is cheap, why pay more? That's where a minimum wage helps shift the allocation.

You could shrink the Labor supply, perhaps artificially; or you could increase demand for Labor.

You could directly legislate by license: the license available only to businesses that e.g. pay at least a minimum wage.

Of course, businesses won't like that, so your software had better be something very useful.

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

#338

Post by sfifs »

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.

Not at all. I very much prefer vanilla Ubuntu front end of my personal laptop to MS Windows. I am still on Win 7 on my work laptop so it is tolerable but I'm definitely going Mac instead of Win 10 abomination next upgrade.

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

#339

Post by mooreds »

jjeaff wrote: post #97
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 think you are mostly right, but I don't think the major cloud providers have much of an uncrossable moat. Cloud services are and will continue to become more and more commoditized. Sure, there is proprietary lock-in. But because of OSS, it is also becoming easy to avoid the lock-in. For example, rather than use a hosted elastic service, I was able to launch an elastic stack on k8s in less than an hour of configurat…

> We are in the process of doing the same with our DB and will migrate from a hosted Aurora instance.

Just curious, you are going to host your database on k8s? Or is there some other solution you are looking at?

My understanding is that k8s is great when you need stateless services, but gets more complicated when you need to maintain state. Been a while since I looked at it, though.

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

#340

Post by scarface74 »

chii wrote: post #320
scarface74 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I really want to go back to managing my own database servers and ElasticSearch servers....

you get what you pay for. If you use managed services from a vendor, you get convenience for the price of lock-in.

You’re always locked into your infrastructure. Out of all of the business risks that most companies face, the least is being locked into your cloud provider.

Your CTO is no more going to risk an infrastructure migration because you pinky promised that it would be “seamless” than your DBA is going to migrate from your seven figure Oracle installation to Postgres because you used the “Repository Pattern to abstract your database access”.

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