The purpose of open source may not making money.
And maybe most of the open source developers are not good at making money.
But if there is a infrastructure to help the developers to get money through their open source software, and still keep the open source free for personal learn and use, that will be fan.
Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
341–350 of 454 posts
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "at that time". My current Linux desktop (Xfce) is way better than Win95 or Win2k. I stopped using Windows around then, so I can't comment on WinXP or newer. I think arguably a current Linux distro/desktop designed for non-technical users is better for them than Win95 or Win2k was.
I (a laymen) buy a random tablet pen, and it works immediately on windows. To get it to work on linux, may be there's already a driver, may be it's not supported. Either way, it's a gamble if it works on linux. Tell me that windows isn't still better for the laymen?
The sheer number of times I've had issues with Windows drivers is anecdotal, but consider carefully. I've had impossible to boot systems because the network driver isn't included in the core installation media. I've had video cards not work out of the box and require me to install massively bloated control centers to use. And the number of complaints from unexpected reboots? And that's in a pretty standardized computer lab, trying to make my Grandma's computer use the correct resolution on her monitor was literally impossible.
I guess it depends on how you define laymen? I think Ubuntu worked out of the box with everything I've thrown at it in years.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#343Its 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
Opensource can also exist outside the server side. There are opensource desktop&mobile apps and cloud vendors cannot do anything against them. Stop painting a narrowed view of reality, opensource is bigger than you think.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
ThoughtWorks and ThoughtBot are different companies, of which TW is well-known due to Martin Fowler, the many debates about the relevance of TDD, agile practices, etc, and they have offices all over the world. They started work on tools, like CruiseControl, and open sourced this. To me it never felt like they made tools open source first, but rather a need that came to have them stay relevant as other, often times better Open Source-first tools came around. The same happened with GoCD.
ThoughtBot came around later, and feels much like a adhering to a lot of the similar cultural habits.
Note: I worked for TW, currently at Red Hat. Note 2: Somne of TW's projects under the other pillars are open source first, but aren't related to this topic.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#345Its 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 Opensource can also exist outside the server side. There are opensource desktop&mobile apps and cloud vendors cannot do anything against them. Stop painting a narrowed view of reality, opensource is bigger than you think.
I don't think the intent was to say open source is limited to server side software, but was to instead illustrate a point about cloud vendors embracing open source.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#346Its 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…
interesting
what license would you even use for that - it seems everything here allows commercial
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#347Earlier 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,…
In the 1980s the lock-in was in hardware: you buy this server, you get our OS and software stack. In the 90s and 2010s it was software: you buy this software because others are not compatible with it. Today's lock-in is cloud services. Will people ever learn?
my vote on today's lockin even more than cloud is chrome, the web as mono culture, single predominant implementation that every caters to, thats subverting standards (http2/http3). it is the IE of today, and as you say because websites are not compatible with other, and the death of opera and ms implementations is the nail in the coffin.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#348It 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…
This doesn't make sense. What additional revenue would the GPL provide for you? How would a copyleft license end up requiring additional support contracts? Your other comment lists a range of things Redhat offers in addition to support, but none of those things rely on the GPL.
Qt exists as a business today because of its use of the GPL - enterprise customers can't ship the free version of Qt with proprietary software when its statically linked (as are all? Qt programs on Windows). PyQt works the same way, its an independent business run on selling proprietary licenses to distribute derivative binaries without source in exchange for money.
For a lot of business denying their users software freedoms are a value add for them because of the power it gives them to demand payment. They will, in turn, pay back for GPL code to get that ability. If it enables the further development of free software, its probably a net win.
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#349Maybe software should be payed for per second usage?
Implemented as a charge added to cloud usage costs.
Terms of use and terms of agreement machine readable and included in public available source code.
Code publically available, publically built and cryptographically tagged by usage and licensing Metadata. Like a smart contract.
Anyone who used the code would automatically be billed by the cloud provider on the license holder behalf.
This would align incentives better and enforce the openness of the source as a byproduct.
(the licensing should ideally be built into the platform, which should be vendor neutral, e.g. K8s and maybe the license could waive cost collection for self hosted use on own hardware)
Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can actually run production ready db in k8s pretty easily. There is volume and stateful set and DNS, I could see limit to what it could run.