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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

#351

Post by tfehring »

pjc50 wrote: post #4

This is a very clear articulation of the common problems here. Intellectual property can only make money by preventing its use, otherwise it just spreads everywhere to everyone for free. Given this property of the Internet, and the decision of open source/Free Software to embrace rather than fight this property, what side-channels can be constructed to return some value to the developers? > Anything paired with a phy…

> Given this property of the Internet, and the decision of open source/Free Software to embrace rather than fight this property, what side-channels can be constructed to return some value to the developers?

One interesting execution of this is https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/. Develop awesome FOSS, aided in part by the community, and scare enterprise users into paying for it by using the restrictive-through-forced-openness AGPL license.

To be perfectly clear, I don't think this is bad, just interesting. And I understand that RStudio also makes money through SaaS offerings, but that's not as interesting.

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

#352

Post by chii »

mythz wrote: post #188
ako wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud companies pay by hiring developers to improve opensource. This way everybody using opensource benefits. The original opensource contributers benefit twice: their software gets improved, and they have marketable skills as cloud companies will be interested to hire them to work on opensource projects.

You mean Cloud Companies are using the wealth created from hosting other's OSS to finance their own OSS efforts. By no means are their OSS investments altruistic, Cloud companies by far benefit the most from OSS and no OSS developers aren't winning. Being able to hire OSS developers using funds generated from hosting their OSS efforts is some weird definition of winning, which they're using towards strengthening the…

> By no means are their OSS investments altruistic

why does anything have to be altruistic? Why can't a company invest in OSS selfishly? The results are the same - more OSS available for anybody else to use.

> OSS developers aren't winning.

what's "winning" here? Is winning gaining financial profit from OSS? Is winning gaining user/market share? Is winning just merely being employed to do what you want to (i.e., employed to contribute to OSS)? And why is any one of those definitions more worthy than any other?

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

#353

Post by donatj »

davidjnelson wrote: post #272
donatj wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

And thus society is reaping near limitless value.

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

#355

Post by egypturnash »

linkregister wrote: post #334
Guthur wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Heavens forbid morals should enter into the discussion. All laws are perfectly rational and sensible and none of them have ever been put into place at the behest of major corporations with a lot of money to throw into buying politicians.

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

#356

Post by jjeaff »

mooreds wrote: post #339
jjeaff wrote: post #97

Earlier 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.

Yes, we are putting our production mysql (mariadb) into k8s. We use a stateful set and the data is stored on persistent volumes. Even if the pod or whole cluster goes down, the data remains. So far, I am finding it more stable than a bare metal setup. Because if the db instance fails, k8s kills it and spins up a new instance using that same persistent data disk. In the meantime, there is a read replica running on a different node that can take some failover.

We also have a job that runs nightly to make a dump of the db and store it in the object store and the persistent disk has a snapshot scheduled for every two hours and in both cases, we are backing up the binary logs, so we can do point in time recovery much like AWS's Aurora offering.

We may eventually switch to a mariadb Galera cluster where there are 3+ master pods that distribute the load and can stay available if one pod dies. But I haven't done the research on stability of that setup yet. A few years ago it wasn't ready yet, but I imagine it is by now.

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

#357

Post by jjeaff »

scarface74 wrote: post #340
chii wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

And yet, I know many people that are chomping at the bit to migrate away from Oracle and just as many more that have successfully migrated away. Infrastructure cost can be a significant cost of your business depending on what you do.

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

#358

Post by hodgesrm »

aidenn0 wrote: post #209
hodgesrm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to write this comment but you did it already. ;) Another common criticism of OSS goes along the lines of "it does not monetize value fully." In other words it creates value but the authors don't collect on it completely. However, the same statement is true of proprietary software. Anybody who has sold proprietary products knows that what you recover is a fraction of the cost of your users doing it themsel…

The problem is that the "cost of doing it themselves" for OSS is downloading and building your source, whereas for proprietary software, it's the cost of writing it.

It really depends on the software in question. I work on DBMS. The cost of doing it yourself is potentially much higher than your comment indicates:

* Time-to-market -- Rework due to mistakes when implementing or deploying applications

* Risk -- Fixing problems may take [much] longer than for supported software

* Resources -- Extra personnel to do software support and maintenance. This gets a lot more painful once software is long in the tooth and no longer cool to work on.

None of these have anything to do with OSS in particular. And for many people the costs are outweighed by benefits like understanding the technology stack and not being in thrall to costs they can't control.

In a similar vein I used to fix cars myself. I now take them to the mechanic even though for many problems I could do a better job albeit at a high cost of time, parts, and tools. It's cheaper to focus on work that I'm good at. I still miss car mechanics though.

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

#359

Post by UncleEntity »

amenod wrote: post #222
0815test wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't we tried this already? The AGPL is a bona-fide OSS license, and is standard enough that it's actually endorsed by the FSF for public-facing services, in addition to being OSI-certified. Cloud vendors avoid it like the plague, rightly or wrongly - which is what we were going for, right? Yet many "OSS-lite" companies have rejected it as not going far enough. It's mind-boggling.

> Cloud vendors avoid it like the plague, rightly or wrongly I don't think they do, actually? MongoDB felt a need to change their license from AGPL to SSPL. That said, I'm on "not going far enough" side of the argument. I don't care if they distribute their code, I want them to stop competing with my service, or to pay the royalties. Alternatively, they are free to develop their own product. Note that that doesn't go…

> I want them to stop competing with my service, or to pay the royalties.

Which is basically rent seeking which is what this whole thread is complaining about.

And, incidentally, the whole problem copywrite was invented to solve -- you get a "time limited" monopoly on the distribution of your work.

> But providing competing service which is based on the work of those that bigtech competes with, simply does not seem fair to me.

This is like car companies saying you are free to race their cars as long as you never outcompete them on the track...

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

#360

Post by chii »

snaky wrote: post #76
YayamiOmate wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more of an entertainment business, basically based on watching. Streamers are nothing else than sports arenas imho. or musicians. It's not so easy to get 10k people watch you code. I'd like to see it though.

It doesn't have to be restricted to livecoding. What about authors of the software you use answer to your questions? Well, to be creative, how much would you pay to watch Stallman dance for you?

i wouldn't want people to have to become entertainers online to get money in order to afford to write their OSS project!
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