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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

#361

Post by mythz »

chii wrote: post #352
mythz wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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., empl…

It doesn't, parent is suggesting everyone benefits when cloud providers use their accumulated wealth to hire people to work on their OSS investments as some kind of justification for the consolidation of wealth from OSS happening around cloud monopolies.

It doesn't benefit everyone, it benefits anyone using their proprietary and OSS products and cloud services. It definitely doesn't benefit existing OSS projects who are seeing their innovations replicated by full-time resources or OSS developers working on competing projects.

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

#362

Post by jjeaff »

patrec wrote: post #306
jjeaff wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions of dollars spent means nothing unless it actually takes billions to launch a hosting company. It doesn't.

You'd need to have some damn clever and hard to copy idea to have any competitive edge. When Google and Amazon are not making their own specialized hardware (good luck implementing your own TrueTime or TPU or competing with them with ML or DB products built on off-the-shelf stuff) they get custom made chips at prices you can't by Intel et al and have things like a very sophisticated SDN backed by a private global phy…

All the things you list are not a part of the moat to compete with the big providers. They are barriers to becoming as large as them. But 10,000 smaller hosting companies could easily start to cut in on their long tail customers. Most any mid size hosting company could handle the traffic and compute of 95% of companies out there.

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

#363

Post by wolco »

mythz wrote: post #215
tzakrajs wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unfortunate that you forgot to mention that these indie oss developers are highly sought after for independent contract work or direct hire positions. Open Source software was never meant to pay the bills of open source developers, it was meant to open source code to the public and allow free use. To somehow read this narrative that indie developers are losing because others profit from their work is facile and…

Right, so everyone should be happy working for the "exposure" so they can be snapped up by Cloud Companies using the wealth created from hosting their OSS efforts who will then be put to work on strengthening their cloud monopolies.

The author could sell a script to modify the defaults for different situations. The popularity of the oss gives the developer a build-in platform.

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

#364

Post by jjeaff »

scarface74 wrote: post #316
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…

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

We are using elasticsearch for non-critical log management. But as for the mysql server, what maintenance/management are you really getting from a managed service like Aurora or Google Cloud SQL?

Our K8s deployment is setup to automatically make backups and test those backups periodically with a full restore. It also notifies us in case of a failed backup. Updating the software is as easy as a single helm command and scaling is about the same as with Aurora. Either you set it up to scale up automatically or you go in and upgrade instances when needed.

Aurora admins aren't monitoring your server for performance issues then making configuration tweaks to speed things up. So I'm not really seeing a lot of difference.

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

#365

Post by UncleEntity »

robenkleene wrote: post #92
burtonator wrote: post #52

I'm currently experimenting with this directly. Specifically trying to make Open Source sustainable but for a consumer project. I think Open Source really works for infrastructure projects and it's possible to do really well either working on a system like Kubernetes or Elasticsearch. Not so well for projects that are more focused on consumers. My app, Polar, is focused more on consumers and is an app for people to m…

Some really quick unsolicited feedback (while I acknowledge upfront I know nothing about your business except what I gleaned from 10 seconds on your website): You say your model is "freemium" but I don't see a way to pay for anything on your website? That's not freemium, that's donationware. I'm not aware of any business like yours (consumer-focused desktop software) that's been successful as donationware, are you? I…

> I'm not aware of any business like yours (consumer-focused desktop software) that's been successful as donationware, are you?

Blender

While they do sell books and DVDs along with various other things in their e-store the majority(?) of their income is from donations "to the cause".

They've actually started to become a viable alternative to the Autodesk monopoly and are being used in more and more commercial projects which leads to more donations which makes the software better which leads to more usage, rinse and repeat.

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

#366

Post by jplayer01 »

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…

It's weird how programmers are the only workers who think it's okay to give away their work for free for businesses to use and sell in their own products. Nobody expects firefighters or nurses to work for free. Even if lawyers sometimes have to work pro bono, it's to serve marginalized or poor communities/demographics, not to enrich massive, incredibly wealthy companies.

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

#367

Post by dwaltrip »

jplayer01 wrote: post #366
marssaxman wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's weird how programmers are the only workers who think it's okay to give away their work for free for businesses to use and sell in their own products. Nobody expects firefighters or nurses to work for free. Even if lawyers sometimes have to work pro bono, it's to serve marginalized or poor communities/demographics, not to enrich massive, incredibly wealthy companies.

Millions of people every year make great salaries working as programmers.

Many artists give away their work. Scientists give away their work. The DIY community and maker community give away their work. And so on... programmers aren't unique here.

Framing all of OSS as simply "free labor to enrich massive, incredible wealth companies" is just wrong.

That being said, I do agree we can certainly do a better job of supporting OSS work. I hope to see continued innovation in this area.

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

#368

Post by solidasparagus »

bigiain wrote: post #301
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…

Was it ever any different? 20 years ago, large chunks of "the web hosting industry" sold access to Linux/Apache/Sendmail/Postfix/BIND/vsftpd/Perl/PHP/MySQL/etc - often (at least in my part of the game) using paid-for WHM/CPanel or Plesk to manage all those. While I sympathise with Mongo/Redis/Elastic et al, who're having their work packaged up and sold by Amazon/Microsoft/Google in their cloud offerings, I don't reca…

I can't imagine the new OSS license approach working. People seriously underestimate the ability and willingness of cloud providers to write entirely software, using existing OSS as nothing more than market research.

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

#369

Post by caf »

jplayer01 wrote: post #366
marssaxman wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's weird how programmers are the only workers who think it's okay to give away their work for free for businesses to use and sell in their own products. Nobody expects firefighters or nurses to work for free. Even if lawyers sometimes have to work pro bono, it's to serve marginalized or poor communities/demographics, not to enrich massive, incredibly wealthy companies.

Huh? There are plenty of volunteer firefighters who work for free.

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

#370

Post by witten »

svnpenn wrote: post #346
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…

interesting what license would you even use for that - it seems everything here allows commercial https://choosealicense.com/appendix

Here's one: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
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