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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

#371

Post by scarface74 »

jjeaff wrote: post #364
scarface74 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What are we getting? Automatic updates, backups, point in time recovery, multi AZ redundancy of storage, autoscaling synchronous read replicas, and much better performance than your self hosted Mysql instance.

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

#372

Post by jaabe »

amenod wrote: post #178
jaabe wrote: post #37

I think you can make money on Open Source, but I think you need partners to do so. I work for a Danish municipality that is a member of a municipality driven open source community called OS2. We’re around 60 members, and we’ve recently won a national award for tech-reuse issued by our ministry of digitisation and around 10 interest groups. We don’t build the code ourselves. We do own, review and manage the code. We h…

> I think you can make money on Open Source > We don’t build the code ourselves. Ha, ha, well put. That much everyone agrees on, and Amazon especially so. :) The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS ?

That was kind of my point about partners. We’re the partner, we pay for every line of code.

It’s OSS, but no one is contributing to it for free because it’s also pretty boring stuff like handling a employee/manager vacation acceptance flow.

We didn’t go with OSS to get free development though, we went with it because it gives us ownership and transparency.

I’m sure the model doesn’t work for everything, but I’d argue that it does work for anything related to the public sector.

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

#373

Post by solidasparagus »

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…

Because these VC-backed OSS companies don't do open source for ideological reasons* , they do it because it gives them a competitive advantage. A permissive license means broader adoption, which means more $. And now some of them are complaining that they need to compete to get rich quickly off of the software they donated to the public. If you gift someone a lottery ticket, you deserve $0 if they win. That's what you gave up when you gifted.

Everyone is so caught up in licenses, what they really need to ask is: "why can't these companies handle competition from cloud providers?". Don't tell me it's resources when these unicorns are getting VC funding to back a single technology when cloud providers support literally hundreds. They could take the Red Hat business model, but is hard and slow. I would imagine VC growth pressure makes it difficult to follow the Red Hat model.

*The software may have started open source for ideological reasons, but once you hit the VC funding stage, open source becomes strategically important for adoption reasons. The companies might believe in it (sometimes their unwillingness to accept PRs that would help the community but hurt their business makes you wonder), but that's not why VC funding happens.

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

#374

Post by sudhirj »

witten wrote: post #370
svnpenn wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Aren’t Creaive Commons licenses not suitable for code? Can’t find a reference but they seemed pretty clear about that.

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

#375

Post by speedplane »

jrockway wrote: post #297
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

> 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

Sure Kubernetes is an open GCP product, but what about datastore, Spanner, Cloud SQL, their memory cache, urlfetch, and a host of other closed source and private services. Kubernetes seems to be the exception to the rule.

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

#376

Post by pjmlp »

noir_lord wrote: post #280
solomatov wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I’m sorry but I disagree, Cinnamon on Fedora is as good a desktop GUI in its day as win2k was in its and imo considerably better than win10 and I started on DOS3.22 so I’ve used them all even ME. It’s fast, stable, well laid out and very easy to configure. It also plays well with both gtk and qt apps. It took a long time but Linux did catch up it’s just by the time it did desktops are less relevant to average people.

Average people use laptops as desktops.

Gtk and Qt still don't offer a full UI stack with all the Win32 features, guaranteed to be available in all customer desktops.

Basic stuff comparable to DirectDraw, DirectText or a audio stack that doesn't get rebooted every now and then.

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

#377

Post by pjmlp »

sfifs wrote: post #338
solomatov wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Don't forget to get a keyboard and screen insurance on top of the premium price.

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

#378

Post by emilsedgh »

coldtea wrote: post #265
solomatov wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I wont disagree. But the OS was also full of holes (pre-XP: 95, 98, ME), programs would take down the whole system, updates required tons of restarts, and several other issues (BSOD, etc). People use to make memes against Windows, without even being Linux users: regular Windows users were frustrated. Linux desktop efforts never managed to get a coherent vision, as every 3-4 years somebody had the idea to remake every…

> Linux desktop efforts never managed to get a coherent vision, as every 3-4 years somebody had the idea to remake everything and screw compatibility

That's not why Linux Desktop never got traction.

Linux on Server got traction because thousands of companies all around the world managed to profit from it. A whole ecosystem was created.

When Linux on Desktop was born, Microsoft's platform was already an ecosystem all around the world. Hundreds of thousands of companies had developed applications for MS-DOS and were invested in Microsoft's ecosystem and users had already learnt the paradigms.

Clients were already locked-in on Windows.

Also, the situation regarding compatibility on Linux is not that different on Windows.

KDE changed API 4 times in 25 years. Windows also changed a lot. Visual Basic, WinForms, SilverLight, etc. Actually windows abandoned more API's than KDE and Gnome did.

And you can still build a KDE 1 and statically build and ship it (just like apps in Windows) and it will still run fine. [0]

KDE and Gnome have always been largely volunteered projects. Of course ~500 volunteered developers who develop something on their free time cannot compete with a worldwide ecosystem.

[0] https://www.heliocastro.info/?p=291

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

#379

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Worse, many think is ok to be payed for their work, while stating it is imoral to pay others for the tools they use.

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

#380

Post by mch82 »

sudhirj wrote: post #374
witten wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Aren’t Creaive Commons licenses not suitable for code? Can’t find a reference but they seemed pretty clear about that.

Correct, Creative Commons recommends using alternate licenses for code. See “Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?”, https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

Creative Commons licenses are good for documentation and manuals.

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