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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

#381

Post by pjmlp »

mythz wrote: post #275
cthalupa wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I guess the question is: What about Open Source makes you believe this is the bad outcome? The cloud companies make their money providing the physical infrastructure, their expertise in working with the product, support, etc. when hosting it for you. You're not paying them to have access to ElasticSearch - you've already got ElasticSearch. Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic…

Cloud providers were only possible because they can host OSS without licensing restriction or costs, they've worked out that they could charge for computing by providing hosting and is where they've put their billion dollar Cap-Ex into building impenetrable moats. Hosting OSS isn't the only thing that creates value, but it's where most of the revenue is now being derived since no-one pays for OSS, only to host it. Th…

Developers wanting to get paid while refusing to buy their tools are also to blame.

In the end, working for such corporations is the only way to actually be paid when one wants to have a daily job in software tooling.

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

#382

Post by pjmlp »

christophilus wrote: post #149
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…

This just made me wonder: what if all of the major OSS companies joined forces, started a new cloud company whose purpose was to send revenue back to all of its underlying OSS projects. Each then promotes that cloud as its #1 recommended cloud, and use their collective visibility to grow that into a contender? One can dream...

It used to be called Openstack.

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

#383

Post by hw »

Justsignedup wrote: post #195
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…

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…

Totally agree. Sometimes you just have to pay the bills. There are some projects that are extremely well done OSS but also have an 'Enterprise' side to them that's paid and offers more advanced features normally required by commercial entities:

1. Sidekiq (https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq) 2. Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com)

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

#384

Post by pjmlp »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #223
evanweaver wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying they should do it for the “exposure”.

This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert (exposure) and then capitalizing w/ a consulting business makes sense. The core issue is that consulting scales at O(n) where n is your personal time investment. It's not like offering a service where you spend all your time working on the service and get to…

Consulting does not work in all software use cases, e.g. desktop software, and supermarkets don't take exposure as currency.

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

#385

Post by pjmlp »

siwatanejo wrote: post #343
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…

> 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.

Kind of, one of the reasons of the failure of desktop FOSS business is that no average consumer is going to pay for consulting, trainings or books.

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

#386

Post by scirocco »

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…

2011 @ Microsoft: "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches"

2019 @ Microsoft: "We are all in on open source"

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

#387

Post by scirocco »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #164
bunderbunder wrote: post #93

Earlier 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?

you forgot virtualization =)

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

#388

Post by simonh »

pferde wrote: post #153
simonh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think tragedy of the commons isn’t really a problem for the development side, though I think I get what you mean, but it comes in the form of excessive fragmentation of the ecosystem. Do we really need dozens of Linux distros when most of them are really just tweaks and could easily be packages on other distros? Do we really need all the little incompatible changes, new UI shells, multiple marketplace stores and mu…

"Do we really need all the little incompatible changes, new UI shells, multiple marketplace stores and multiple messaging clients and crapware on Android OEM phones?" Yes, we do. If different people did not try doing new things (or just old things done differently), there wouldn't be as much progress, and we would all be poorer for it. Sure, some things stick, some don't, but that's how it's supposed to be.

The problem is the motivation of most of these differences is not improvement but just differentiation. They are literally only different for the sake of being different, for marketing purposes.

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

#389

Post by pvorb »

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…

This article talks about Amazon forking Elasticsearch in depth: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/15/cloud-open-source-pow...

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

#390

Post by bigiain »

solidasparagus wrote: post #368
bigiain wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I dunno.

From the angle I'm looking, AWS wants to sell Redis/Mongo/Elasticsearch because that's what the devs are using. The devs are using it because it solves one of their problems well (or, less charitably, because its a "standard part" of new-framework-de-jour).

I can't think of any piece of software that came out of a cloud provider into a place of being "the essential hot new dev framework".

I don't deny for a moment that Amazon/Google/Microsoft write a lot of software, but I haven't got an example I can point at of that moving out of their own ecosystem into the broader development community.

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