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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

#431

Post by slavik81 »

captainbland wrote: post #427
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

I guess the Fair Source License should fit in there: https://fair.io/#license This is basically "you're free to use the application and the source unless you're a company where 25 people or more will be using/modifying this software". Mind you, I see an issue with this where proving that the number of people are actually using the software is difficult. I'd prefer a version where it's just the number of people in the…

I don't think I could use that software as a student. Even if I was considered independent of the school (which is unclear), my professor would not be, so I would not be able to use software under that license in a project for credit.

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

#432

Post by nlightcho »

bigiain wrote: post #390
solidasparagus wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The cloud providers have enough resources to provide APIs that are compatible with the popular ones. They won't be selling you Mongo but a Mongo-compatible replacement built in house.

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

#433

Post by pjmlp »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #429
pjmlp wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SDL is not a platform library with driver support. Yeah, maybe I should state Direct2D as well to see what your answer would be. So what is the Linux answer to DirectText? Surely not SDL.

SDL doesn't need driver support, it handles rendering back ends transparently, which is why its so widely used. (drawing is translated into OpenGL, Direct3d, or pretty much anything else) Freetype and Cairo are the direct equivalent of Direct2d and DirectWrite (which is what i suspect you mean by DirectText) which virtually everything on linux uses.

Yeah the Cairo that bashed by ISO C++ game group as being based on legacy drawing concepts and the FreeType that still doesn't handle properly text display on HD monitors.

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

#434

Post by carimura »

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…

That's why the cloud providers are building higher-level services that ultimately speed up development and increase laziness. They're already higher than k8s now so ultimately that too is an unnecessary time suck from "just programming".

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

#435

Post by robenkleene »

UncleEntity wrote: post #365
robenkleene wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 project…

This is a great example, I wasn't aware of Blender's funding model. Thanks for sharing!

For those interested, blender is crowdfunded and supports six full-time developers, and three part-time developers[1]. There's more interesting details on their funding page[2].

[1]: https://code.blender.org/2018/12/blender-development-fund-pr... [2]: https://fund.blender.org

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

#436

Post by csallen »

hinkley wrote: post #277
pbalau wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 0 people that make a living making art (and music, as a subset of art). All the people you think of are selling art. They are doing things that they believe they can sell, either for money or for status.

Nitpicking aside, if you consider that most of the money is made by people working with musicians and not the musicians themselves, then 'the money is in selling art' is pretty true. I wonder which is more lucrative? Starting a band, or putting equal resources and time into buying lottery tickets. I bet the gap is narrower than people would be comfortable with.

That's no different than most professions. Consider software development. Who makes more money, the CEO, the top sales people, or the developers? It's probably top to bottom in that order.

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

#437

Post by aidenn0 »

hodgesrm wrote: post #358
aidenn0 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

All of those costs are orthogonal to OSS vs proprietary software. For example, there is commercially supported OSS software and completely unsupported proprietary software.

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

#438

Post by amenod »

cthalupa wrote: post #261
amenod wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a valid point, and I don't have the answers to your concerns yet. I am sure best practices that protect Lucenes of the world will develop, given chance. For example ES could buy out rights for independent development, or they could simply pay part of their income to the original developers. Having constraints for selling and building on other people's work doesn't mean that one shouldn't be able to do it, ju…

> For example ES could buy out rights for independent development, or they could simply pay part of their income to the original developers. This sounds exactly like a lot of proprietary software licensing agreements :) >Having constraints for selling and building on other people's work doesn't mean that one shouldn't be able to do it, just that previous link in the chain should be financially rewarded for it. I don'…

> If financial reward is what you most care about, write proprietary software. If FOSS is what you care most about, then the AGPL is probably a good fit for you. It won't force anyone to pay you for using your work, but it would force them to give back to the community.

This is a false dichotomy. You don't need to "care most about financial reward" to recognize that FOSS is simply not sustainable.

There is a whole level of freedoms one can grant (or not) to users of their software. FOSS is one extreme. Proprietary software is another. I don't think we need to tolerate black boxes, just because we want functioning software.

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

#439

Post by robbrown451 »

anticensor wrote: post #412
robbrown451 wrote: post #111

The real problem is that our scarcity based economy wasn't designed to deal with intellectual property.

Neither does post-scarcity economy. Even post-scarcity economy requires finite supply of goods.

Doesn't it depend on how it is set up? I could think of lots of ways to set up a post-scarcity economy that could work well, at least if population isn't growing wildly.

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

#440

Post by UncleEntity »

robenkleene wrote: post #435
UncleEntity wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 project…

This is a great example, I wasn't aware of Blender's funding model. Thanks for sharing! For those interested, blender is crowdfunded and supports six full-time developers, and three part-time developers[1]. There's more interesting details on their funding page[2]. [1]: https://code.blender.org/2018/12/blender-development-fund-pr... [2]: https://fund.blender.org

They also get a bunch of money together every so often to do their open movie projects which get some major dev support. Gov't art grants, company sponsors and donations.

Pro tip: If you want to be famous push some patches their way while they're working on one of them and they put your name in the credits...got my name in the one with the dragon (or maybe the one with the sheep, dunno?)

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