Who eats who in open source
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Who eats who in open source
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Re: Who eats who in open source
#2Right now your webserver is eating your post
Re: Who eats who in open source
#3Who eats closed source software?
Re: Who eats who in open source
#4Who eats closed source software?
FTA it's Open Source, there is a neat fish diagram
Re: Who eats who in open source
#5Re: Who eats who in open source
#6This analysis seems correct if OSS = OSS ISVs.
Re: Who eats who in open source
#7Who eats closed source software?
The cloud, too.
Think of Office365, SAP Cloud Platform. It's benefical for a closed source vendor to switch to a service model, collect monthly recurrent fees and get free ultimate leverage against the customer.
Re: Who eats who in open source
#8The root of the issue is that licensing costs, the only costs that open source is guaranteed to reduce, can be a small percentage of operational costs in practice. If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience, it can literally be economically uncompetitive with a closed source product that does optimize those other operational costs even if it has a license overhead or creates vendor lock-in.
I see this dynamic more and more, companies have figured this out. Sure, buyers prefer open source infrastructure without vendor lock-in, but they don't prefer it enough to spend 2-10x the OpEx, which is often the case in these discussions. The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. Open source is a nice idea that most companies love, but they aren't going to spend mountains of extra money in operational costs to get it.
Re: Who eats who in open source
#9I work at Pivotal and disagree with a fair amount of the characterisation thereof, but my bias is mostly informed by actually working there for the last 6 years. Let's look at the heart of the argument instead.
> If you squint, open source could be seen as a very generous charitable donation to some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet.
Broadly: yes. Except backwards.
FLOSS can be seen as a public good -- it is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Excludability is the property that someone can be prevented from using the good (eg, requiring payment to consume a can of soft-drink). Rivalrousness is the property that utility from consumption of a good by one person diminishes utility for another person (if I drink the soft-drink, you get less of it).
Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level.
A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption.
This hints at one of the ways that public goods get provided: through subsidy by benefactors, who will capture some but not all of the value created by their benefaction. A wealthy person may so enjoy seeing the opera that they will donate heavily to the local opera house. They don't capture the full benefit -- other folks can watch the same shows -- but they capture enough value that they are satisfied with the arrangement. They might also get value from other factors, such as social approval.
The cloud providers do not sell public goods. Their services are fully excludable. If you refuse to pay, service will end. They are rivalrous at the limit, though, putting them into the category of club goods. These are much more likely to be provisioned in a pure market, since the benefits and costs fall more "correctly" on those who obtain or bear them.