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Who eats who in open source
11–20 of 78 posts
Re: Who eats who in open source
#12The 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…
Reducing OpEx often requires cooperation and pooling of resources that a proprietary vendor can force on their users with little choice, while by default software like Mastodon, Pleroma, etc treat other instances as potentially hostile, replicating data (often) needlessly.
Efforts like https://jortage.com can reduce OpEx quite significantly.
Re: Who eats who in open source
#13https://web.archive.org/web/20191123091956/http://www.platfo...
That one's pretty clearly past the tipping point in usage, so I think we can leave it above.
Re: Who eats who in open source
#14The 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…
> 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
I feel the opposite is true. There are many open source projects that are at least on par with their proprietary counterparts. Postgres is competitive with every SQL DB I've heard of except maybe in some niche use-cases. Redis is open source and incredibly performant. Same with Kafka (if you use it well). Linux sure runs better than Windows in my experience.
There is also a whole class of open-source libraries like React that have taken over. I can't even think of a proprietary frontend framework.
What software are you thinking of when you make these claims?
Re: Who eats who in open source
#15> The unexpected and asymmetric competition from the clouds confounds open source companies, who must confront the fact the competitive advantage of knowing their software better than anyone else isn’t the insurmountable moat they had hoped. It is never fun to wake up and discover your product is now just a feature of a broader offering, but this is what is happening with software. Claiming open source is eating the cloud is like coffee bean farmers claiming they’re eating Starbucks: it willfully (or just out of delusion) ignores the vast majority of what the customer is buying.
As always, 'commoditize your complement': https://www.gwern.net/Complement
Re: Who eats who in open source
#16Re: Who eats who in open source
#17Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3).
The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql.
These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This makes the stock version of open source software hard to operate in the way AMZN / GOOG operate it, while still allowing AMZN / GOOG to benefit from community effort without giving much back.
Re: Who eats who in open source
#18Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3). The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql. These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This…
With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.
Re: Who eats who in open source
#19[deleted]
Re: Who eats who in open source
#20I 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…
>>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.
Thus the reason Free (As in Freedom) software advocates promote the use of Copy-Left Licensing, and why non-copyleft (like MIT, BSD, and others) are slowly eroding "open source" to less fully formed software and more just the tooling, libraries and dev environments used to create software