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Who eats who in open source

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31–40 of 78 posts

Re: Who eats who in open source

#31

The 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. S…

I have used Postres during 4 years, Oracle and SQL server since 2000.

Postgres is a nice database, but there are enterprise deployment use cases that it doesn't cover, which might be consired a niche, fair enough.

What I don't consider a niche use case, is that its development tooling, meaning graphical DB management, graphical debugging of stored procedures, data modeling tooling, or integration of language runtimes into the database are all a bit behind of what those big DBs are capable of.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#32
I'll play the 'open source eating cloud' argument because what merit it has, isn't addressed in this piece.

How do computers earn people money? Speaking in 2019 that's obvious. Cloud providers earn the most.

There used to be other ways people got rich off computers. But all those businesses imploded against the awesome might of '0 marginal cost', 'only good solutions survive', world of open source.

Open source has 'removed more profits'/'provided more value' then the cloud. Cloud is simply the high profit game until competition kicks in, open source tools become the norm, and only the value of the virtual machine is sold at 1% the current price.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#33
post #20

I 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. A…

Being an old dog at tech, given how the community has been anti-GPL licensing, pushing for non-copyleft licenses, I predict that in a couple of years we will be back to the PD, Shareware, Demoware, Beerware, PostcardWare, whatever were all the way to share code during the 80 and 90's on home computers.

And it is already too late to change course back to GPL being widespread.

Every year there is a new project replacing GCC with LLVM, on Android the kernel is the only major GPL piece still standing (with Fuchsia on the horizon), on embedded there is a rise of non-copyleft OSes (including Zephyr, a Linux Foundation project), and so on.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#34
post #18

Missing 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.

AGPL doesn't protect the Free Software business. It protects the Free Software code itself.

The fact that a company backing an AGPL-licensed work goes under isn't the direct concern of the license. The fact that the code itself remains as Free Software, with a source-release obligation, even when run as an online service, is the principle concern.

Copyleft free software licenses, as with the GPL and AGPL, promote the concept and system of free software, first and foremost.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#35

The 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. S…

There are two major dimensions to the operational cost weaknesses of open source. Neither is guaranteed to be meaningfully exploited by proprietary software in any particular case. Since we are talking about operational costs, this is almost entirely about data infrastructure software, not things like React.

First, there is a vast amount of supported operational tooling that is simply missing from open source ecosystems. PostgreSQL, which I still use extensively, is a perfect example of this. The code bases around this tooling are several times the size of the product they support, and it isn't the kind of code that most developers aspire to write despite its high value to the customer. Oracle and SQL Server have architectures that are as obsolete as PostgreSQL, they don't compete on the basis of being modern, efficient designs but on the basis of having dramatically better operational tooling. Cloud RDBMS attack a different aspect of this.

Second, is the operational infrastructure costs i.e. how much hardware is required to run a given workload. This is the larger threat to open source, particularly as the data intensity of business increases. PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Redis (I've used all three operationally) have several times the hardware requirements to deliver a workload in practice than is required with a state-of-the-art architecture. This isn't hypothetical, I've designed engines that replaced them when warranted. An 80% reduction in infrastructure cost is attractive when you are already spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year on it. Some popular proprietary software is just as inefficient but that isn't guaranteed to remain the case (and I've replaced those systems too). Designing efficient software architecture isn't magic (see: ScyllaDB), you simply see very few examples of it in open source because it isn't a priority (see: use of managed languages for data infrastructure despite this being a known limitation).

The reality is that I can guarantee data intensive businesses who make competent use of open source that I can reduce their infrastructure costs by 4x with ease. You can bury a massive amount licensing and engineering costs in those savings.

Also, some companies are explicitly looking at this as a major "green" initiative. The wasteful infrastructure footprint to deliver a workload with open source is viewed as environmentally unfriendly, and this is pushing companies to consider proprietary solutions even if they are not sensitive to operational costs. That isn't a conversation open source is currently prepared to have but it is coming.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#36

The 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…

I disagree about the opex cost, as anyone who has had to pay for oracle consultants to come in and fix a borked dB would.. I think that a more accurate assessment is 2x-10x the claimed sticker opex cost that the vendors talk about. The problem bring that "boss my system has shat its pants and I need half the budget to g fix it" is a story that NO ONE in ANY corporate can tell twice.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#37
post #26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like open source companies will just need to become patent trolls. At least if Google is unable to successfully win the appeal in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit.

A company enforcing software patents is no longer "open source" in a meaningful sense.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#38
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AGPL doesn't protect the Free Software business. It protects the Free Software code itself. The fact that a company backing an AGPL-licensed work goes under isn't the direct concern of the license. The fact that the code itself remains as Free Software, with a source-release obligation, even when run as an online service, is the principle concern. Copyleft free software licenses, as with the GPL and AGPL, promote the…

You're right, but there's another concern: who maintains the software? The original developers forming a company that supports development is not possible if the company is not protected by the license in some way.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL doesn't protect the Free Software business. It protects the Free Software code itself. The fact that a company backing an AGPL-licensed work goes under isn't the direct concern of the license. The fact that the code itself remains as Free Software, with a source-release obligation, even when run as an online service, is the principle concern. Copyleft free software licenses, as with the GPL and AGPL, promote the…

You're right, but there's another concern: who maintains the software? The original developers forming a company that supports development is not possible if the company is not protected by the license in some way.

Under the philosophy of the FSF, that'd be the "commons", i.e., the users of the software take on responsibility for adding new features or fixing bugs that affect them, and then contributing it back.
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