Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

blog.timescale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 63 posts

Re: Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

#11

Post by amelius »

kazinator wrote: post #10

Open source isn't eating all proprietary software. Open source is enabling proprietary software to be more profitable, because it makes free all the commodity pieces that are needed to make proprietary software work. Customers would otherwise have to pay for these things (in an ongoing manner) leaving less of their $$$ to spend on your payload. Open source powers SaaS which is so closed and proprietary that the user…

> Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten your business.

It seems like the rule is that open source is eating all-except-niche software.

Re: Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

#12

Post by fierarul »

kazinator wrote: post #10

Open source isn't eating all proprietary software. Open source is enabling proprietary software to be more profitable, because it makes free all the commodity pieces that are needed to make proprietary software work. Customers would otherwise have to pay for these things (in an ongoing manner) leaving less of their $$$ to spend on your payload. Open source powers SaaS which is so closed and proprietary that the user…

> Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten your business.

I agree with what you said. With the caveat that some lucky few companies do seem to do well in this space too. Recently learned JetBrains (makers of IntelliJ) had $270M revenue/year and $100M net income in 2018.

Re: Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

#13

Post by codr7 »

I don't really buy into the political debate. The arguments for open source as applied to non-technical users don't really work as advertised from my experience. Sure, you could potentially find someone to maintain it if the version you depend on goes bottom up. But the contexts where that's the preferred solution are few and far between.

More important in my mind is that open source software is strictly higher quality from a technical perspective. Because it's not prostitution most of the time, it's passion and wider perspectives such as sharing knowledge. And a higher quality foundation means better software, because whatever commercial cruft someone adds on top it will still work better.

I recently reinstalled a laptop that was running Windows 10 with Kubuntu for a non-technical friend, which is not an excellent example but still applies since Canonical is semi-commercial. And it's a total win, because Windows is simply crap from the bottom up.

Android is another example, as is macOS.

Re: Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

#14

Post by fierarul »

This is a decent article that could stand on its own.

It is also a PR piece by TimescaleDB which has all interest in convincing people/investors that an open-source company is a good deal:

> (Disclaimer: Our company TimescaleDB is an open-source time-series database startup and shares investors with several of these companies, including Elastic, MongoDB, Hortonworks, Confluent, and Databricks.)

There were more paragraphs, but I only picked 2 to comment:

> If you are an individual, your project (or your contributions to someone else’s open-source project) will get you visibility and help your long-term career. If you want, you’ll travel the world, deliver talks on your work, and meet like-minded people along the way.

I doubt this is still the case. With GitHub/Universities promoting open source contributions all over the place, it offers much less leverage. Maybe a very popular project helps the career but otherwise I think it's just a work out of passion. Might even hinder your career.

>Some think that open-source foundations should fund open-source projects directly through stipends or fellowships. But these foundations are not money-making machines: e.g., the Apache Foundation barely made $500,000 in 2011. Perhaps these foundations can fund individual developers, but are extremely unlikely to be able to support open-source projects at scale.

True. But some foundations do fund specific areas in need, eg. FreeBSD Foundation. Apache is a bad example as they don't fund anything. What do they need $500,000 for is unclear to me since infrastructure for projects can't cost so much (and nowadays it's offloaded to GitHub, etc).

Re: Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

#15

Post by 1996 »

Ah, timescaledb. They are funny. I tried them really hard. I was rooting for them. Then it bit me: death by a thousand papercuts

One of the many papercuts was actually more serious, to the point it was funny: I remember how in their stable versions, they had a humorous bug: if you did \copy instead of insert to a timescaledb, the timestamps looked right when you eyeballed them with a select, but acted wrong when you used them in a query.

Theefore it passed tests, but took down production whenever than happened. Ouch.

To their credit, they preserved this bug very well for several stable versions - for far longer than my patience with broken software.

That's quite bad for a database that intends to do timeseries - something so basic you won't ever see in proprietary software.

Then before there was pipelinedb which also had its fair share of bugs before going under. Some of them took a production database offline. But it was such a CPU hog that it had been anticipated.

Still after that timescaledb bug, I banned the use of third party postgres extensions.

Re: Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

#16

Post by Edmond »

fierarul wrote: post #12
kazinator wrote: post #10

Open source isn't eating all proprietary software. Open source is enabling proprietary software to be more profitable, because it makes free all the commodity pieces that are needed to make proprietary software work. Customers would otherwise have to pay for these things (in an ongoing manner) leaving less of their $$$ to spend on your payload. Open source powers SaaS which is so closed and proprietary that the user…

> Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten your business. I agree with what you said. With the caveat that some lucky few companies do seem to do well in this space too. Recently learned JetBrains (makers of IntelliJ) had $270M revenue/year and $100M net income in 2018.

It shouldn't be surprising that JetBrains is doing well.

Even with sectors like developer tools, there is a lot of room for creating value-added solutions that are proprietary, and that customers will happily pay good money for.

Re: Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

#18

Post by Aloha »

Edmond wrote: post #9

The conclusion is simply not backed by reality. There are certainly realms where open source has supplanted proprietary counterparts and they all mostly fall under infrastructure type software. We all use these infrastructure open source software products because they serve needs that practically anyone doing technology work will find themselves to have. The larger universe of commercial software is HUGE and most of…

I'd agree with you, the conclusions in this article are wildly optimistic and not backed by reality. While I'm happy there is more open source stuff, I also see no substantive change in proprietary software in the near future either.

Re: Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

#19

Post by robenkleene »

amelius wrote: post #11
kazinator wrote: post #10

Open source isn't eating all proprietary software. Open source is enabling proprietary software to be more profitable, because it makes free all the commodity pieces that are needed to make proprietary software work. Customers would otherwise have to pay for these things (in an ongoing manner) leaving less of their $$$ to spend on your payload. Open source powers SaaS which is so closed and proprietary that the user…

> Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten your business. It seems like the rule is that open source is eating all-except-niche software.

So you’re saying everything except “operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff” is “niche software”? I’m not following, e.g., that would make Google and Facebook niche software?

Re: Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

#20

Post by robenkleene »

Edmond wrote: post #9

The conclusion is simply not backed by reality. There are certainly realms where open source has supplanted proprietary counterparts and they all mostly fall under infrastructure type software. We all use these infrastructure open source software products because they serve needs that practically anyone doing technology work will find themselves to have. The larger universe of commercial software is HUGE and most of…

The irony of open source is that its biggest success is closed-source web apps, which, since your data is now hosted in the cloud, means you've lost the one thing you actually had control over, your data. And you still don't have the source code.
Post reply on HN