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Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

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Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#201

Post by StavrosK »

nitrogen wrote: post #200
StavrosK wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is an example of a company I wouldn't want to charge for my software, at least until you're into six figure revenues.

Not sure but I think maybe they were mixing up profit vs. revenue and pointing out how a company can ensure it has zero profit. But I guess you'd also have to be careful about which entity or sub-entities are covered by a license and the revenue limits.

Ah, I see, by "subcompany" they meant their own subsidiaries. Yes, that's why I said "revenue" in the original post, thank you for the clarification.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#202

Post by nrmitchi »

FireBeyond wrote: post #158
nrmitchi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a part of this is that engineers in particular have a preference to use software which can be treated as a transferable skill if/when they move on. They would rather use the OSS version of Nginx, of Envoy, because they know they will have access to it in the future. I think there is some aversion to becoming familiar with the features, functionality, and characteristics of a piece of software that your curren…

You can purchase the commercial version of Nginx and not use its specific paid feature subset. Alternatively, "I am familiar with this, and we can do x% of what we need with the OSS version, but we had to pay to get the last part."

I see what you're saying, but this is basically suggesting that Dropbox should have made a donation to F5 (a public company with an $8B market cap).

I think there is a valid point you're making for smaller companies that are providing both open-source and commercial versions of software, but I don't think Nginx is a great example of that.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#203

Post by wwright »

count wrote: post #172
wwright wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what’s it worth, many companies have a hard time justifying “unnecessary” expenses to their boards or shareholders. Depending on company structure, their hands may be somewhat tied. Not all companies, of course; and to be clear, I think such a company structure is a problem itself and agree with you.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a board or shareholders who think 'support contract for essential component of our infrastructure' is 'unnecessary'.

To clarify, I meant that it can be hard to convince the board to donate money to an OSS project when there is no "need."

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#204

Post by freedomben »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #129
mehrdada wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what RHEL is, in different words obviously.

I suppose, but you know you’re what you’re buying when you sign up for RedHat. I was trying to imagine a scenario where free OSS project does that, like Kubernetes or React.

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but opinions are my own

I totally disagree. Red Hat patches/maintains things regardless of whether people pay for it. Everything is always available open source. There are numerous derivatives of RHEL that get these for example.

The money you pay for Red Hat stuff is for support. There are always free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer alternatives of red hat products.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#205

Post by freedomben »

organsnyder wrote: post #198
e40 wrote: post #40

Also note that we’ll cover the open source version of the Nginx, not its commercial version with additional features. It always kills me when very successful companies don't buy software from other companies. I remember being at a lunch with a prospective client that really loved our technology. About 1/2 way through, he said he really would love to purchase our software, but the CEO doesn't allow them to use anythin…

Not sure what nginx is like, but in my experience, the developer/operator experience of commercial software tends to be subpar. For instance, when I worked at a shop that used a ton of Red Hat software (millions of $$ per year in licensing), the commercially-supported versions often were a pain, with requirements like phone-home (that didn't play well with the mandatory corporate proxy), documentation behind a paywal…

I agree, we (at Red Hat) try so hard to make awesome documentation but then put it in hard-to-reach places. I really wish we didn't do that. I'd like to see us publish it all widely.

That said you'd be amazed at how much of man pages is written by Red Hat but isn't attributed, so nearly everybody on every distro benefits from our documentation without realizing it.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#206

Post by e40 »

mehrdada wrote: post #57
e40 wrote: post #40

Also note that we’ll cover the open source version of the Nginx, not its commercial version with additional features. It always kills me when very successful companies don't buy software from other companies. I remember being at a lunch with a prospective client that really loved our technology. About 1/2 way through, he said he really would love to purchase our software, but the CEO doesn't allow them to use anythin…

Why does it blow your mind? Various obvious and sane reasons for this, including cost. I bet many of those companies you have in mind “buy” Windows and macOS, and if they are sufficiently big, most certainly buy Oracle or SAP for their corporate operations, finances, and accounting. It’s usually only the production side of sufficiently large internet-scale companies that is biased towards building. Most of the time y…

Just to be clear: the product I was sell was not OSS and the product they were building was not OSS. That's why it blew my mind.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#207

Post by tlb »

StavrosK wrote: post #175
JoshTriplett wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model of "copyleft if your project is open, pay us if your project isn't open" is one where I have no problems or concerns, and will happily use the open version and recommend that people building something proprietary purchase a paid license. Nor will I typically worry about the motives or future of the project unless I have some other reason to. And the KDE Free Qt Foundation means I never have to worry about Q…

Does anyone know a good license for that? Maybe the Prosperity license? EDIT: I've just realized that I want a revenue-limited trial, rather than a time-limited one. I basically want the Prosperity license, but with the ability to say "you have to pay me if your company makes more than $100k in annual revenue". Is there a license like that? I've emailed the License Zero people, hopefully they'll do something for that…

Unreal engine charges a 5% royalty on sales after the first $1M in revenue. And source is all on github, so it's basically zero friction until you get big.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#208

Post by chucky_z »

jrockway wrote: post #90
chucky_z wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The operational overhead shifts to more API stuff, so people can write 100 lines of code instead of modifying 1 line of config, it feels like. This is never going to end as more things shift towards being core APIs that allow you to write code instead of configure things. It's not even configuration-as-code, it's just code managing configuration files. edit: I think my comment comes across maybe kinda rude. My beef w…

I think the problem with xDS is that their example go-control-plane repository is completely useless. It's overly complicated with frightening-sounding details that don't matter to someone experimenting ("you MUST MUST MUST CACHE THIS how to do so is an exercise left to the reader"). I ended up reading the specs and found them very clear, and wrote my own xDS implementation: https://github.com/jrockway/ekglue/blob/ma…

On that note, the grpc spec specifically calls for load balancing that doesn't actually do the proxying, but instead hands out assignments, with the server passing it's current load back to the load balancer service. it sounds like in this case the grpc client is using some array of xDS, but the server is using xDS along with...?

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#209

Post by pm90 »

boris wrote: post #167
JoshTriplett wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a business context, I'd definitely consider paid support for an Open Source product. But I'm not interested in a proprietary version that I can't modify or get third-party support for or otherwise work with in a pinch; I'm certainly not going to make a business dependent on it. Push the proprietary version hard enough and I'll reconsider whether I even want to use the Open Source version, or if it might be on more…

What if it were a single source-available version (that also allowed you to, say, get third-party support/customizations)?

If the licensing model asks for companies to pay for the "Enterprise" features which are still OSS, it would resolve this problem for me at least (not sure about the OP).

In general, its been my experience that the closed source enterprise only crap that most companies push for is exactly that: crap. I suspect its because those features are treated as a business expense, and thus built to keep costs low. Almost every time those features are underwhelming and buggy. If its OSS, at least I can contribute a patch; if the thing is popular, likely someone else has already fixed it.

Enterprise support is a fucking joke; they will delay delay and delay. If you push hard enough, they say "its on the roadmap" without giving any gurantee of when it will be fixed. The only time Enterprise support has really worked well is in my org that got the best support package for GCP. GCP's support for urgent issues and product feature requests has been somewhat reliable and predictable. Much more than literally any other enterprise (I'm looking at you Okta).

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