Death of an open-source business model • Hacker News Board

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#21

Post by hannob » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #3

> if you give your secret sauce away for free, and it gets popular enough, cloud providers will inevitably spin up competitive services using your very own code against you. For some reason, the author never mentioned AGPL. What's wrong with using this license if you want to defend your open-source business model?

AGPL doesn't allow you to say "I want AWS to pay me if they use my software". As long as AWS abides the rules of the AGPL they can use your software as much as they like and create offerings based on it.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#22

Post by shvedchenko » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

one more article about death of something.

if you want people read your article, just yell that something they love is dead. works every time.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#23

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

infinity0 wrote: post #18

I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of: - if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it. Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this. Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to…

> "if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it."

That would just be a proprietary license with source availability. It would also dry up any community contributions since contributors are generally not going to help a for-profit project without themselves getting paid.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#24

Post by joejoebags » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

freeqaz wrote: post #11

hacknat wrote: post #5

I disagree with this article’s premise that all software is services-based. There are lots of open-core business models that can’t be eaten by the cloud providers, because they aren’t services to be spun up. Almost all of the CNCF-based businesses are complex plug-in models that the CPs can’t just make a button for.

AWS has a hosted version of Kubernetes and Envoy now, and those are both CNCF projects. Other CNCF projects like NATS and Argo have equivalents on AWS today. Even if they're complex and not one-button click to drop in, the cloud providers seem keen on running managed versions of these projects. What projects come to mind as being "immune" to this problem, out of curiosity?

I'm curious about this too; I'd love some counter-examples and that was a big reason for me taking the rather arrogant stance of claiming "cloud killed open core." I selfishly wanted to rile up smart folks who could prove me wrong.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#25

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

shvedchenko wrote: post #22

one more article about death of something. if you want people read your article, just yell that something they love is dead. works every time.

[deleted]

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#26

Post by herodoturtle » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

shvedchenko wrote: post #22

one more article about death of something. if you want people read your article, just yell that something they love is dead. works every time.

Hah, yes.

I'd write an article about VR, entitled: "Death of monitors."

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#27

Post by hannob » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

I feel there's a few cases cited here to make a case that an entired business model is dying, but it doesn't look to me that this is an overall trend. You can't extrapolate from "5 projects didn't fare well with this, so it's not working".

But there's more. I followed the MongoDB case a bit and it's not exactly how many make it sound like. MongoDB was doing fine as a company. It wasn't like they were unable to pay their programmers because AWS offered a hosted MongoDB.

In the months before that controversial license change they got plenty of funding from investors.

It looked all more like investors created expectations of future revenue and they became cold feet if they could meet those expectations.

It remains to be seen how this will work out in the long run. I'd personally consider everything that depends on MongoDB to be toxic. With that license it won't be shiped in standard linux distros, other projects are less likely to build on it.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#28

Post by joejoebags » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

lock-free wrote: post #15

In the back of the head this gives me an idea for a marketplace startup for software utilities but I know it's been tried before and died. I don't know how to align the incentives of creators to where we can make a marketplace where open source is lucrative by design. But I don't think it's impossible, just the social hurdles haven't been cleared yet. Not much technology to throw down on the problem.

You might be interested in Tidelift https://www.tidelift.com/

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#29

Post by philipswood » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

if only there was a way to make cloud providers charge a per second usage charge for software used... And an open source licence that could support that...

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#30

Post by stingraycharles » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

freeqaz wrote: post #11

hacknat wrote: post #5

I disagree with this article’s premise that all software is services-based. There are lots of open-core business models that can’t be eaten by the cloud providers, because they aren’t services to be spun up. Almost all of the CNCF-based businesses are complex plug-in models that the CPs can’t just make a button for.

AWS has a hosted version of Kubernetes and Envoy now, and those are both CNCF projects. Other CNCF projects like NATS and Argo have equivalents on AWS today. Even if they're complex and not one-button click to drop in, the cloud providers seem keen on running managed versions of these projects. What projects come to mind as being "immune" to this problem, out of curiosity?

Almost by definition the projects that are immune to this are the projects that are not yet popular enough. It’s not a coincidence that it’s Kubernetes and Envoy that are the most popular CNCF projects.