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Death of an open-source business model

joemorrison.medium.com

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Re: Death of an open-source business model

#51

Post by leipert »

claytonjy wrote: post #20
selfhoster11 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Gitlab will try to pull an Atlassian in the future. They already said they are changing focus to their cloud-based offering over the on-prem version.

I worry you're right, and while I think it's bad for what it signals about business model viability, I'm not sure it's bad for how I use GitLab. Do the couple dozen devs at my company really need an internally-hosted version, or should we just pay for the cloud offering and supply our own runners? Seems easy to frame as a wash.

Working at GitLab, but I want to focus on this part of your comment in general:

> Do the couple dozen devs at my company really need an internally-hosted version?

From personal experience and knowledge through friends: Everyone writes code. Universities, Governments, Governmental agencies, political parties, etc.

A lot of them do not want to host in the cloud, especially in Germany, considering that the cloud (depending on the provider you are looking at) means hosting outside of Germany with all that entails privacy and regulation wise.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#52

Post by GordonS »

hannob wrote: post #21
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.

It's not only about money though, it's also about megacorps extending the code but keeping that code to themselves, not contributing back.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#53

Post by wmf »

hannob wrote: post #21
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.

This is debated. Some people say that AWS will never touch AGPL software which accomplishes the goal of not getting AWSed while remaining OSI certified.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#54

Post by wmf »

joejoebags wrote: post #40
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?

I'm not super familiar with AGPL and how it might address this issue, but I would love to be enlightened.

Cloud providers and enterprises are afraid of AGPL being "super-viral" so they'll either pay for the non-AGPL version or not touch the software.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#56

Post by jabl »

stingraycharles wrote: post #30
freeqaz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think CNCF, or more generally, Linux Foundation projects are better characterized as public goods. Basically a bunch of companies, many whom are competitors with each other, get together to improve the commodified base upon which they depend. Saves a lot of $$$ that would otherwise be wasted in wheel reinvention or spent on license fees.

For the particular case of AWS now offering Kubernetes, is that:

- A win for AWS, since they can leech code without contributing back

or

- A win for Kubernetes contributors and users vs AWS, since now customers have the option of moving their Kubernetes workloads from AWS to other providers.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#57

Post by eikenberry »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #45
joejoebags wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote it last night; I didn't have time to research every "open core" company I could think of to figure out a chronology of their licensing strategy. I decided to publish it based on a limited number of case studies to gin up discussion and hopefully learn from other people about counter-examples. Do you know of any?

I'm stupid in this space, but as an outsider, is this "the end of an era" because it looks like MapBox is simply pulling the tried and true "bait and switch" which has been around forever. In that regard, "open core" (or open source for that matter) was never a business model — the business model always was bait and switch. Open was the bait. But likely I have always been a little suspicious of "open source" and like…

"Open source" was created as a marketing term and companies using it as such shouldn't come as a surprise.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#58

Post by paulgb »

joejoebags wrote: post #37
hannob wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course by mentioning any name here I risk that they might be a future candidate of closing down and you say "gotcha" :-) Not all of them are "open core" in the sense that they have a core product and proprietary extensions (some just opensource everything they make), but a number of relevant companies around FOSS products: Gitlab, MariaDB Corporation, Blindside Networks (Big Blue Button), Qt Company, Mattermost In…

Thanks, those are great examples. I've considered writing about Mattermost before, as I think it's a fascinating pattern that I haven't seen much elsewhere. Attack an existing, high-profile app by cloning it in the open but then additionally build a for-profit company around the clone. Truly a galaxy brain strategy.

I’ve been interested in this pattern as well. I’d contend that GitLab is another good example, and even argue that Automattic is too (IIRC Movable Type was already a successful proprietary blogging platform when WordPress came along)

Which is all to say, if you write that post, I for one will read it :)

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#59

Post by brandmeyer »

GordonS wrote: post #52
hannob wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not only about money though, it's also about megacorps extending the code but keeping that code to themselves, not contributing back.

AGPL does help with this. An early example was when Google's search interface answered unit conversion queries using GNU Units. They fixed a bug internally and didn't flow the bug back upstream. Since they weren't distributing Units, but were only executing it as a service, their behavior was strictly conforming to the letter of the GPL. The failure to respect the spirit of the GPL was a factor in AGPL's development.

AGPL code is strictly forbidden for use inside the company now, partially because they consider private modifications to open-source software to be a competitive advantage.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#60

Post by x0x0 »

hannob wrote: post #27

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 th…

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

Getting funding from investors sucks. It comes with expectations of growth. Mongo still hasn't turned a profit. To the extent that they are a saas business with saas economics that's common, but still. They clearly read the writing on the wall and declined to fund AWS's R&D costs for free.

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