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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

#91

Post by wpietri »

hpoe wrote: post #71
ironmagma wrote: post #69

As much as I want open source software to be good, commercial software has the inherent advantage of having hierarchies and teams that are all powered by compensation. We could really use some kind of platform in the open source community built around (a) making it easy to fund projects, AND (b) making those projects organizable, with a team lead and contributors.

Counterpoint to that, all the tools I use most often and am most delighted by are published under a GPL or other FOSS license (Bash, Linux, Emacs, Firefox, Inkscape, etc) whereas the ones I am most constantly frustrated by, angry at, and find the most fault with are closed source proprietary company developed (Anything that starts with MS, VMWare Fusion, etc)

Agreed. Hierarchies are an advantage only if the people on top of the hierarchy are either unusually right or unusually good at hiring and deferring to people who know better than they do.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#92

Post by skrtskrt »

joejoebags wrote: post #32
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…

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?

Hashicorp

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#94

Post by vaibhavgandhi12 »

joejoebags wrote: post #83
Veen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily the organization and its founders who have revenue maximization as a primary goal. The other factor is hundreds of millions of dollars of VC money, and VCs are definitely all about revenue maximization. MapBox has raised quarter of a billion. The conundrum is how does a company develop software as complex as MapBox without relying on VC cash to get the ball rolling.

Great point. Are there any bootstrapped $1B+ open core companies? There are a surprising number of proprietary ones (e.g. Esri, Mailchimp, etc.)

Cloudera

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#95

Post by jokethrowaway »

Open source doesn't work and I'm glad the world is starting to understand. It promotes unfair compensation (or lack thereof).

If you have the skills to advance technology and no capital to invest to acquire other technical solutions you may need, you can get a job and use that money to pay what

Expecting free work from people rarely work, there are just not enough motivated individuals willing to work and maintain something for free.

Most open source I rely on is either backed by a giant company which uses it as a way to attract talents (and retain talents, by letting their employee work on their favourite project on company time) or it's unmaintained. If it's unmaintained I either need to do the work myself or hire someone, which introduces a myriad of variables. I'd rather hire the author but often he's busy with his real job and doesn't think he can live off its project.

If it wasn't for the OSS movement and the sheer amount of free work we would have a network of company buying OSS solutions and, most likely, more distributed, smaller companies that produce and resell proprietary software.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#96

Post by warpech »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #42
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…

Based on HN's cheerleading when some projects abandon open source (for example the top comment of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488642 ), the overall trend may be the user base not caring about open source in the same way people cared 5-10 years ago

When we at Handsontable switched to a proprietary license, it wasn't met with much enthusiasm from the existing open source users. But it helped us to get better deals. We invested part of the proceeds in another open source project - HyperFormula. The ideology is still in our blood and we keep the open source circle of life running. But I am happy that this new open source project is not on a collision course with revenue.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#97

Post by LeonidBugaev »

I work with open-source for the last 8 years, as a business owner and as contributor.

There are a lot of people who assume that the biggest value of using open-source project that it is free. Additionally there are a lot of idealists who think about oss as foss.

Open-source is not dead, it just trying to find a sustainable model for survival. None of the active OSS projects you know exist without money flow. Even if you have hyped project now, without money it will be dead in a year.

More and more companies consider open-source as default option, because there are a better tools right now to make business out of it. And everyone essentially wins from it.

Yes, old models of OSS are mostly dead. But new ones are alive more than ever.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#98

Post by andybak »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #42
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…

Based on HN's cheerleading when some projects abandon open source (for example the top comment of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488642 ), the overall trend may be the user base not caring about open source in the same way people cared 5-10 years ago

Taking the top comment as proof of groupthink is possibly misunderstanding how voting dynamics work on HN.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#99

Post by [deleted] »

infinity0 wrote: post #67
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#100

Post by [deleted] »

lacker wrote: post #78

My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the success of the open core business model. For 99% of use cases, MongoDB is open source. You can see the code, you can make modifications, you can use it for free in your business, you can share your changes with others, you can integrate it into your products and services. Yeah, y…

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