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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

#121

Post by yarrel »

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…

These wouldn't be FOSS, and wouldn't have the effects people hope for.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#122

Post by permille42 »

Post logic: Here is an example of a company taking their software closed sourced after previously being open. Also, AWS.

AWS uses the crud out of open source. They admittedly "steal" it in that they fork it internally, applying patches, add UI, and then sell it. They still depend highly on basically all the open source software in the world.

That Amazon does this is a rallying call for new licensing schemes. Large monopolistic companies such as Amazon need to be legally shut out of this type of abuse of open source software. So long as we go "It's fine. You have to allow this to truly embrace open source" then we will continue to see Amazon try to shut down all "open core companies" that they can by outright stealing their IP.

Open source is not developed primarily by hobbyists or aficionados. Most open source imo comes from closed source projects being open sourced by companies in order to gain free testing, free work ( contributions ), and more market share ( exposure / interest )

Heralding the death of open-source seems like nonsense just to grab attention. I agree that the large companies are trying to crush open-core companies that are small, but it is obvious they are doing this and there will be a backlash from those of us who don't appreciate their meddling.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#123

Post by Someone »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #63

This seems to me more like another case of "death of a business model caused by revenue maximization strategy". "Open-core" does not have "non-viable" or even "must-be-bait-and-switch" stamped all over it. But if the organization using it decides that its primary goal is revenue maximization (and/or significant growth), then it becomes much more questionable how it will fare. But isn't that the goal of any business,…

So, you’re running a small restaurant, and are fine with it staying small, as long as you can make a living. You publish all your recipes under a permissive license.

A restaurant chain starts selling your dishes, using your name, but, because of their scale, cheaper than you can afford to.

If you still manage to make money, you may be fine with that, but that’s where the correspondence breaks.

In real life, that restaurant chain offers a better product, not because its dishes are better, but because its restaurants are in better locations (have faster network connections), are closer to cinemas and theaters (they offer a zillion other products), etc., and, unlike with restaurants, you can’t make money by branding yourself as “the original”.

I don’t see that smaller restaurant staying in business, unless it starts making new recipes it keeps for itself.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#124

Post by mapgrep »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #63

This seems to me more like another case of "death of a business model caused by revenue maximization strategy". "Open-core" does not have "non-viable" or even "must-be-bait-and-switch" stamped all over it. But if the organization using it decides that its primary goal is revenue maximization (and/or significant growth), then it becomes much more questionable how it will fare. But isn't that the goal of any business,…

Very good point and I'd go a step further: There are lots of organizations that are not even businesses in the first place who can sustainably fund open source work.

Postgres came out of UC Berkeley. GNU stuff like emacs and gcc came out of MIT. VLC came out of École Centrale Paris. SecureDrop is developed by the Free Software Foundation. Tor was originally funded by the Open Technology Fund (USG). Firefox is from a nonprofit funded by Google advertising and born from the ashes of a commercial failure. Etc etc etc.

There may or may not be an open source business model, but there does not have to be one at all for open source to thrive.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#125

Post by aaron_m04 »

julianmarq wrote: post #103
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…

I'd replace mongo with redis in your comment. Redis truly is open core, but mongo no longer is. Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. Calling mongo open source now just dilutes what "open source" actually means. The organization even removed the submission of its license for approval by the OSI. It's source available, and it's up to each person to decide whether that's good o…

> Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros.

I wasn't aware the licensing is more restrictive now.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#126

Post by breakfastduck »

vosper wrote: post #110
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…

Mongo is also proving the success of vendor lock-in: you (or the engineers before you, and the engineers before them) make a mess in Mongo, because there are no relations and no schemas [0], and it becomes really difficult to get off it. The effort required just to get your data in a state that's clean enough to consider moving to the RDBMS you should have started with can be overwhelming. Then you have to rewrite yo…

Agreed. MongoDB makes it far too easy to make terrible decisions in regard to data design.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#127

Post by bonestormii_ »

vosper wrote: post #110
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…

Mongo is also proving the success of vendor lock-in: you (or the engineers before you, and the engineers before them) make a mess in Mongo, because there are no relations and no schemas [0], and it becomes really difficult to get off it. The effort required just to get your data in a state that's clean enough to consider moving to the RDBMS you should have started with can be overwhelming. Then you have to rewrite yo…

This isn't really vendor lock-in, though. It's simply a technical/design lock-in. Going from unstructured to structured data presents problems, and if you do that, it's rightfully up to you to fix.

It is different from the vendor lock-in that prevents one from migrating from AWS to Google Cloud because all of your code uses their APIs and libraries specifically.

However, the effect is the same, of course. You are locked in! It's not necessarily a bad thing, but this is why you must choose your poison carefully.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#128

Post by aazaa »

Could it be that, rather than the death of a particular variety of open source ("Open Core"), that the author has in fact described yet another open source business model? One that specifically extends Open Core?

Consider:

- Company releases the Secret Sauce as open source under a highly permissive (non-reciprocal) license

- Secret Sauce coalesces a large, engaged community around it

- Company pays the bills with support, consulting, and other complementary products/services as it bootstraps itself

- Company releases v2 under a traditional non-open license

Everyone profits from this arrangement, potentially. Small users get good, free software to bootstrap projects. Big companies build stuff on top. And in the end, Company takes a portion of the open source audience with it into v2.

Finding that audience and getting them to pay attention is not easy at all. Think of Open Core as the car that gets you there, to borrow a quote from "The Comeback."

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#129

Post by simonh »

permille42 wrote: post #122

Post logic: Here is an example of a company taking their software closed sourced after previously being open. Also, AWS. AWS uses the crud out of open source. They admittedly "steal" it in that they fork it internally, applying patches, add UI, and then sell it. They still depend highly on basically all the open source software in the world. That Amazon does this is a rallying call for new licensing schemes. Large mo…

Let me play devils advocate for a minute. Maybe what Amazon is doing is just fine. If they had to roll all of their services from scratch themselves, they’d be massively more expensive and dramatically less compatible with everything else. The fact that Amazon and many other hosting companies can offer cheap commodity services based on familiar building blocks is a huge benefit to the world enabled by open source. That’s exactly what open source is about, making the world a better place.

I’m not entirely convinced by my own argument, but I’m having trouble seeing the world as on the whole a worse place with AWS in it.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#130

Post by gmueckl »

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.

It comes down to whether your company can accept the risks inherent in hosting essential data at a third party site that necessarily provides a bigher attack surface than anything hosted behind the company firewall, but is also monitored by a (dedicated) security team.
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