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

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#131

Post by Drdrdrq » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

> Redis adopted a strategy of adding a severely restrictive “commons clause” to updated versions of their existing open source tools,...

Severely restrictive? I'm amazed at how bad (undeserved imho) reputation Commons Clause license got. The new Redis tools' license is basically the same, just less clear. The same with MongoDB and MariaDB's licenses. In effect, they all forbid selling to 3rd parties - and yet, being less clear, they are deemed 'OK' while Commons Clause, clear and to the point, is frowned upon.

I firmly believe that both proprietary and FOSS licenses are extremes and that a new batch of "cloud protection licenses" will help develop software that will protect core users' freedoms and still allow maintainers to work on in fulltime. Commons Clause was simply ahead of its time - I'm waiting for its descendants to prosper.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#132

Post by haihaibye » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

_puk wrote: post #101

senko wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. It wouldn't be open source any longer, tho.

There's more than one licence that's open source. Is there a reason that a new style of licence that prevents the "fork and suffocate" approach of these large companies can't be ratified as fitting with core open source values? Being dogmatic about the definition of open source, and not allowing that to evolve over time, feels like hard times ahead.

Open source is a trademarked term by OSI, and it doesn't allow licences that discriminate based on user (even cloud mega corps) to call themselves open source.

The Businesses source licence https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ tries to make dual licencing easier, but isn't "open source", the term is "source available"

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#133

Post by chipotle_coyote » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 10:25 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #53

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.

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.

AWS specifically might not, but I can say with some certainty that cloud providers can host AGPL software. It's not impossible that Compose (the now IBM-owned cloud database hosting company) pulled in more revenue from RethinkDB than RethinkDB, Inc., did.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#134

Post by vosper » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

bonestormii_ wrote: post #127

vosper wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 loc…

> 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.

This is true, but it's also kind of vendor lock-in because there's a whole query language and aggregation pipeline for Mongo that's completely different to other databases. If I was using an RDBMS and was switching from MySQL to Postgres I think I would likely have a much easier time, because fundamentally it's all SQL (I know, there are differences between Postgres and MySQL, but it's a lot less, and a good ORM will smooth some of it out for you - at least initially)

I think this is basically equivalent to your example of not being able to easily move from AWS to Google Cloud because of their different APIs.

It doesn't seem like SQL-to-Mongo is impossible to implement, because there is third-party tooling for that (which I haven't tried): https://studio3t.com/knowledge-base/articles/sql-query/

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#135

Post by jfengel » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

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 took the opposite route in 2010, and it didn't work out well for me. We sold it as a premium product, and it was hard to get adoption. Which made it hard to actually prove the benefits we claimed should exist.

That's not proof that we'd have fared better if we had open-sourced it. We took exactly the opposite route of MongoDB, with very stringent schemas to ensure data quality. That required a large up-front investment in time, and that was a hard sell too. The whole world went in the opposite direction, of schemaless databases and machine learning for "eh, good enough" answers.

Still, I'll always wonder if we wouldn't have failed so spectacularly if we'd open sourced it. The idea was a pretty good one, and we wrote some remarkable software to make it happen.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#136

Post by FpUser » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

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…

I very much prefer to use RDBMS first and the rest as the last resort. Still I do not believe that quality of data design could be enforced just by the fact of using RDBMS. I sometimes encountered RDBMS schemas that look like they were designed by lunatics.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#137

Post by warpech » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

julianmarq wrote: post #111

warpech wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> The ideology is still in our blood and we keep the open source circle of life running. I'm curious about what exactly you mean by these two sentences. Particularly the second one. Is this circle you speak of the one where a company announces an open source product and once the goodwill—that open source development gives it—ensures a number of contributors and early adopters, helping the project grow until the compa…

I hope this does not sound cynical. When we release a new open source project, we are not sure what the project will turn into. We put it out, hoping to get some reaction from the world. If there is no reaction, we will only invest a bare minimum for our own use. When there is some reaction, the community might find its sweet spot. When there is huge enthusiasm, which is the least likely, we might decide to seek ways to invest more and get our returns.

Keep in mind that for projects like that, even if they are open source, the vast majority of contributions come from the primary investor. And other contributors can always fork.

It is not anything special about open source. For any product, early adopters are almost expected to get hurt or lose interest as the product matures. It's a part of the product's life cycle that's in any startup book. Crossing the chasm is hard not only for the business but also for the original user base. Yet, successful businesses are destined to do it. I am sorry for the ones that become dissappointed, but they too get something out of it along the ride.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#138

Post by infinity0 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

insertnickname wrote: post #118

infinity0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can write such a license if you want (or hire a lawyer to write it), but it's not FOSS and it never will be. Why is it important to you that such a license is recognized as FOSS?

Like laws, definitions change with changing times and circumstances. I am a Debian Developer and very happy to discuss this with other members of the community. Why is it important to you that such a license is not recognised as FOSS?

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#139

Post by qchris » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 11:06 PM UTC

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…

I know that there's a formal definition of capitalized "Open Source" by the OSI, but I'm also not enchanted by that being the only definition for lower-case "open source". I think that the lower case open source is really more about a general approach to software (or intellectual property in general, really). Some people want to use terms like "libre" to refer to projects that have most of the practical characteristics of open source projects, but not an OSI-approved license, but I kind of think that the lower-case version of the term is important because it's reached a point of basically a colloquialism.

There's room for a grey area, but I think that the parent's comment about how Mongo's license relates to the overwhelming majority of it's community to use it (in that, functionally, it doesn't) still pushes farther towards open source than it does proprietary with source-available.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#140

Post by ozim » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 11:08 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #123

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 rest…

I really don't see your point.

There are loads of small pizza places that make money and they don't have some "special"/"magic" pizza recipe. There are also loads of pizza chains that make money as well selling basically the same product. I am not pizza lover, for me it is just another dish so maybe I am wrong.