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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

#151

Post by chrisseaton »

lowdose wrote: post #150
chrisseaton wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget that the OSI and the people behind it neither own, nor invented, the term 'open source.' They want to give you the impression that they do and they did, but they don't and they didn't.

Who did?

I don't know - not sure anyone does.

Christine Peterson claims to have invented the term in 1998.

https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...

But at least this much is not true - we can see it being used, in context, at least as far back as 1996. I think people involved in this project at the time say it was a common term back then as well, but I can't find a reference for that now.

http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html

And they certainly don't own it - they wrote a whole article on their own website still available about how they don't own it!

https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#152

Post by hansvm »

claytonjy wrote: post #114
leipert wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (depend…

That's a great point. I'm in the US, so this isn't an issue for us in the same way, though I've heard fears of "we can't put code in the cloud, what if it gets out!". My response is "what's your threat model?". For a small company, our only security advantage is being a small target; there's no way we're competing with the Gitlab.com team on security.

> our only security advantage is being a small target

1. If a 3-letter agency requests access to your on-prem data you'll know about the request and know which data is compromised.

2. You now have to trust your hosting provider. This is almost the same as being a small target, but not quite because you need to worry about all of their employees AND all of your own. There are 1k+ employees to attempt to compromise at Gitlab, and you have no control over or contracts with any of them.

3. Expanding on 2, given the disconnect between Gitlab and your own organization you open yourself up to new kinds of attacks like social engineering an account takeover, or expanding an email breach to a source code breach.

I don't think any of that matters for most people, but your attack surface area is increased with current cloud tech.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#153

Post by orlandohill »

infinity0 wrote: post #144
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 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 achieve something similar by dual-licensing under a paid license and the source-available license, Polyform Small Business.

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#154

Post by _puk »

julianmarq wrote: post #117
_puk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just to build on that thought. (IMO) The only people who really care about open source are us, the philanthropic builders of said software. If we shout down those in our community who question the status quo, by simply stating "it's not open source", then we lose those people. Given the hard stance we see on open source, it's very seldom that the reply to that is "but why can't it be". An analogy that springs to…

Nothing is stopping you from using your own source available license. Mongo did it, and they're doing okay. It seems like you're arguing something different: You (general you) want the distinction and, more importantly, goodwill that the "open source" label gives you, but without actually having to fit the parameters of "open source".

No, not really.

I'm just asking why an innocent question along the lines of "couldn't we.." gets immediately shut down as "No, That's not open source".

What is ultimately wrong with having real world limitations to a licence?

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#155

Post by chii »

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…

> restaurant chain offers a better product

so the end consumer benefits. I think that's an acceptable outcome tbh.

> unless [the small restaurant] starts making new recipes it keeps for itself.

which is why it doesn't make sense to give away the recipes in the first place. If restaurant's value proposition is _merely_ the recipe, and you give it away, but expect customers to be charitable and still give you money, then the business is a failing one (even if temporarily solvent).

But if your small restaurant has qualities that can't be replicated in a chain, then you have a business model (even if temporarily insolvent - you just have to hang on and not bankrupt...), and you can "afford" to give away the recipe and chalk it up to marketing expense.

This is why there's barely any real businesses selling open source games - there's hardly any differentiator there. But for enterprise/productivity applications, i think there may be - for example, professional services associated with the product, or customizations etc.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#156

Post by chii »

ozim wrote: post #140
Someone wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> loads of small pizza places that make money

these small pizzarias tend to make good pizza - much better than the chains do.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#157

Post by chii »

aazaa wrote: post #128

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 sup…

What you've described is basically a bait and switch, but worded nicely.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#158

Post by smichel17 »

nine_k wrote: post #105
linuxhansl wrote: post #87

IMHO "open core" is not a good idea in the first place. Open source is about an open community, open contributions, the multiplier you get from contributions from multiple companies. That way open source is a win-win. Companies benefit from each other's contributions. It's _not_ about just showing the code or a free-for-all. Once you have free and non-free tiers it's already broken. The incentives no longer align. I'…

IMHO, free + non-free can be fine, e.g. AGPL + commercial cloud license.

Dual license is different than open core.

I would be interested to see if a permissive core with dual-licensed (AGPL+ commercial) extensions would work, for something like GitLab. It's not that big of a step on top of their current model where the proprietary bits are still source-available.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#159

Post by smichel17 »

wmf wrote: post #147
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, it's a matter of risk. Rightly or wrongly you could get hit with a lawsuit that says "we have infected your entire control plane; open-source it or die" and every cloud provider has to weigh that for themselves.

To be fair, thigh, when the cloud provider has deeper pockets than the developer of the AGPL'd software, that means something different.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#160

Post by t0astbread »

chrisseaton wrote: post #143
qchris wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 characteristi…

People forget that the OSI and the people behind it neither own, nor invented, the term 'open source.' They want to give you the impression that they do and they did, but they don't and they didn't.

On the other hand, standards and consensus are important to know what's going on. See the endless meaningless "organic produce" label landscape.
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