171–180 of 223 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry, call me a grammar Nazi, but when I see the word "thusly" when "thus" is perfectly serviceable, I can't be bothered to read any more...
It's not clear to me that open-source-as-a-business-model was ever vibrant enough that it makes sense to say it has now died. Open-source-as-a- funding -model was surely a thing, but turning open source into a source of consistent and growing free cash flow has been much more rare. At my last start-up the first things to go out the window when we wanted to stop burning money were the commercial Aerospike and Nginx li…
No doubt about that. If you give away the source for free that doesn't produce any cash-flow. If you sell services you sell services.
The value-add proposition of "open source companies" I think is they know the software so you can hire them to do things with it, and they can adapt their open source software if needed as they go along. So that is a service-model. Open Source licenses can help companies that do this.
Open Source is its own worst enemy. At some point an OS project becomes so GOOD that you don't need to be its developer to use it and adapt it or build Cloud-services around it. Further if they need the expertise of the original developers they can simply hire them. The ethos of open source doesn't forbid you from having an employer. An ethical OS-hacker should be happy getting a salary from whichever company lets him or her write Open Source software. That includes companies like Amazon and Microsoft and IBM who then sell the right to use that software on their Cloud.
If this is the correct ethical model then we should not blame Amazon or Google, they do contribute to copyleft Open Source projects. We should blame smaller companies like MongoDB etc. who do not offer "pure" Open Source licenses.
So I'm thinking it's not so much the Open Source Business Model that is in crisis. It is the Open Source Ethical Model, which needs to reflect upon itself in the time of Cloud.
Is it really more ethical to work for Amazon writing Open Source, than writing Non-Open-Source for a small company which wants to make sure it is not crushed by Amazon?
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 believe this is mis-stating the extent of redis re-licensing. http://antirez.com/news/120 > Today a page about the new Common Clause license in the Redis Labs web site was interpreted as if Redis itself switched license. This is not the case, Redis is, and will remain, BSD licensed. > What is happening instead is that certain Redis modules, developed inside Redis Labs, are now released under the Common Clause (usin…
OSS companies like Mongo, DataBricks, and Confluent run popular cloud services. They all seem to be doing fine for this reason. I don't see a lot of proof that changing their licensing was a root cause of their success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So the answer to my question was "yes" then, thank you. I don't know what I would call that practice but it is not any kind of "open source circle of life". > It's a part of the product's life cycle that's in any startup book. There are many start-ups truly committed to open source development. Conversely, there are many who are not but are pretty upfront and honest about how they are not. I don't judge either one as…
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.
"(a) making it easy to fund projects" I don't know how it is in the US, but in EU you need a regular invoice for a business expense. So if a company wants to support an open-source project today, they need an invoice from the authors. Now try to get this from the author of your favorite GitHub open-source library... And for large corporations you need to get a quote / an offer so that a business decision may be made…
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…
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…
Or are you describing some sort of system where the authors get the fixed share (%) of user's company revenue? I think this is not going to work very well... just imagine a big company which is not focused on computers. Or a computer startup which wants to be bought by FAANG for billions of dollars.