Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Death of an open-source business model

joemorrison.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 223 posts

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#181

Post by willvarfar »

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…

> - if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it.

This would just lead to Hollywood-accounting, where a AWS-Tools subsidiary does all the software at a loss, and AWS-Cloud is just a user etc.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#182

Post by ameliaquining »

smichel17 wrote: post #158
nine_k wrote: post #105

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.

Redis is doing this and so far they seem to be doing fine. But it's early.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#183

Post by permille42 »

pabs3 wrote: post #179
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…

Amazon contribute back to open source, both with funding and code. The issue is about (VC) money rather than contributing back.

I worked there. I can assure you that they contribute very very very very little in terms of what they use. They also have very strict gatekeeping about what they allow to become open source. I've seen multiple projects get prevented from going into open source despite their devs requesting it. Fuck Amazon.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#184

Post by permille42 »

simonh wrote: post #129
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. Th…

What Amazon is doing is not fine in any way. Having seen their dev process from the inside it is an absolute nightmare. They give zero shits about the wellfare of their devs nor about their contribution to open source.

The only reason they ever release things to open source is to try to get people to use their paid services. Eg: attention. They view open source only as an advertisement and nothing more.

The problem isn't that they use open source. It is that they spend a lot of dev times fixing all the bugs and then don't contribute them back upstream. They have sooo many internal patches that should go back but they go "if we contributed them back people wouldn't use our more reliable paid service based on that".

They are the exact opposite of the healthy hacker mentality that has brought Linux to the state it is today. Fuck Amazon * 100.

The world isn't a better place in any way with them. Their services aren't cheap in any sense.

Also, behind the scenes all those services you think are "ultra stable" are actual unstable and flaky as hell. Ask anyone who has worked at Amazon for more than a year and they'll tell you that it is constantly in pants on fire mode. All engineers are required to be on call because they have that many fires every single fucking day.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#185

Post by [deleted] »

jayparth wrote: post #116
joejoebags wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Literally tons within the data ecosystem. dbt, Great Expectations, Dagster, Seldon. The list goes on. My employer Tecton has an "open core" called Feast and we are doing great. Mattermost, PostHog also come to mind. Databricks has shown that you don't need a crazy license to win. I disagree with this article from my personal experiences and my industry experience but I respect you writing it. The business model is cl…

[deleted]

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#186

Post by lmeyerov »

jayparth wrote: post #116
joejoebags wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Literally tons within the data ecosystem. dbt, Great Expectations, Dagster, Seldon. The list goes on. My employer Tecton has an "open core" called Feast and we are doing great. Mattermost, PostHog also come to mind. Databricks has shown that you don't need a crazy license to win. I disagree with this article from my personal experiences and my industry experience but I respect you writing it. The business model is cl…

vc $'s may be seriously clouding the analysis here.

in terms of revenue justifying big valuations, how many healthy companies are there, really? ("spend $20M to make $3M..." = not healthy) What about ratio of OSS successes vs closed successes, esp w/ efficiency?

e.g., the biggest co there is databricks (and i continue to root for them!), and contrast w/ snowflake who started in a similar period, grew 10-20X bigger, and started more simply (get a clone of redshift without doing business w/ aws). worse, databricks took a lot of phd students many years with a lot of big corp funding before the vc's got involved: that's a high bar an oss co must hit vs not for adjacent high-growth spaces.

the good news for oss founders is VC's are warming to investing here, and sometimes, even before OSS traction. irrespective of profitability, the founders have a better chance of flipping it to be someone else's problem.

not necessarily as clear cut for community-minded co's though that want to be financially healthy for their community. it seems the bigger and more numerous successes are non-oss, and despite the many oss attempts, the big sustainable oss successes have to doubly succeed at what is already hard. If going OSS increased chance of success -- and didn't actively challenge success -- I'd expect relatively more successes by now. I wish all this wasn't so but it's hard to unsee...

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#187

Post by [deleted] »

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'…

[deleted]

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#188

Post by [deleted] »

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'…

[deleted]

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#189

Post by 3np »

jfengel wrote: post #135
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 invest…

What is the "it" you're referring to here?

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#190

Post by bonestormii_ »

vosper wrote: post #134
bonestormii_ wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah you are right. There is no standardization to the way you interact with such things.
Post reply on HN