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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

#191

Post by andrewshadura »

chrisseaton wrote: post #151
lowdose wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.xen…

The Caldera announcement you’re referring to does not use "open source" as a term. They write "open (source code) model", not "(open source) (code model)". It’s an important distinction.

And yes, Christine indeed invented the term, and folks from OSI gave it the current meaning by clearly defining it.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#192

Post by andrewshadura »

dredmorbius wrote: post #166
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.

False. In the application to software, Bruce Perrens most definitely did define ther term, based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the Free Software Foundation's Three Freedoms definition of Free Software, in June 1997: https://opensource.org/docs/osd https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines https://perens.com/2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-open-so... The term was not previously used with regard…

Indeed. But to be more precise: Christine invented the term and Bruce precisely defined it based on the DFSG.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#193

Post by nradov »

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…

RDBMS doesn't work for some of the complex hierarchical data I have to deal with. Shredding it out into a 3NF relational schema would require joining 20+ tables in every query to do anything useful. No thanks. Use the right database type for the job.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#194

Post by langitbiru »

willvarfar wrote: post #181
infinity0 wrote: post #144

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…

> - 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.

So can we cheat Unreal with Hollywood-accounting because they offer this kind of license (although it's not open source)?

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#195

Post by willvarfar »

langitbiru wrote: post #194
willvarfar wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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.

So can we cheat Unreal with Hollywood-accounting because they offer this kind of license (although it's not open source)? https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

Yes, game projects absolutely use Hollywood accounting. Dev studios pop up for one project, and often close at launch, and some other legal entity gets all the subs after that. And so on. Game dev financing is infamously horrid.

Unreal, though, is in a different negotiating position with the game publishers than, say, an open-source software with a new pay-us-if-you-make-money clause. Its the distinction between source-available (like Unreal Engine) and open-source which the article tries to make?

Timescale's new license is an interesting move in this direction.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#196

Post by danbmil99 »

I don't think anyone should have a realistic expectation of making money directly from an open source project. You have to be strategic and tactical in how you approach the problem of monetizing.

If you don't do it, someone like Amazon will. If you want to make that difficult or impossible, use a copyleft license. The choice of a permissive license implies things that you have to think about upfront.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#197

Post by chrisseaton »

andrewshadura wrote: post #191
chrisseaton wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.xen…

The Caldera announcement you’re referring to does not use "open source" as a term. They write "open (source code) model", not "(open source) (code model)". It’s an important distinction. And yes, Christine indeed invented the term, and folks from OSI gave it the current meaning by clearly defining it.

I'm afraid this just isn't true. Ask other people around at the time:

> I joined Caldera in November of 1995, and we certainly used "open source" broadly at that time. We were building software. I can't imagine a world where we did not use the specific phrase "open source software". And we were not alone. The term "Open Source" was used broadly by Linus Torvalds (who at the time was a student...I had dinner with Linus and his then-girlfriend Ute in Germany while he was still a student), John "Mad Dog" Hall who was a major voice in the community (he worked at COMPAQ at the time), and many, many others.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-i7au3...

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#198

Post by phaemon »

chrisseaton wrote: post #151
lowdose wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.xen…

> But at least this much is not true

Yes it is. Just because a phrase was used once or twice in some obscure post in the past, doesn't mean that someone can't come up with it independantly.

> a common term back then as well, but I can't find a reference for that now.

Because it wasn't a common term at all. If it was, you'd be able to find thousands of examples of usage, from all over the early web and (especially) Usenet. How many examples do you actually have. Two or three?

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#199

Post by phaemon »

chrisseaton wrote: post #197
andrewshadura wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Caldera announcement you’re referring to does not use "open source" as a term. They write "open (source code) model", not "(open source) (code model)". It’s an important distinction. And yes, Christine indeed invented the term, and folks from OSI gave it the current meaning by clearly defining it.

I'm afraid this just isn't true. Ask other people around at the time: > I joined Caldera in November of 1995, and we certainly used "open source" broadly at that time. We were building software. I can't imagine a world where we did not use the specific phrase "open source software". And we were not alone. The term "Open Source" was used broadly by Linus Torvalds (who at the time was a student...I had dinner with Linu…

So where are all the examples on public mailing lists and Usenet of them using this? I'm afraid I simply don't trust people's hazy memories of conversations from years ago.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#200

Post by SergeAx »

It is not a "cloud" that damages open core projects, it is Wal-Martesque cloud providers. If you are buying lots of infrastructure from AWS, there's just no reason to buy MongoDB or Redis from their creators: you would just put more load on your accounting, monitoring and cost controlling and will have nothing extra in return, except pride for supporting open source.

There is an interesting model at Google cloud, where I can deploy and use a Grafana stack for moderate $50/month. Looks like Grafana gets a solid chunk of these money - they are advertising it on their own website.

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