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

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#211

Post by phaemon » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #203

phaemon wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> So where are all the examples on public mailing lists and Usenet of them using this? Here's one http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html Also - even the USPTO rejected their claim as a trademark.

One. The same one you already posted. Where are the thousands of examples of this common usage?

Rejected after they'd made the term popular.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#212

Post by chrisseaton » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

phaemon wrote: post #211

chrisseaton wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So where are all the examples on public mailing lists and Usenet of them using this? Here's one http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html Also - even the USPTO rejected their claim as a trademark.

One. The same one you already posted. Where are the thousands of examples of this common usage? Rejected after they'd made the term popular.

How many examples do you need to prove that something existed? Isn't one enough? When you see a fossil of a dinosaur skeleton in a museum do you say 'well hang on are there any more or just one?'

And it was rejected because it was a simple descriptive term. You can't take ownership of a simple descriptive term.

Bottom line facts are: OSDI don't own it - that's a fact - and they didn't use it first - that's a fact.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#213

Post by phaemon » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #212

phaemon wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One. The same one you already posted. Where are the thousands of examples of this common usage? Rejected after they'd made the term popular.

How many examples do you need to prove that something existed? Isn't one enough? When you see a fossil of a dinosaur skeleton in a museum do you say 'well hang on are there any more or just one?' And it was rejected because it was a simple descriptive term. You can't take ownership of a simple descriptive term. Bottom line facts are: OSDI don't own it - that's a fact - and they didn't use it first - that's a fact.

I didn't claim it didn't exist so your strawman is irrelevant. If there was only a single dinosaur skeleton in existence I certainly wouldn't be claiming they were common animals.

The fact is it was barely used until the OSI introduced it as a term at which point it became popular. You seem to have a personal problem with that.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#214

Post by bradwood » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

joejoebags wrote: post #173

joejoebags wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow me to be at your service: you are a grammar nazi

how would you prefer that sentence be written?

s/thusly/thus/

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#215

Post by selfhoster11 » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

claytonjy wrote: post #20

selfhoster11 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Gitlab will try to pull an Atlassian in the future. They already said they are changing focus to their cloud-based offering over the on-prem version.

I worry you're right, and while I think it's bad for what it signals about business model viability, I'm not sure it's bad for how I use GitLab. Do the couple dozen devs at my company really need an internally-hosted version, or should we just pay for the cloud offering and supply our own runners? Seems easy to frame as a wash.

On-prem is your trump card in case Gitlab cloud decides to leave you out in the cold.

Without on-prem, you're cut out of your source code service and will have to do a potentially hasty migration to an entirely new platform (which brings its own issues inherent in any migration project).

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#216

Post by joshspankit » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 9:42 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…

Genuinely curious: Have you looked at moving to a graph database?

I can’t conceptualize a dataset that could survive(/be performant) in a document store, but not a graph.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#217

Post by joshspankit » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

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.

Is there a way to structure a license so that this kind of accounting is much harder?

In Hollywood’s case, it’s pretty clear when movies are making money (same with games to a large degree), but I don’t know if there’s a way for “tool” companies to leverage that.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#218

Post by haihaibye » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #145

haihaibye wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> Open source is a trademarked term by OSI This is a lie. You're lying. > "Open Source" is not and cannot become a trademark. https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

Well, I'm wrong but why are you so certain I was intentionally lying?

I was probably misremembering something I read on Slashdot in the 90s.

I don't think you're lying about saying I'm lying... you're just wrong (as I know my own intent)

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#219

Post by infinity0 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:45 AM UTC

orlandohill wrote: post #153

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…

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

That license is specifically targeted in favour of small businesses for some reason, omitting individuals etc. This potential FOSS license I am talking about would only target against big tech companies.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#220

Post by infinity0 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 10:48 AM UTC

cycloptic wrote: post #161

infinity0 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can't imagine it would go down well at all with Debian users if random packages (in the free or the nonfree repo) came with clauses saying you now owe royalties to random parties. If you installed 10 packages on your company's server that each ask for 20% royalty, your company now would owe 200% royalties. It would just make the distro unusable by companies.

That's simply not true. ">X revenue a year" would affect nobody except the largest tech companies. Apart from this, it would strictly benefit existing users, because it means the projects that are properly contributing to the FOSS ecosystem, including importantly its diversity, are getting a fair share of income.