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I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

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Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#31

Post by marvinblum »

tommoor wrote: post #19
marvinblum wrote: post #15

I'm working on an open-core product [0] right now, and an aspect I find missing in the article is that you can generate trust by showing how the internals work. This is especially beneficial if you work in an area like us. Of course, you need to make sure your license is set right and you need to think about where new features go, but it's a valid use-case. [0] https://pirsch.io/ open-source core: https://github.com/…

Lovely landing page – there seems to be a sudden abundance of google analytics alternatives by small teams and indie hackers in the last year, any insight into why that is?

Hmm due to the cookie banners probably. I've started this as a side project for my personal website, without looking for existing solutions :D

The landing page is... meh, a placeholder more or less right now.

Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#32

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #20
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people wrongly assume that if you license the product under GNU GPL, you must publish source code on the internet. Many active proponents of free (as in freedom) software had very tense quarrells with me when I explained them that it's not exactly mandatory.

This is a small point to argue. Even if you choose to distribute your source on-demand by CD in an envelope with postage stamps on it, the next logical step is for a customer to just put that code on github. So, what then is the difference? Putting it on github (or a zip file on your website) is less of a hassle.

If the customer paid a really high price for software and source code (like a few million dollars), he might rightfully decide that publishing it and giving it to everyone for free is not in their best interests.

Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#33

Post by Google234 »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #16
iso1210 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft spent a lot of money and energy in the late 90s and 00s to convince the world - especially business and legal people - that the GPL was a "cancer" The GPL is one of the cleanest licenses out there. Use the code in your project, give the source of your project to anyone you give the binaries to, job done.

This is a naive view. Most companies try to limit or restrict the scope of what they must open source. With the GPL, depending on the version, how the code interacts with your project (static linking, dynamic linking, IPC, etc.) you may or may not have to release your code under the same license. In particular Google's strong anti-AGPL stance has caused a chilling effect for adoption of AGPL projects at companies, he…

The AGPL means that all code that links to it must also be published as AGPL. You don’t have to be Google to recognize how contagious thst could be.

Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#34

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

Rochus wrote: post #8
monoideism wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS, and hence own developer mindshare, for their own selfish reasons. "heading towards"? I'd say we're there. And it's been a while coming. I wrongly discounted Stallman. Like many, I found the GPL onerous and annoying to deal with as a developer. But we've paid a high price.

> But we've paid a high price. What price?

Everyone using BSD and Apache licenses - so any changes or improvements they make aren't contributed back to the source repo.

Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#35

Post by satvikpendem »

Open source is not a business model.

Let me say this again. Open source is not, in and of itself, a business model.

People conflate having an open source project with having an open source business. Open source businesses can be done, of course, but open source in and of itself won't give you that business. It is not a business model therefore but rather a distribution/governance model.

The key is that being open source should not be a core value proposition in most cases (unless you're Red Hat) but rather it should be ancillary, merely incidental to your core business. For example, say you ran a task management app company. The core value driver is not whether it's open source or not (to most people). People don't buy based on whether the product itself is open source, they buy because it solves their problem, of task management in this case.

Labeling oneself as "open source" is a classic engineering trap because again, people don't care about that, if a closed source solution can solve their problem more than an open source one, they'll use the former.

By the way, I happen to run an open source task management app (a todo list + calendar hybrid basically, https://getartemis.app) but nowhere do I advertise it as open source, even though it is, because I know my core customers, non-engineers, don't care about that and just want to schedule their days better.

---

I am reminded of OpenHunt, an open source version of Product Hunt that was made. The only value proposition was that it was open source, but it shut down precisely because users didn't care about that, they cared whether it had enough cool products (as a consumer) and enough traffic (as a submitter).

Here's one post-mortem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729

> OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers.

> It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.

> There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.

> If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.

Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#36

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

monoideism wrote: post #6
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

The sad thing is so few companies really invest in participating in FOSS software. That’s one reason these “open source companies” came to exist. It really should be a community of contributors, backed by a diverse set of companies. At best, employers will allow contributing bug fixes or small patches. Not the in depth dedication these projects really need. We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can…

> We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS, and hence own developer mindshare, for their own selfish reasons. "heading towards"? I'd say we're there. And it's been a while coming. I wrongly discounted Stallman. Like many, I found the GPL onerous and annoying to deal with as a developer. But we've paid a high price.

I don't think it's really a price - including corporate projects was always the point of "open source" as opposed to "free software". The split is generally understood to have started when part of the community embraced Netscape's open source browser.

Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#37

Post by wmf »

softwaredoug wrote: post #3

The sad thing is so few companies really invest in participating in FOSS software. That’s one reason these “open source companies” came to exist. It really should be a community of contributors, backed by a diverse set of companies. At best, employers will allow contributing bug fixes or small patches. Not the in depth dedication these projects really need. We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can…

A community of contributors backed by a diverse set of companies has to be seeded by an MVP. Where would that MVP come from? For complex software it's either an internal project spun out from a unicorn or a labor of love from a gentleman hacker. These are pretty limited routes; it's much easier to start an open source startup with the caveat that the community will probably never emerge later because the startup will be moving too fast for outsiders to jump in. Now startups feel they have to use "innovative" licenses to be successful but the powers that be are deriding these licenses as "fake open source". We're setting ourselves up for an OSS winter where sophisticated developer tools or installable infrastructure software just won't be created.

Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#38

Post by Alekhine »

mrkurt wrote: post #18
tptacek wrote: post #5

This is unusually insightful for a LinkedIn post. One question, though: towards the end, it suggests that GPL/AGPL products, which are more defensible against commercial competitors who simply resell the open source project, are "legally murky" and might be rejected by customer legal teams. But does that matter? Can't you just do what Sleepycat did, and offer commercial customers a clean commercial license?

GPL variants are more defensible but make open-source-as-a-marketing-tool way less effective. Developers know they can't use GPL software for work, and OSS companies need them to use tooling at work so they become leads.

Wait, why can't devs use GPL software at work? How is code compiled with GCC any different from code compiled with Clang, legally speaking?

Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#39

Post by rhn_mk1 »

> If you are running a commercial business on top of your open-source solution, it is paramount that you own the product's full IP.

Why is it "paramount"? While I have seen that behaviour, there are also several commercial businesses in my corner of the 'net based on open source solutions that don't make an effort to own the full IP and they are doing OK.

I think there's some unstated assumption here, anyone care to explain?

Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one

#40

Post by BossingAround »

softwaredoug wrote: post #3

The sad thing is so few companies really invest in participating in FOSS software. That’s one reason these “open source companies” came to exist. It really should be a community of contributors, backed by a diverse set of companies. At best, employers will allow contributing bug fixes or small patches. Not the in depth dedication these projects really need. We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can…

> We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS, and hence own developer mindshare, for their own selfish reasons.

Can you name some examples of such "selfish reasons" connected to some OSS?

I can think of Google taking over the internet with Chrome, but MS did the same with IE, so that has nothing to do with OSS. It's more that Chrome happens to have source code available.

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