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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

#81

Post by jrochkind1 »

ignoramous wrote: post #52

If engineers are the most important resource, I think being a company known for open source might act as an inbound sales for attracting top talent, too (see: Google, RedHat, Mozilla). For engineers, it makes sense to work for companies that do have FOSS projects because they can always point to their corpus of work when switching between jobs as proof of their worth. Most engineers who realise this don't ever want t…

There's possibly "companies with FOSS products" that arne't "FOSS companies".

For instance, I know people that work for heroku that work on open source (and are primary maintainers in some case) on company time -- but heroku is obviously not a FOSS company.

Or, in a comment below jedberg says 'At Netflix our ethos was "if it's involved in infrastructure, open source it, if it's related to movies, keep it closed.' -- nobody would call netflix a "FOSS company".

In the original wave of open source, this was the position of most contributors to open source I think. Work on a thing on company time that helps the company achieve it's goals/business, but is not the main focus of the company.

This seems to be less and less the case. Because companies are more ruthlessly focused on the bottom line, and don't think they can afford to have anyone working on something they don't own or that might help a competitor? I dunno.

But this change has a lot to do with the current apparent sustainability problems in open source.

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

#82

Post by mooreds »

habitue wrote: post #78

I think "Commoditize your complement" comes into play here. Yeah, if your core offering is free, you're going to be fighting to make money. But you can get huge value if you open source otherwise proprietary parts of your stack.

We've done this at my current company. We have a closed source, commercial offering. But our client libraries, our documentation, sample deployment scripts, and other supporting libraries are open source.

We get some contributions.

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

#83

Post by vmception »

Cryptocurrency issuing entertainment companies have monetized this pretty well.

They don't have recurring revenue but they don't need venture capital investors either so it doesn't matter.

Open source, campaign, sell, book revenue from sell. If market has formed, book more revenue in the future from selling into liquidity. If market hasn’t formed, hire some entertainers to babysit a chat room and move on.

Some parent companies are monetizing repeat issuances, those are worth investing into because all the shareholders make money. The companies dont need capital and would only offer shares to provide some exposure to the market. I’m not aware of any broadly offered dealflow of a token issuing factory, which is probably why people don't understand or notice this business model.

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

#84

Post by alfonsodev »

gregwebs wrote: post #75

The main business proposition of open source is that you can create a larger market. This is hinted at in the article by saying "easy distribution", but it isn't really discussed. The goal of open source is to create a market for the product that is 10x or 100x bigger than a proprietary product would have. You won't ever capture 100% of the market. But if you capture a fraction of that larger market you still come ou…

This is a good point, any examples that come to mind to illustrate it?

I’m genuinely interested.

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

#85

Post by dschramm »

tommoor wrote: post #57
marvinblum wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That kind of makes sense, the cookie banners have been around quite a while now though.

They did get more annoying lately though. Nowadays you have to wrestle through a horrible click game of dark patterns to not accidentally accept anything. Things like putting a small "Accept all" in the top right corner where you expect a close button or hiding the settings with at 12px in light grey.

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

#86

Post by temac »

IncRnd wrote: post #69
nine_k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "open source" has a well-known definition, and the "novel licenses", like Mongo's, do not match it. They are more like the "source available" licenses, as practiced by MS in 1990s, and by IBM, much earlier.

There are several definitions for Open Source that come from foundations and other groups, which push their own beliefs and standards. Opensource.org, for example, pushes their own definition that excludes all those who do not use the perferred license! However, dictionaries that mirror collective understandings, as used by millions of people, tell a different story. According to OxfordLanguages, Open Source denotes,…

For software the overwhelming consensus is the OSI definition (extremely close to the FSF def, extremely close to what is applied as criteria by various distro, etc.)

You may want to write "Open Source" to be sure it is not confused with something else, but even "open source" should be parsed as that definition by default. This is not even pushing a political agenda or a judgment of value. Just "everybody" calls that like that, so there is no point in overloading the term for other approaches. Using another term for other things is perfectly fine and there are plenty of them possible with a positive tone, in case they bring positive things to the table.

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

#87

Post by mooreds »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #39

> 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…

Control. If you control your IP, then the company is more valuable because there are more options (whether selling the company, relicensing/dual licensing or something else).

It's similar to developers assigning copyright when they make a contribution to an open source project--keeps control in one place, makes it easier to make long term decisions about the project (for the project's maintainers).

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

#88

Post by jrochkind1 »

jedberg wrote: post #61

Same. I've very wary of investing or getting involved with any company that has an open source strategy. I worked for one (Sendmail) and it did not go well. We talked about how it's hard to compete when your number one competitor is your own software for $0. If you look at successful public companies with open source, they are all fairly small successes compared to their public closed source peers. When I worked at r…

> "if it's involved in infrastructure, open source it, if it's related to movies, keep it closed."

In the first wave(s) of open source, I think most contributors were working on company time, but the open source was not the primary product of the company. It was something useful to the business of the company, without being the business of the company.

So what you describe seems to fit into that model.

That model seems to be less and less of open source contribution though. (I am not certain why). And I think that has a lot to do with current apparent crises in open source sustainability -- it was the model that worked, for a while, to produce and maintain lots of open source. I am not sure "open source companies" ever really have.

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

#89

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ignoramous wrote: post #52

If engineers are the most important resource, I think being a company known for open source might act as an inbound sales for attracting top talent, too (see: Google, RedHat, Mozilla). For engineers, it makes sense to work for companies that do have FOSS projects because they can always point to their corpus of work when switching between jobs as proof of their worth. Most engineers who realise this don't ever want t…

> "the most precious commodity of all, developer mindshare"

Reading the above reminds me of a not too long ago news story, titled "An Influencer With 2 Million Followers Couldn't Sell 36 T-Shirts": https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a27623334/...

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

#90

Post by hapless »

The author makes a good case against open source businesses, but he indulges himself in a false dichotomy between a traditional proprietary model and open source.

Increasingly often, there is no market for your proprietary software. It is then not a choice between open source and proprietary models, but rather between doing open source or doing nothing.

A lot of markets are just gone, and they're not coming back. Odds are, you're never going to sell another proprietary UNIX clone, or a proprietary database, or a proprietary application server. There are no punters. Those niches have been extinguished.

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