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I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
101–110 of 179 posts
Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
#102If 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/...
If we are cherrypicking examples, here's one from the time when Cisco reluctantly opensourced a router's firmware because GPL, "Linksys continues to earn millions of dollars per year selling an 11-year-old product without ever changing its specs or design... That product really is what made the company." https://thenewstack.io/the-open-source-lesson-of-the-linksys...
Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
#103The 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. Od…
This is a really good point. However, there are still successes that I'd never have expected. Jetbrains is a good example. Who would have thought that an IDE could be sold when there are adequate ones for free?
There are also many many smaller niches where software can be sold because there isn't adequate developer interest to create OSS. One example is this: https://querix.com/products/lycia (not a customer, just ran across their product).
Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
#104The 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…
> 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 out far ahead of the proprietary product in which you capture close to 100% of the market.
The point of the post is that even if you capture a huge portion of the market, monetising it is very difficult, and profitability potential is the main reason you invest.
While open source databases struggle to be profitable, MS SQL Server and Oracle are both very profitable. Why? Strong product-market fit - these products are heavily targeted at enterprise who are willing to pay money, and there is no 'free roll your own' solution to avoid paying the licence fees.
Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
#105Same. 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…
> The biggest benefit was being able to show people the code when they suspected shenanigans.
This is very interesting to me. How was that a benefit?
Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
#106Earlier 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.
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.
To be clear, I don't typically have any issue with corporate use of my code. That's why I chose MIT and other permissive licenses.
That said, what I had in mind when I licensed my code were start-ups and small+medium businesses. It didn't occur to me that behemoths like Amazon might stripmine open source and fail to contribute back. Even though the permissive licenses permit this kind of behavior, it seems exploitative.
Additionally, as the GP mentions, we're at the point where it's primarily massive tech companies who can afford to develop ambitious open source projects.
Far more importantly, it also failed to occur to me that tech companies would become the new railroads -- massive monopolies that dominate society, the economy, culture, politics, etc. When I started in open source, Microsoft had recently been slapped down by antitrust regulators, there was no social media, and the tech ecosystem - particularly the open source ecosystem - was much, much different. It was more democratic, egalitarian, and balanced.
Granted, as far as I know, it has been small and medium sized companies that have used my own open source code. I'm not aware of any of the Big 5 using it (my most popular libaries have been superceded by newer/better projects anyway).
Nonetheless, I would have been more wary of philosophically supporting permissive licenses had I fully realized the implications.
Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
#107Earlier 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?
See my other comment in this thread for my answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25896907
Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
#108If 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…
Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion. How much is GitLab worth? How much money has Microsoft made selling Windows vs Linus off Linux? How much money does Apple make off iThings?
Correct me if I'm wrong but GitHub was first, and has more users.
Given that GitHub is more popular, I'd suggest the only reason we know about gitlab is because its open source.
Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
#109The 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. Od…
This is a really good point. However, there are still successes that I'd never have expected. Jetbrains is a good example. Who would have thought that an IDE could be sold when there are adequate ones for free? There are also many many smaller niches where software can be sold because there isn't adequate developer interest to create OSS. One example is this: https://querix.com/products/lycia (not a customer, just ra…
It's worth noting that Querix was founded back in 1994 -- when Informix and proprietary databases were more popular than today.
Re: I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one
#110The 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. Od…
This is a really good point. However, there are still successes that I'd never have expected. Jetbrains is a good example. Who would have thought that an IDE could be sold when there are adequate ones for free? There are also many many smaller niches where software can be sold because there isn't adequate developer interest to create OSS. One example is this: https://querix.com/products/lycia (not a customer, just ra…
I personally have been being using Intellij for everything for the last five years.
I tried to migrate to VSCode for golang.
I mean, don't get me wrong, the situation is not the worst possible, but the only reason you would want to use that is because you never tried refactoring with Goland.
Are you kidding me? I had to go look for what is the current needed extensions for go that are still maintained, configure them etc...vs just download and use Goland.
If you can't or don't want to spend money OK, but otherwise is a non sense to use anything else.