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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

#141

Post by totoglazer »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #135
hapless wrote: post #90

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. Od…

The market for new proprietary databases is both large and lucrative -- it is printing money right now. What has changed is the structure of the market and the product economics. The classic marketing-driven retail database product model, the kind that puts billboards on the 101, stopped working as a financial model a decade ago -- development costs are too high for the marginal return. That has been replaced by mode…

This is fascinating! Could you share some names of these databases? I’d love to learn more.

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

#142

Post by zaphirplane »

jedberg wrote: post #112
mooreds wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It helped shutting down rumors or runaway conspiracy theories. You know how reddit can get when they have an idea in their head, wrong or not.

In the nicest way possible, how does that work, this is the code but what is running could be different

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

#143

Post by zaphirplane »

InvOfSmallC wrote: post #110
mooreds wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So pay for it in dollars or in time ;) but goland isn’t free last time I checked

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

#144

Post by mewpmewp2 »

zaphirplane wrote: post #142
jedberg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helped shutting down rumors or runaway conspiracy theories. You know how reddit can get when they have an idea in their head, wrong or not.

In the nicest way possible, how does that work, this is the code but what is running could be different

I guess if there was some odd result in the upvote count or something they could show the code how it could lead to this exact same result naturally.

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

#145

Post by sitkack »

totoglazer wrote: post #141
jandrewrogers wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market for new proprietary databases is both large and lucrative -- it is printing money right now. What has changed is the structure of the market and the product economics. The classic marketing-driven retail database product model, the kind that puts billboards on the 101, stopped working as a financial model a decade ago -- development costs are too high for the marginal return. That has been replaced by mode…

This is fascinating! Could you share some names of these databases? I’d love to learn more.

BigQuery and Snowflake are my top two.

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

#146

Post by sitkack »

alfonsodev wrote: post #80
madmax96 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

$6B, It’s not so far behind[1] and that before exiting, and I don’t know how much founders retain vs GitHub founders. But what if would be less, not everything has to be about market valuations. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/gitlab-oversaw-a-195-milli...

I can't fathom that, at all. I think the market is broken.

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

#147

Post by enriquto »

nemothekid wrote: post #77
enriquto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lawyers don't like GPLv3 and they don't like AGPL. Whose lawyers? Why would the lawyers at your company object that your choice of license for the free software that you publish is the AGPL or the GPL?

This is a post about running an open source company. In other words, you have to worry about your prospective customer's lawyers objecting to your product just because it is in part AGPL. You could just upsell with a different license; but from a business model perspective that makes the distribution channel of open source irrelevant.

What you are describing sounds more like a problem with sales, or marketing, than with legal. I don't think your legal department would prefer you to use BSD instead of AGPL.

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

#148

Post by ThePhysicist »

the-dude wrote: post #50
ThePhysicist wrote: post #2

For standalone software like databases or CLI tools AGPL isn't an issue, if legal departments would object against using such software those companies couldn't run Linux/GNU tools either. For libraries it's a different story of course. The other points are mostly true, I think if open-source is just a marketing strategy to you it's not worth it.

Uhh, wasn't this what the Elastic license change was all about?

No, Elastic was licensed as Apache 2.0, which is much more liberal than AGPL. Also, they changed the license because a large company basically resold their solution withtout granting them a share of the revenue. OPs point about the (A)GPL was that it would hinder the adoption of OS software by companies.

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

#149

Post by jabl »

Rochus wrote: post #47
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, there are also many who want to contribute code back to GPL and LGPL projects, but can't because the companies that control these projects want them to sign contributor agreements with unacceptable terms.

Probably a big reason why Linux is successful in attracting contributions; the distributed copyright means that there's nobody more equal among equals that has the sole right to monetize it however they see fit. Everybody gets the same deal.

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

#150

Post by jabl »

monoideism wrote: post #106
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exploitati…

> 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.

These are social and political problems, you can't fix them by sitting in your basement writing copyleft code anymore than you fix them by writing permissively licensed code.

It's not like the FAANG's of the world would go, oh no we really want to use this copyleft library, oh well, let's release all our code under a copyleft license as well. They'd just use some other code with a more permissive license, or then they would reimplement the needed functionality themselves.

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