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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

#171

Post by cutemonster »

jabl wrote: post #152
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?

Dual licensing requires copyright assignment, largely preventing a community of contributors forming around the software (nobody wants to provide free labor to somebody else's get rich quick scheme), which is one of the big advantages of OSS in the first place. In a way, dual licensing is essentially proprietary software, with a for free version that you hope will satisfy as few users as possible. A bit like the old…

> Dual licensing requires copyright assignment

No.

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

#172

Post by iudqnolq »

nemothekid wrote: post #168
enriquto wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't think your legal department would prefer you to use BSD instead of AGPL. Google's legal department is the problem: https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/ There's likely nothing your sales or marketing team can when Google, and companies that cargo cult Google's legal, decide not to allow your product gain a foot in the door because of its license.

The last sentence of that policy is the whole point of a FOSS company using AGPL

> In some cases, we may have alternative licenses available for AGPL licensed code.

Large companies pay, others don't need to.

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

#173

Post by iso1210 »

Google234 wrote: post #10
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.

Then they can give the source code out to anyone...

And?

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

#174

Post by kemitchell »

iso1210 wrote: post #9
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?

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.

> 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.

I'd encourage you to read the GOLs and some of the legal commentary about them, if you haven't already. "Clean" is a value judgment, but as one who routinely handles both open source and commercial license agreements, I'd never refer to GPL as particularly "clean", and I doubt I have any colleagues who would.

The summary you give is not complete, overall. And it omits a lot of details that can prove important.

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

#175

Post by kemitchell »

cutemonster wrote: post #171
jabl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dual licensing requires copyright assignment, largely preventing a community of contributors forming around the software (nobody wants to provide free labor to somebody else's get rich quick scheme), which is one of the big advantages of OSS in the first place. In a way, dual licensing is essentially proprietary software, with a for free version that you hope will satisfy as few users as possible. A bit like the old…

> Dual licensing requires copyright assignment No.

cutemonster is correct. Dual licensing can and does happen without copyright assignments. It can even happen without contributor license agreements, if contributors make their work available under permissive terms in addition to the required copyleft terms.

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

#176

Post by kemitchell »

jabl wrote: post #152
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?

Dual licensing requires copyright assignment, largely preventing a community of contributors forming around the software (nobody wants to provide free labor to somebody else's get rich quick scheme), which is one of the big advantages of OSS in the first place. In a way, dual licensing is essentially proprietary software, with a for free version that you hope will satisfy as few users as possible. A bit like the old…

The perverse incentive of scaring people about the license only really works if the license is hard to parse or the sales team is really unethical. Unfortunately that has proved the case when firms choose a GPL and hire the wrong people.

If the license is straightforward enough, or comes from a neutral organization that publishes trustworthy lay summaries, as Creative Commons does, there's less room for sales incentives to run wild. The usual conflicts of interest in other business models, like holding back code or doc, making the software hard to use, and so on break down, because there's just one product. Customers pay to use the product.

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

#177

Post by jandrewrogers »

hodgesrm wrote: post #169
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…

> Proprietary databases have found their niche with qualitatively higher performance and throughput -- often 10-100x -- than the best open source has to offer on the same hardware footprint. This is not true in general. It depends on the workload. Here's an example: MySQL 8.0 is benchmarked at over 1M QPS on I/O bound reads using Optane SSDs. [1] You would need to show that proprietary software hits 10-100M QPS for t…

This really isn't comparing against Oracle or SQL Server, which are both legacy architectures. And you don't need Optane SSDs; people do better than that with cheap NVMe JBODs like you get on EC2. Also, something is only "I/O bound" if it is literally running at the theoretical limits of the storage hardware. And even that doesn't imply another database couldn't drive much more workload with the same theoretical bandwidth; many popular databases employ architectures that unnecessarily burn storage bandwidth.

It is pretty rare for these days for a modern database engine to be I/O bound in a storage sense, even with cheap solid-state storage. Certainly not for fast-twitch query workloads. For most data models and workloads, the bottleneck is either memory or network bandwidth if you are doing everything else right.

MySQL isn't typically held up as a paragon of query performance. It is solidly middle of the road. It is part of a generation of architectures that can't get anywhere close to current high-performance architectures. Every database architecture suffers this fate as they get older.

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

#178

Post by hodgesrm »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #177
hodgesrm wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proprietary databases have found their niche with qualitatively higher performance and throughput -- often 10-100x -- than the best open source has to offer on the same hardware footprint. This is not true in general. It depends on the workload. Here's an example: MySQL 8.0 is benchmarked at over 1M QPS on I/O bound reads using Optane SSDs. [1] You would need to show that proprietary software hits 10-100M QPS for t…

This really isn't comparing against Oracle or SQL Server, which are both legacy architectures. And you don't need Optane SSDs; people do better than that with cheap NVMe JBODs like you get on EC2. Also, something is only "I/O bound" if it is literally running at the theoretical limits of the storage hardware. And even that doesn't imply another database couldn't drive much more workload with the same theoretical band…

Right, I realized I put in the Oracle comparison which was beside the point but decided not to edit it out.

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

#179

Post by CRConrad »

tinco wrote: post #114
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 did, there's never been really good community driven open source IDE's. For every community driven IDE I can name you an enterprise driven IDE that's popular and arguably better. Code editors are a product where polish has high value, and users are willing to pay for that polish. I don't particularly care if my editor is open source as long as it's got strong community and great polish.

From what little I've tried it, the open-source Object Pascal IDE Lazarus doesn't really feel all that much worse than Bo– ah, In– eh, Co– uh, Id– erm, Embarcadero Delphi.
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