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Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

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Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#41

Post by geerlingguy »

nrawe wrote: post #34
ergonaught wrote: post #22

Products aren't projects, which has confused people for decades. If open source products retreating from some of the "freedom" elements bothers you, then you should be focusing your ire on the megacorporations and overfunded startups who simply refuse to contribute to the financial viability of the products that sustain them. For some reason "we" celebrate the exploitative, though, so I guess that's out.

Yep. The author complains that there used to be plucky startups with Open Core business models who've now gone "extinct", while simultaneously sharpening their pitchforks because those same companies got successful and _slightly_ amended their licenses to prevent loosing revenue against IaaS giants so that they can, in turn, continue innovating. I guess money grows on trees where they live.

The projects I think of most are redis and ansible—both of which I've used extensively, and quickly went from 'neat thing I spotted on Hacker News' to 'now it's a startup', then a few years later 'it's just another corporation, the open source project is buried somewhere deep inside'.

The projects weren't as much open core as they were literal open source projects made to solve some problem the author had with other existing tooling. The open core part was injected when the startup decided it had to turn into a platform to sustain the beefy staffing budgets while they figured out how to generate revenue off something that was freely available.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#42

Post by jacobr1 »

skywhopper wrote: post #33
leetharris wrote: post #3

Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady. I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative. I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work,…

Just because they’re failing doesn’t mean switching licenses will help. HashiCorp did not increase the popularity of Terraform Cloud by clamping down on the ability of other companies to host Terraform services. There were any number of things HashiCorp could have done to improve revenue generation from their products without changing the source license. When they realized they weren’t building the best SaaS version…

> When they realized they weren’t building the best SaaS version of their products, they didn’t try to improve their service

They went there several versions of their cloud products over the years, and pivoted a few times during that span

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#43

Post by [deleted] »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #10
kevingadd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do actual open source and your product is any good, somebody else is just going to repackage it and sell it, either as SAAS/IAAS or as a boxed product. So why not get there first? It's depressing. That's been my experience every time I gave code away, at least. Somebody else made money off it.

It's why things like Captura no longer exist. You make something fantastic with an open source license, someone else renames it and sells it in app stores, and the people running the app stores go "the license allowed for this, we see nothing wrong". It's well past time for getting rid of licenses that say "you can do what you like with this software", and replace them with licenses that allows you to sell as long as…

[deleted]

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#44

Post by radlad »

geerlingguy wrote: post #41
nrawe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The author complains that there used to be plucky startups with Open Core business models who've now gone "extinct", while simultaneously sharpening their pitchforks because those same companies got successful and _slightly_ amended their licenses to prevent loosing revenue against IaaS giants so that they can, in turn, continue innovating. I guess money grows on trees where they live.

The projects I think of most are redis and ansible—both of which I've used extensively, and quickly went from 'neat thing I spotted on Hacker News' to 'now it's a startup', then a few years later 'it's just another corporation, the open source project is buried somewhere deep inside'. The projects weren't as much open core as they were literal open source projects made to solve some problem the author had with other…

You can add nginx to the list as well.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#45

Post by phkahler »

leetharris wrote: post #3

Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady. I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative. I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work,…

>> Source available from the beginning is ethical.

It's also mostly pointless. If someone wants to develop features for software they pay for I guess that's their choice.

>> I'm not sure what people want these companies to do.

Not rug-pull.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#46

Post by kube-system »

kevingadd wrote: post #38
kube-system wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it depressing? It was your choice to share it.

I think at this point it's undisputed that modern society relies on a lot of permissively licensed software, and the people who maintain that software aren't getting paid enough (or at all) to do it. xz is only the most recent example, NTP and OpenSSL come to mind. I used to do OSS development full time, but it wasn't financially sustainable for me.

IMO, that's more of a sad story about the state of respect for supply chain risk management in the software engineering discipline. It may be convenient at first to add a bunch of dependencies for free that solve a particular task, and ignore the part that says "AS IS WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND". The only thing a FOSS license gives anyone is code. It never gave anyone maintenance or support.

Any organization that uses software that is "as is" should have a plan to maintain that software themselves, or mitigate the risk in other ways. And many of the large players in this industry do exactly that, and their full-time employees are top contributors to many large FOSS projects.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#47

Post by buildfocus »

There are uses for CLAs besides rug pulls. For example, if you want to offer software as AGPL, accept community contributions, but be able to _also_ offer a non-AGPL option to paying customers (who effectively pay to be allowed to integrate the license without themselves being subject to licensing risk). Quite a few big orgs have a full ban on internal use of AGPL software so this can be very valuable.

That requires a CLA (as I understand it, IANAL) because you're relicensing a contributor's contribution. At the same time though, I wouldn't consider it a rugpull - contributors lose nothing here, and the open source project gains a funding mechanism (a rare thing in open source).

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#48

Post by radlad »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #36
TillE wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with making and selling proprietary software. If you want to make money, you should probably just do that. I'm very happy to have created a mildly popular permissively-licensed library. It's a contribution to a community with zero intention of profit. That is, for the most part, what open source is all about.

If you read me as saying making and selling proprietary software was wrong, you read a very different text from what I wrote. Making and selling software is perfectly fine, and building that software on top of libraries specifically released for that purpose is equally fine. Open source licenses that in perpetuity lock you out of any form of gains from your own work , even when that work is the very backbone of someo…

I believe the parent is responding primarily to this point:

> The idea that you just mark your work as MIT/GPL/CC0 may have made open source more popular, but it also ruins lives when that thing you worked on for years and never made you anything makes a random drive-by asshole more than your annual salary.

There's no reason this should ruin your life - your quality of living didn't suddenly decrease. If you are unhappy with this outcome, you probably didn't really intend to create open source software, and should stick to writing proprietary software.

> Open source licenses that in perpetuity lock you out of any form of gains from your own work, even when that work is the very backbone of someone else's non-open-source, for-pay product, are morally objectionable licenses.

It is simply false that open source licenses lock you out of any form of gains from your own work. They allow others the opportunity to benefit from it, as you yourself can too.

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#49

Post by Ekaros »

stuff4ben wrote: post #21

I don't blame the big corps like IBM (disclaimer: I work there, I don't speak for them) and Microsoft and Google. I really blame investors who are looking to get their money back. When they force an IPO but there's no business model to sustain the company, this is what happens. CEOs resort to developer-hostile actions which kills off the community and generates ill-will towards the company. People here shit on "lifes…

If you offer something for free. And it becomes popular partly because it is free. Well it should be pretty clear that there is not huge money in free product... And at some level someone packaging with some margin your free product is well...

Re: Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

#50

Post by amouat »

The declining share price and profits is exactly what made it possible for IBM to buy Hashicorp. The license change didn't juice things -- it watered down the price. $6 billion is a snip compared to the $14 billion IPO valuation.

Fintan Ryan has a nice write-up here: https://medium.com/@fintanr/on-ibm-acquiring-hashicorp-c9c73...

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