Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The life and death of open source companies

lucumr.pocoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 207 posts

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#11

Post by drewdevault »

Sorry, Armin, but this is such nonsense.

Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutting them on hardware costs. Now that Prusa is non-free, they have lost both the price, the hackability, and the moral advantage. It's an utterly braindead move. If Prusa were smart they would be looking for ways to reduce production costs to get down to similar price points, investing in usability improvements, and doubling down on the free software approach. Let's face it, Prusa got complacent and someone at their lunch.

You can monetize free software without breaking the social contract. I'm quite fine with your licensing approach with FSL, but it's not free software nor open source, and it does not align with the social contract, and that's all well and good so long as you can acknowledge that -- and live with the consequences, such as heavily disincentivizing third-party contributions. But you can make money with genuinely free software, social contract and everything, if you're smarter about it than barking up the VC tree and promising infinite growth and monopolization using a tool (open source) which is not suited for that purpose by design -- that was Sentry's mistake. Honestly, I'm glad that FSL is working out for you, but by no means does it justify some call to action to water down FOSS nor is it indicative of some fundamental problem with FOSS.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#12

Post by jampekka »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #8

The tragedy with any form of software development is that it becomes a commodity very quickly. That's why open source works so well for commodity software. The challenge is that while everybody needs commodity software, they aren't necessarily willing to pay for it. People pay for other things like managed services, support, etc. But not for software directly. Take operating systems as an example. Unless you have ver…

The true tragedy is the economic system that makes this a tragedy.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#13

Post by drewdevault »

pydry wrote: post #3

If you need to see why stuff like the BPL and FSL is needed you only need to compare the commit histories of ElasticSearch and its fork when Jeff Bezos bravely "stepped up for open source" with OpenSearch ( https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-tr... ). It's not like Jeff couldnt invest to make better software than elastic. They have the money. Theyd just rather feast off Elastic's plate until Ela…

Elastic's revenue was north of half a billion dollars when they changed their license. Amazon was most decidedly not killing them. It was motivated by greed, like it always is.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#14

Post by sverhagen »

drewdevault wrote: post #11

Sorry, Armin, but this is such nonsense. Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutt…

Just wondering aloud, here, could it be that the open source company comes from a place of feigned or real enlightenment that makes it hard to compete on hardware cost, as the lowest-possible hardware cost may require unethical practices in sourcing or production? Even something like "manufactured in the USA", if that were something you're into, I have to imagine, might make it hard to compete on hardware cost, compared to China.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#15

Post by pydry »

drewdevault wrote: post #13
pydry wrote: post #3

If you need to see why stuff like the BPL and FSL is needed you only need to compare the commit histories of ElasticSearch and its fork when Jeff Bezos bravely "stepped up for open source" with OpenSearch ( https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-tr... ). It's not like Jeff couldnt invest to make better software than elastic. They have the money. Theyd just rather feast off Elastic's plate until Ela…

Elastic's revenue was north of half a billion dollars when they changed their license. Amazon was most decidedly not killing them. It was motivated by greed, like it always is.

Still posting losses.

It's not generally considered a wise business move to wait until your corpse is already being feasted upon before changing direction.

Long term they absolutely would have been killed - computing is being consolidated onto one of 4 platforms, all of which would squeeze out elastic using their market dominance as leverage.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#16

Post by drewdevault »

sverhagen wrote: post #14
drewdevault wrote: post #11

Sorry, Armin, but this is such nonsense. Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutt…

Just wondering aloud, here, could it be that the open source company comes from a place of feigned or real enlightenment that makes it hard to compete on hardware cost, as the lowest-possible hardware cost may require unethical practices in sourcing or production? Even something like "manufactured in the USA", if that were something you're into, I have to imagine, might make it hard to compete on hardware cost, compa…

Yes, quite likely. This is not really a matter of FOSS or not, but it is something that Prusa absolutely needed to have foreseen and made a viable business plan to address. Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that.

That could have taken many forms. They might have invested in a much stronger brand, aiming to make Prusa (needs a better name tbh) synonymous with 3D printing, and developing a product line which covers a wider range of needs, from entry-level highly-usable stuff up to hackable mid-tier things and possibly high-end workshop printers as well, all of which should have had a shared brand identity. China can't really compete on reputation, so that's where to focus. Moreover, they could have invested more in services surrounding the product, such as the aforementioned cloud printing services, perhaps a thingiverse-equivalent with a models marketplace and a small margin off of that, etc. Auto-detect when your filament is running low and have a subscription service to ship you a new one -- maybe the cloud printer notices when you don't have enough in stock for a model you want and suggests you order more.

Just making a new model every 2 or 3 years and hoping China wouldn't notice was a very stupid strategy, and the free or non-free nature of their firmware has nothing to do with that.

This is such a common failure mode in open source companies -- they think that the code is 90% of the battle for the market. It's not, it's more like 5% at best and because it's open source the rest of the market can make use of it. This can be very powerful if you're smart about it, but "write the code and the rest will work out" is not that.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#17

Post by chii »

jampekka wrote: post #12
jillesvangurp wrote: post #8

The tragedy with any form of software development is that it becomes a commodity very quickly. That's why open source works so well for commodity software. The challenge is that while everybody needs commodity software, they aren't necessarily willing to pay for it. People pay for other things like managed services, support, etc. But not for software directly. Take operating systems as an example. Unless you have ver…

The true tragedy is the economic system that makes this a tragedy.

software has zero marginal cost, so therefore, if a piece of software can be used by the majority of humans, it makes sense that it ends up costing very little per instance of it.

It's not a tragedy. It's actually a good outcome imho.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#18

Post by DeathArrow »

>They offer a user friendly experience at a very attractive price point

That's what most users care about. That it just works and it does that at an attractive price point.

The rest is ideology and politics, which is fine if it's what you are into, but most people won't care.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#19

Post by chii »

bruce511 wrote: post #6

I feel like the problem is defined in the title. Open Source. Company. These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well. Over and over we see the same story playing out. Companies need to make revenues to sustain the employees. Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the…

> decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source.

these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge.

That is what i associate with any open source company.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#20

Post by chii »

drewdevault wrote: post #16
sverhagen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering aloud, here, could it be that the open source company comes from a place of feigned or real enlightenment that makes it hard to compete on hardware cost, as the lowest-possible hardware cost may require unethical practices in sourcing or production? Even something like "manufactured in the USA", if that were something you're into, I have to imagine, might make it hard to compete on hardware cost, compa…

Yes, quite likely. This is not really a matter of FOSS or not, but it is something that Prusa absolutely needed to have foreseen and made a viable business plan to address. Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that. That could have taken many forms. They might have invested in a much stronger brand, aiming to make Prusa (needs a bett…

> Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that.

none of those plans would work - at best they're a gamble.

> China can't really compete on reputation

nor will they. The competition is always going to be on price. It's why counterfits exists as a market, but not only counterfits but also white-labeled copies.

The only thing that china cannot clone is technology they cannot get access to - such as high tech semi conductors, and that's thru a lot of losses copped by the shareholders by fiat from the US gov't.

Post reply on HN