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Death of an open-source business model

joemorrison.medium.com

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Re: Death of an open-source business model

#101

Post by _puk »

senko wrote: post #49
lepikhin wrote: post #48

Can the license simply have a clause that user is not in Amazon, Microsoft or any public cloud provider?

Sure. It wouldn't be open source any longer, tho.

There's more than one licence that's open source.

Is there a reason that a new style of licence that prevents the "fork and suffocate" approach of these large companies can't be ratified as fitting with core open source values?

Being dogmatic about the definition of open source, and not allowing that to evolve over time, feels like hard times ahead.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#102

Post by nine_k »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #95

Open source doesn't work and I'm glad the world is starting to understand. It promotes unfair compensation (or lack thereof). If you have the skills to advance technology and no capital to invest to acquire other technical solutions you may need, you can get a job and use that money to pay what Expecting free work from people rarely work, there are just not enough motivated individuals willing to work and maintain so…

Why, open source does work: look at Linux, Webkit, Postgres, LLVM, any programming language with wide adoption, every serious Web framework.

But open source does not necessarily mean:

- that the bulk of the work is done by people at their leisure, unpaid;

- that commercial use for free is necessarily easy or possible; dual licensing has a long history.

- that large companies have no interest in maintaining, advancing, financing, or starting open-source projects: currently the opposite is true.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#103

Post by julianmarq »

lacker wrote: post #78

My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the success of the open core business model. For 99% of use cases, MongoDB is open source. You can see the code, you can make modifications, you can use it for free in your business, you can share your changes with others, you can integrate it into your products and services. Yeah, y…

I'd replace mongo with redis in your comment. Redis truly is open core, but mongo no longer is. Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros.

Calling mongo open source now just dilutes what "open source" actually means. The organization even removed the submission of its license for approval by the OSI.

It's source available, and it's up to each person to decide whether that's good or bad.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#104

Post by smashah »

As a maintainer of a a relatively tiny "open source" project, I've been going through the same thing over the last few months. People relied on the project, ok let's go open-core 99% is free, a few obscure features require a license key.

Now I'm seeing cloud providers built on top of my project with almost no significant changes (other than I guess bypassing my licensing mechanism) and they contribute nothing in terms of support or code.

Now I'm building out the cloud service and am slowly moving away from this being an open source project to more like a project that has some code that you can see and a public issue tracker.

I have several pitch decks/one pagers ready to go and written up for VCs but have been hesitant due the reasoning in this article.

But there is soon coming a time when I will have to pull the trigger and send those emails.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#105

Post by nine_k »

linuxhansl wrote: post #87

IMHO "open core" is not a good idea in the first place. Open source is about an open community, open contributions, the multiplier you get from contributions from multiple companies. That way open source is a win-win. Companies benefit from each other's contributions. It's _not_ about just showing the code or a free-for-all. Once you have free and non-free tiers it's already broken. The incentives no longer align. I'…

IMHO, free + non-free can be fine, e.g. AGPL + commercial cloud license.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#106

Post by pulse7 »

nrvn wrote: post #82
pulse7 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"(a) making it easy to fund projects" I don't know how it is in the US, but in EU you need a regular invoice for a business expense. So if a company wants to support an open-source project today, they need an invoice from the authors. Now try to get this from the author of your favorite GitHub open-source library... And for large corporations you need to get a quote / an offer so that a business decision may be made…

What about non-profit organizations, donations, charity funds? I doubt that there is absolutely no way for EU based companies and people to support open source projects snd teams behind them

In my country a company can legally donate if: a) organization is on a list of approved non-profit organizations or b) you sign a contract with organization where the purpose of donations is clearly defined. Usually authors of open-source projects are not "approved non-profits" so you must have a contract with them...

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#107

Post by _puk »

_puk wrote: post #101
senko wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. It wouldn't be open source any longer, tho.

There's more than one licence that's open source. Is there a reason that a new style of licence that prevents the "fork and suffocate" approach of these large companies can't be ratified as fitting with core open source values? Being dogmatic about the definition of open source, and not allowing that to evolve over time, feels like hard times ahead.

And just to build on that thought.

(IMO) The only people who really care about open source are us, the philanthropic builders of said software.

If we shout down those in our community who question the status quo, by simply stating "it's not open source", then we lose those people.

Given the hard stance we see on open source, it's very seldom that the reply to that is "but why can't it be".

An analogy that springs to mind is jslint (bear with me here..). A great idea that had true belief at heart, but was just too strict for mass adoption.

JSLint started a wave of enforcement that was needed, yet the far more flexible jshint (and subsequent eslint) won out in the long run.

I'm fully onboard with truly open source, and think there will always be a place for it. But feel that being all or nothing suffocates the discussion.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#108

Post by argomo »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #95

Open source doesn't work and I'm glad the world is starting to understand. It promotes unfair compensation (or lack thereof). If you have the skills to advance technology and no capital to invest to acquire other technical solutions you may need, you can get a job and use that money to pay what Expecting free work from people rarely work, there are just not enough motivated individuals willing to work and maintain so…

I think you've successfully argued against your own point.

With open source, developers are paid for ∆V -- the amount of value added to a project. Companies are paid $0 in most models but it's backed by a monetization model that's non-zero. Basically, more work == more value == more pay.

With proprietary software, developers are still paid ∆V, but companies are paid for V∆t -- value times the duration of usage. While some of this is just compensation for risking investor money, the ultimate model is rent-seeking and lock-in. This is extractive because the company keeps getting paid even when they don't add value.

You may raise concern that volunteer developers don't get compensation, but use that a problem for a voluntary activity? People program as a hobby, to scratch an itch, to develop mastery, to solve a problem they already have, to advance an ideology, or for a chance at recognition/popularity. Only that last one is anything near a problem, and it's the same boat as first time authors or artists.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#109

Post by paulgb »

evanelias wrote: post #88
paulgb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been interested in this pattern as well. I’d contend that GitLab is another good example, and even argue that Automattic is too (IIRC Movable Type was already a successful proprietary blogging platform when WordPress came along) Which is all to say, if you write that post, I for one will read it :)

I don't think Automattic really fits the same pattern. Although Movable Type was one of the earliest and most successful source-available blogging platforms, there were a bunch of others soon after. They all had similarities in functionality, by nature of being blogging software, but they weren't exactly "clones". WordPress was actually a fork of another early blogging software, b2/cafelog. When Six Apart made Movabl…

Thanks for the context. I wasn’t really involved in WordPress until a few years after, so the early history is foggy to me.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#110

Post by vosper »

lacker wrote: post #78

My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the success of the open core business model. For 99% of use cases, MongoDB is open source. You can see the code, you can make modifications, you can use it for free in your business, you can share your changes with others, you can integrate it into your products and services. Yeah, y…

Mongo is also proving the success of vendor lock-in: you (or the engineers before you, and the engineers before them) make a mess in Mongo, because there are no relations and no schemas [0], and it becomes really difficult to get off it.

The effort required just to get your data in a state that's clean enough to consider moving to the RDBMS you should have started with can be overwhelming.

Then you have to rewrite your queries out of their custom query language.

Is it Mongo's fault you made a mess in your database? No, of course not. And their dashboard is actually pretty nice. But you are massively locked-in.

Source: own a production Mongo DB with years of accumulated mess in it. Desperate to get off it. Paying customer of Mongo's hosting (it's one less Mongo thing to deal with, at least).

[0] There is schema support now, but it's only JSON schema and it's relatively new in the scheme [sorry] of things

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