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The life and death of open source companies

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Re: The life and death of open source companies

#101

Post by jraph »

Arch-TK wrote: post #91
jraph wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggested, I didn't recommend. I chose my words carefully. Under the condition that the person believes open source is the right thing to do. You need to believe in what you do when you start a company. I also suggest based on the fact that I do work for such a company, which has been successful. Next year is its 20th anniversary. It's an amazing place to work at. You can create amazing work environments out of ope…

Where do I find these open source companies? In the UK it seems like they don't exist. But maybe I am looking in the wrong places.

I believe New Vector Ltd, which builds Element [1], is in the UK. You also have Collabora [2] and probably others as well.

If you are willing to work from home, you could join one from France or Germany where many of them are established, the time difference is small. You get to work in an international setting which is also relatively small size.

When I was looking for a job, I actually listed open source software I may enjoy working on and find who was behind. I ended up running into my current company at an open source event, so you might also want to go to one of these.

[1] https://element.io/

[2] https://collabora.com/

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#102

Post by sjfjsjdjwvwvc »

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #31

Here we go again. Open Source, as currently defined is hard to monetize, so lets go ahead and call Open Source something which makes it easy. Note though Easy Monetization was never goal of Open Source, so why not instead leave Open Source alone and focus on defining something different, which is focused on being easy to monetize.

Yea open source developers who want to get paid or make a living from their work can suck it, damn fools what did they expect!

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#103

Post by hutzlibu »

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…

"My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source"

I don't think this is true in general, but maybe indeed in many cases. And a non profit organisation would be a better fit(tax reductible donations!), but those are not exactly easy to set up and a project in itself.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#104

Post by jraph »

rmbyrro wrote: post #90
sh79 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a company inherently carries a risk of failure with it. You seem to be taking it the wrong way, you really shouldn't be building your company based on a few opinions of HN comments, nor it's their responsibility to outline the full extent of risks involved.

The point is that Open Source, by design, drammatically increases the likelihood of failure. It's already hard to build a successful business. Odds are already thin for you to succeed. Why choose a model that worsens it? Open Source was not created as a funding source to for-profit ventures. That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and t…

> That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source.

You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does:

- develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees.

- sell support and consulting on this product

- sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this product, with support

Totally withing the free software / open source spirit. The world gets great open source software for free (not open core: truly and completely open source), and the business behind it is sustainable as well. We also donate to some open source projects that we use, chosen by employees.

At some point, if you want open source to take over, you need it to grow and strive, and having it supported by business is a great way of getting this. The world probably cannot be run only by side projects.

Not saying that all open source companies behave this well, but it's not an impossible outcome.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#105

Post by usrusr »

jraph wrote: post #34
chii wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not always pure marketing. There are companies who truly have open source / free software in their DNA. The founders are true open source proponents, and some people joined these companies because of the open source aspect. Because of this, sometimes, a majority of the people in these companies are pro-open source and will skew things towards this. Some don't even have investors pushing against this. What do you…

People, founders or not, are of little consequence when they are not owners, and majority at that. Which companies of that list are bootstrapped, and which have taken outside investment? I would only consider the bootstrapped ones valid entries, all others just haven't left the pretend stage yet.

If you already did base your list on bootstrappedness, consider this post strong agreement: because that's what I'm trying to say. Yes, there are companies that can be considered "true to the idea of open source" (sqlite! Even though technically neither a company nor open source), but there's a clear cutoff.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#106

Post by zaphar »

drewdevault wrote: post #43
punkybr3wster wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reduce production costs to get down to similar price points How on earth is anyone supposed to compete with near slave labor in China?

Certainly you can't get a similar product made at the rock-bottom price points that China will ship it for. But, you can get a lot cheaper than Prusa, and there are vulnerabilities in the Chinese market you can exploit. And, to be honest, Chinese manufacturing is not the open slave market it used to be. They've cleaned up their act quite a lot, and the quality of life in Shenzhen isn't that bad. China isn't winning j…

The reports are that their is still plenty of de-facto slave labor out there. The Uighur's for instance are heavily used as slave labor in re-education camps. I think it very much matters which industry and what commodities you are sourcing. Also we are pretty sure that the official reporting on this from China is heavily doctored. I'm not sure where you got your numbers from but I'm pretty sure I don't trust them.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#107

Post by prmoustache »

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…

This is overly simplified.

You could have said "company" and "made in EU" and it wouldn't have been more or less true.

Open source itself is not necessarily a problem but one over many factors that have there pros and cons. And for one struggling company doing open source there are hundred or thousands of struggling companies not doing anything opensource or benefiting from opensource without contributing.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#108

Post by bombcar »

jraph wrote: post #104
rmbyrro wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that Open Source, by design, drammatically increases the likelihood of failure. It's already hard to build a successful business. Odds are already thin for you to succeed. Why choose a model that worsens it? Open Source was not created as a funding source to for-profit ventures. That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and t…

> That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source. You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does: - develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees. - sell support and consulting on this product - sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this pro…

I think for many “open source companies” there’s some underpants gnomes business planning going on:

1. Open source product

2. ???

3. Profit!

Open source isn’t a magical bandaid though it may get you some early traction, the same you can get by having a free plan.

If you develop it appropriately and plan it out, it CAN be successful. But you have to think it out and choose an appropriate license, etc.

Most successful open source companies would have been successful as closed-source; and you rarely can take a closed-source product and make it successful by going open source.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#109

Post by PhilipRoman »

sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #102
PeterZaitsev wrote: post #31

Here we go again. Open Source, as currently defined is hard to monetize, so lets go ahead and call Open Source something which makes it easy. Note though Easy Monetization was never goal of Open Source, so why not instead leave Open Source alone and focus on defining something different, which is focused on being easy to monetize.

Yea open source developers who want to get paid or make a living from their work can suck it, damn fools what did they expect!

My impression is that many of these "open source developers" overestimate the value of their code. There are many amazing projects for which I would pay considerable price, but the long tail of 99% of projects just aren't worth anything in my opinion. It is an interesting exercise though - to imagine how much I would pay for my window manager, gcc or even Vim.

Maybe easier transactions of tiny sums is the real solution? Even if every user paid something trivial like 10 cents a month, it would be a huge revenue stream for popular projects which lack maintenance. Of course, adding monetary incentives opens a whole new can of worms, so maybe the current situation is the best we can do after all. I suspect that many good qualities of open source software come from lack of money involved - there is no telemetry, no dark patterns to keep you using it, no attempts at vendor lock-in.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#110

Post by Qwertious »

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #77

The Open Source is about freedom for users not about making life easy for developers or the Company. Open Source is not for everyone and many those crying how horrible Open Source is simply should not gone with Open Source to begin with :)

>The Open Source is about freedom for users not about making life easy for developers or the Company.

That's exactly what open source is about. Open Source was explicitly invented as a more business-friendly version of Free Software, without the whole "freedom" spiel.

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