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Open Source does not win by being cheaper

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Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#111

Post by musicale »

dpig_ wrote: post #66
musicale wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What? If Apple or FedEx could get customers to (sustainably) pay them without actually providing a product in return, do you think they would have kept making phones and delivering packages just for the hell of it? That's a strange counterfactual. Why would customers keep paying a company that doesn't provide any goods or services to anyone? They're not really "customers" anymore if all that is happening is money t…

It's not really strange at all. It's a clear illustration of why your perspective is incomplete.

How are they "customers" if the company is no longer providing any goods or services to anyone and is just taking their money?

> incomplete

see "usually"

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#112

Post by musicale »

Izkata wrote: post #110
musicale wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What? If Apple or FedEx could get customers to (sustainably) pay them without actually providing a product in return, do you think they would have kept making phones and delivering packages just for the hell of it? That's a strange counterfactual. Why would customers keep paying a company that doesn't provide any goods or services to anyone? They're not really "customers" anymore if all that is happening is money t…

I think they were confused why you included the word "usually".

I was considering that there could potentially be exceptions, perhaps some non-public facing investment or trading firms without traditional "customers".

So "usually".

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#113

Post by nullcipher »

> While the core product is typically maintained by a central engineering team, integrations or plugins are often built by community developers and then occasionally merged into the main branch.

One of the things I really dislike about opensource deployments is plugins. Often the core team is happy to let something go to a plugin and 99.99% of the time plugins just get abandoned. It's worse when some projects "outsource" basic functionality like authentication (say via saml or oidc) to a plugin.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#114

Post by bruce511 »

musicale wrote: post #62
kelnos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. That's just an avenue to make profit. If those activities weren't profitable, they probably wouldn't get done, outside of government regulation or subsidy. Sure, some businesses are "labors of love", but they still would likely not exist if they were break-even, cert…

Apple's mission statement isn't "try to extract as much money from our customers' wallets as possible" or even "deliver the highest profit and value to our shareholders." (Recall Tim Cook's comment on the "bloody ROI.") In fact I'd be hard-pressed to find such a mission statement for a non-financial firm - at least one that doesn't mention any other purpose for the company.[1] It's a mistake to think that companies o…

You are incompletely right. Businesses benefit multiple stake-holders. Products and services are created to provide value, that value being sold for cash.

But if a business doesn't make a profit over the long run, it will run out of cash and fail. In other words, it's no longer a business.

Of course most businesses do fail, and always for this reason. So every successful business is implicitly making a profit and has to do so.

So you are right. Businesses don't exist to make profits. People don't exist to breath air. But if you remove profit from the equation, the business will die.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#115

Post by toast0 »

musicale wrote: post #62
kelnos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. That's just an avenue to make profit. If those activities weren't profitable, they probably wouldn't get done, outside of government regulation or subsidy. Sure, some businesses are "labors of love", but they still would likely not exist if they were break-even, cert…

Apple's mission statement isn't "try to extract as much money from our customers' wallets as possible" or even "deliver the highest profit and value to our shareholders." (Recall Tim Cook's comment on the "bloody ROI.") In fact I'd be hard-pressed to find such a mission statement for a non-financial firm - at least one that doesn't mention any other purpose for the company.[1] It's a mistake to think that companies o…

You don't put that in the mission statement in the same way you don't write 'try to get as much salary as possible' in the objective statement of a resume.

At the end of the day, if a business isn't making money for the owners and isn't making them happy for other reasons, they'll find new owners or shut it down; without regard to the stakeholders.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#117

Post by mholt »

candiddevmike wrote: post #108
mholt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Caddy project is fighting to show it can work. We are having moderate success. I just gave a talk about this a couple weeks ago at an internal company event and will be doing so again at GoWest in a few weeks. The premise is that open source licenses are what they are: they grant freedom, but not other things that companies would pay money for. Proprietary licenses do offer what companies need, but at the cost of…

Sponsorware is/eventually becomes basically ad supported, it's not really a new thing.

Nah we tried that already -- this is different.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#118

Post by musicale »

toast0 wrote: post #115
musicale wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's mission statement isn't "try to extract as much money from our customers' wallets as possible" or even "deliver the highest profit and value to our shareholders." (Recall Tim Cook's comment on the "bloody ROI.") In fact I'd be hard-pressed to find such a mission statement for a non-financial firm - at least one that doesn't mention any other purpose for the company.[1] It's a mistake to think that companies o…

You don't put that in the mission statement in the same way you don't write 'try to get as much salary as possible' in the objective statement of a resume. At the end of the day, if a business isn't making money for the owners and isn't making them happy for other reasons, they'll find new owners or shut it down; without regard to the stakeholders.

True. The same can be said for employees - eventually they might unionize or quit en masse, regardless of what the owners want. Or for customers - they might decide to quit buying the company's products or services. Or for society as a whole - perhaps laws will be passed to strictly regulate a business or to ban its core activities - even if the company is profitable and has lots of enthusiastic employees and customers.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#120

Post by devoutsalsa »

pylua wrote: post #41
hinkley wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Vendor contracts are hard - So we avoid doing them - So we never get good at them - So every contract is a painful lesson in trying Open source wins because I don't have to involve the entire company to use it. I can literally just raise my voice to see if anyone in the group cares and then use it. And even when it's free for small companies, not approving a license is holding up something that we think is already…

In many companies I expect at least a security review of the open source before developers can use it. This can have a lot of red tape.

I wonder if there’s a business model around sharing the results of security reviews. Even if Company A can’t fully trust the review of Company B, you could A could provide a lot of context for B to reduce the cost of starting an evaluation from zero.
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