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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

#121

Post by jraph »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #118
jraph wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

IME when you dig into the project and financials for companies like yours they're not software companies but service companies. This is not an insult; the economics are much different, and typically don't get the scalability that made software so ridiculously profitable.

Can you develop on this? I'm interested by what you mean by this.

Income is mostly from support and consulting. These two things still pretty much rely on the actively developed product, so a big part of the company is dedicated to this. I'd say we are both a software and service company. I believe this is one nice way of developing open source software.

No insult taken :-)

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#122

Post by nojvek »

wavemode wrote: post #113
jraph wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. I would suggest the contrary: if you want to build a company and believe open source is the right way to do it, please do try! We don't have enough open source companies, we need more successful examples of this. It's hard and there are traps on…

There are four business models that I believe are sustainable for open source development. 1. Solo developer (or small group), funded via e.g. Patreon 2. Non-profit funded by sponsorships and donations 3. For-profit but the software is free; the company charges for support and/or cloud services 4. Open collective, where donations fund bounties that are paid out to people who contribute patches In other words, I think…

There’s a 5th one. While not fully open source companies, they have a whole bundle of open source libraries and packages that don’t threaten their core business.

Meta does OS well for their scale. React, Llama, PyTorch come to mind.

For MS: Typescript, vscode, .net come to mind.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#123

Post by jraph »

subtra3t wrote: post #95
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.

> risk of failure with it And licensing one's product seems to amplify that risk. > based on a few opinions of HN comments What if someone does do that? As a HN commenter I can't bypass the possibility that somebody takes my comment at face value without conducting proper research and analysis. HN comments (and really all content on the Internet in general) should be written responsibly. I am not saying that GP didn'…

> I can't bypass the possibility that somebody takes my comment at face value without conducting proper research and analysis

Someone not conducting proper research is doomed to fail at building a company anyway.

You should be careful in writing HN comments but you should not feel responsible for a business failing. Someone reading should also read comments from anyone, one's writing does not go unchecked for long on HN.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#124

Post by Qwertious »

PhilipRoman wrote: post #109
sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soluti…

>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.

This is exactly what the Free Software world needs, IMO. More specifically, it needs to be trivially easy to use and built into the distro - i.e. you have a utility that keeps track of what you desktop apps etc you use, asks priorities+budget then generates a breakdown of how much money to send each project. Then it lets you one-click pay, instead of having to individually go to all the websites and donate to each.

Free Software can't be gratis, if we ever want it to be sustainable and prioritize the user.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#125

Post by JW_00000 »

wavemode wrote: post #113
jraph wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. I would suggest the contrary: if you want to build a company and believe open source is the right way to do it, please do try! We don't have enough open source companies, we need more successful examples of this. It's hard and there are traps on…

There are four business models that I believe are sustainable for open source development. 1. Solo developer (or small group), funded via e.g. Patreon 2. Non-profit funded by sponsorships and donations 3. For-profit but the software is free; the company charges for support and/or cloud services 4. Open collective, where donations fund bounties that are paid out to people who contribute patches In other words, I think…

I'd slightly modify 3: a for-profit company that open-sources some software that is not a product in and of itself.

For instance, Facebook can open source React because it's something they need, but it would not be a viable product on its own. Releasing it as open source doesn't give them any disadvantage. Similarly, a GPU manufacturer can open source their drivers because this won't prevent them from selling their hardware (and in theory should allow them to sell more hardware).

In theory, I'd expect a printer manufacturer to be able to open source their software, because their product is the printer not the software. In fact, I don't get why open sourcing 3D printer software should be a disadvantage, and the article doesn't explain this.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#126

Post by jraph »

nojvek wrote: post #122
wavemode wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are four business models that I believe are sustainable for open source development. 1. Solo developer (or small group), funded via e.g. Patreon 2. Non-profit funded by sponsorships and donations 3. For-profit but the software is free; the company charges for support and/or cloud services 4. Open collective, where donations fund bounties that are paid out to people who contribute patches In other words, I think…

There’s a 5th one. While not fully open source companies, they have a whole bundle of open source libraries and packages that don’t threaten their core business. Meta does OS well for their scale. React, Llama, PyTorch come to mind. For MS: Typescript, vscode, .net come to mind.

> Llama

This is not open source. (but this does not take out the essence of your comment)

The huge caveat with this is that we often get nice open source developer tools out of these companies, but never good software targeted to end users. So others still need to work to provide open source software to actual users.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#127

Post by fipar »

sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #98
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 :)

Why should someone start developing open source if there is no way to make a living from it long term ? Should we just expect OSS devs to work for free (or scraps via sponsors/kofi)? I guess there are a lot selfless individuals who would still use a significant portion of their lifetime to build OSS. But what about software that needs significant effort to build and constant updates? I find your view very cynical and…

If it adds any context to this, Peter is one of the founders of Percona, a company built entirely around open source software and associated services.

That doesn’t mean you should agree with him, but when he says “ those crying how horrible Open Source is simply should not gone with Open Source to begin with” it does have a different meaning if you know where he comes from.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#128

Post by JW_00000 »

ChatGTP wrote: post #92
silisili wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few companies compete on code alone. Those that do I understand the model a bit more, but still usually have the velocity to run away from copycats. Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.

Can you tell me where I can see the source code for the Google maps APIs please?

Isn't that exactly his point? They open source "a ton of work", but not everything; thereby "not competing on code alone". The code of, say, Android or Google Web Toolkit is open source, but the products they build on top (App Store, Gmail/Maps/...) is closed. It only makes sense to open source the parts on which you're not competing.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#129

Post by remram »

James_K wrote: post #64
remram wrote: post #24

We should come up with a name for this new generation of licenses. They are not "open source" or "free software", and using those words would be both confusing and immediately polarizing. But having nothing more specific than "source available" seems very insufficient, since most of them turn open source quickly or only deny rights that do not usually matter to the end-user. (licenses in that family: BUSL, FSL, Commo…

It's pointless to call this anything other than source available. This license is just a no-compete license with extra steps. I see little practical difference between "you can't compete with us" and "you can't compete with us for as long as we're developing the software". Maybe we should call this a "you can have the scraps" license because the project only becomes open source when the developers stop caring about i…

It depends who "you" refers to. If you are a company offering a related product, then yes you have to start over and can't use any part of the existing ecosystem. If you are an end-user or a company wanting to use this internally (usually my situation), then the difference is very important.

Maybe it doesn't matter until there are more licenses of this kind though. For now, maybe "BUSL and FSL software" is simple enough, since it's just those two.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#130

Post by jraph »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #117
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.

Yes, but the response of "just try" is basically saying "do something the extra-hard way".

> do something the extra-hard way

indeed

> just try

I did say "please" try, the nuance is quite important :-)

You know, I think the views differ because we have two problems:

1. How can I create a profitable company

2. How can I make my open source work sustainable

If you only target 1, open source might not be the more immediately easy solution.

I'm aiming at 2, and 1 is one way to do it: given I want to live from open source work (because of my convictions), can I do it by building a company?

The answer is: it might be harder, but yes.

If you don't care about open source, my comments here are just mostly annoying.

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