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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

#131

Post by hintymad »

jmpeax wrote: post #125

> Minio is a great alternative to companies mindful of who has access to user data. Of course, AWS claims that AWS personnel doesn’t have direct access to customer data, but by being closed-source, that statement is just a function of trust. Can't a company claim to be hosting something via open-source software but using a closed-source in-house software masquerading with the same API endpoints as the open-source ver…

> Of course, AWS claims that AWS personnel doesn’t have direct access to customer data, but by being closed-source, that statement is just a function of trust.

I'm not sure if this is a strong enough argument. Given the state of maturity in companies, most companies should really worry about their own employees or security vulnerability than Amazon's.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#132

Post by matheusmoreira »

carapace wrote: post #100

Win what? TFA is published on a platform owned by Microsoft. - - - - I always thought that the whole point of computers and software was to make machines to do the scut work so we could all take a break and explore the universe Star Trek-style. You don't win by making money, you win by obviating the need for money at all. Science has delivered technology and wealth (it's not evenly distributed, of course, but that's…

> You don't win by making money, you win by obviating the need for money at all.

Yes, a post-scarcity society would be very nice indeed. That's why we need a total abundance of free and open source software not owned by corporations. If we don't make this software, we'll be subjected to their dystopian artificial scarcity where they charge you for nothing and create economies where there ought to be none.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#133

Post by closeparen »

jmpeax wrote: post #125

> Minio is a great alternative to companies mindful of who has access to user data. Of course, AWS claims that AWS personnel doesn’t have direct access to customer data, but by being closed-source, that statement is just a function of trust. Can't a company claim to be hosting something via open-source software but using a closed-source in-house software masquerading with the same API endpoints as the open-source ver…

A company can also genuinely state that it hosts customer data on-premise to protect it from the big bad cloud, but elide the part where everyone and their brother in the local IT consulting ecosystem has domain admin credentials for them & half the town in a KeepassX on a network drive.

Don’t assume self-hosted means security-conscious. For most businesses, on-premise IT is treated like HVAC or electrical only more annoying. Anyone with a work shirt could con keys to the server room off the front desk.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#134

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

nullcipher wrote: post #113

> 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 "outsou…

Also it's really weird that in a open source business, contributions come from people who never get a cent of the benefits which the founders receive. This to me feels very disingenuous. Profit sharing should be built in as part of these "open source" projects.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#135

Post by keepamovin »

a typical open-source business needs profit to be the ultimate north star.

I totally agree. We're making profit our north star in BrowserBox at Dosyago. It's a hard balance to strike, but absolutely necessary.

Catering to the price-conscious is a losing battle.

As for competing on price being bad...I guess that's true if you go free, but aside from that, I think there's markets/segments where that works. And if you have the solution that can support a lower COGS then you have the room for that too.

A great case for an open-source solution is when a transparency problem is present. What is a transparency problem? It’s when a solution being closed source creates distrust between the client and vendor.

I totally agree with that too. It's one of the reasons I thought going full open source would work for our cybersecurity market.

But I think there's also the reliability concern: many companies are concerned that going with a small vendor may lock them into a dead end if the vendor goes out of business.

Open source is like an escape hatch for the pressure of those concerns, by providing a guarantee that if you do go out of business they can keep using your product.

I see this as less about licensing and more about access to the code. Breeding self-reliance in your clients is a recipe for scalability, and helps solves their reliability concerns. If you're the only source for updates and changes, you're a single point of failure. Open source is resilient in that way.

Come check us out: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#136

Post by foundart »

For me as an engineer who influences technology acquisition, open source wins by being grokkable.

- If my colleagues and I can see the source, we can decide whether or not we think it will fulfill the claims it makes.

- Once we're using it, if we run into a bug or an unanticipated use case, we can, at a minimum, research a solution and suggest it in a bug report. Alternatively, we can open a PR.

(edited for formatting)

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#137

Post by cpill »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #25

"Open Source" doesn't win, period, because it doesn't compete with anything. Open Source is not a business model or a product. It's an engineering widget. You can use it to build a product, or you can use it to make a jig to shore up an uneven table leg. Nobody cares about the license or whether they can read your code. They care if you build a product that solves their problem. You know why companies use Open Source…

We ended up paying for people to host stuff for us. the free OS aspect attracts us because we know we can host ourselves down the line when the team grows and also, that the people behind it aren't douche bags and want to make the world better in some small way.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#138

Post by stepanhruda »

jmpeax wrote: post #125

> Minio is a great alternative to companies mindful of who has access to user data. Of course, AWS claims that AWS personnel doesn’t have direct access to customer data, but by being closed-source, that statement is just a function of trust. Can't a company claim to be hosting something via open-source software but using a closed-source in-house software masquerading with the same API endpoints as the open-source ver…

All you need is knowledge about this from a former employee and you have an excellent opportunity for a lawsuit

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#139

Post by lmm »

musicale wrote: post #59
Qwertious wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, "if" - as if every company isn't actively pursuing recurring revenue models right now.

In theory you can cancel a subscription if you don't think it's providing any value.

But companies put a lot of effort into making sure you don't.
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