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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

#141

Post by lmm »

paxys wrote: post #65
jandrese wrote: post #3

I've always been annoyed that companies will pay 6 figures for a support contract, but won't consider hiring a full time engineer for the same or less pay to support an open source product that does the same thing. The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frust…

By that line of reasoning software companies should not be a thing at all and everyone should hire engineers and write all their software in-house. Hiring and maintaining a team of developers is hard, especially if the problem they are solving is not in your domain. Contracting a problem out to specialists is most often the more sensible option for both parties.

Buying off the shelf software is reasonable. Outsourcing for expertise - whether that's having an external party write software for you, customize existing software for you, or something else - usually fails, IME.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#142

Post by lmm »

debarshri wrote: post #80
jiggawatts wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. These words were almost verbatim used this morning in a meeting. A small agile ISV was purchased by one of those big "holding companies" and now everything is "for consideration", "not on the roadmap", "not strictly required", or like you said "not their current focus". We've been raising issues like: "You're using frameworks and SDKs that went end-of-life y…

I think you are not the target customer that the holding companies is looking for. I would try to see an out and look for another vendor, tool or alternative.

> I think you are not the target customer that the holding companies is looking for.

On the contrary, customers who keep paying them while they do the bare minimum to keep the thing limping along is probably exactly what the holding company is looking for.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#143

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

bruce511 wrote: post #102
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #50

"Profit" is a strange and ambiguous term here. I've been running an open source, libre project for closing in on 24 years now, and generating revenue from it for about 17 years. There's never been any "profit", but there has been revenue. I regard profit as what's left of the revenue after you pay the people who work on the project and any expenses, which is the way most corporations and accountants would view it. Th…

The article is talking about businesses being on Open Source foundations, not the myriad of other possible Open Source projects. In that context profit is what's left once revenue is received and expenses paid. Implicit in those expenses are (fixed) salaries, employee contracts, payslips and so on. What a business does with the profit can be varied. Firstly it can be added to cash reserves, which can contine to pay e…

TFA said:

> To be clear, I’m talking about open-source projects that compete with popular paid solutions.

[ ... ]

> Excluding non-profit projects that are sponsored by donations or parent organizations, a typical open-source business needs profit to be the ultimate north star.

So, I think you've somewhat misinterpreted the space the author thinks they are referring to.

Ardour is a small project in terms of man-power - 2 full time paid developers, other individuals paid for media and other work, various commercial collaborations along the way, certainly dreaming of being able to use more paid development hours. We absolutely compete with at least a dozen popular paid solutions, with at least 3 on Linux alone.

The main reasons I think this article feels so unrelatable to me is (a) it's strange focus on profit (b) it's web/SaaS centric nature (c) it's B2B centric nature. It just doesn't have much to say about the "space" of writing native/desktop applications for individuals involved in creation workflows, free of VC influence.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#144

Post by martypitt »

Fantastic article. I'd love to see more people championing statements like "Profit, not usage, is a measure of success".

I think there's a stigma about open source projects being run as commercial, profit-generating businesses, and I'm very happy to see more people championing the Commerical, Profitable OSS cause -- which everyone in the ecosystem benefits from. (More Profit == Keep Building More OSS).

I happen to like the Open Core model here, where businesses adopt OSI OSS licenses for the core, and Source Visible licenses for the rest - which gives the balance of visibility, auditability, etc, whilst still enabling the project to be revenue generating, delivering longevity as well.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#145

Post by asabla »

maggoty wrote: post #84

VLC trumps any sort of paid video player software, including the one provided by Microsoft. Been using it for years at work and its been flawless. In that scenario, it wins!

Couldn't agree more. So many softwares has come and went from my usual collection. But VLC still remains after so many years.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#146

Post by maxloh »

lolinder wrote: post #64
brap wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the pattern you’re referring to? I’m curious how these infra projects keep AWS/GCP from killing them

HashiCorp is the latest big name to do it—they switched to the BUSL, which more or less says you can only use the product if you aren't offering it for sale in competition with HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl

That seems to be a fair license to me.

The entire codebase will be open-sourced a few years after a version is released.

You can use the old version and fix security vulnerabilities yourself. If you really want the latest features, you pay.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#147

Post by dgudkov »

closeparen wrote: post #133
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…

What makes you think that the big cloud is somehow more security-conscious? Because they said so?

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#148

Post by xtracto »

martypitt wrote: post #144

Fantastic article. I'd love to see more people championing statements like "Profit, not usage, is a measure of success". I think there's a stigma about open source projects being run as commercial, profit-generating businesses, and I'm very happy to see more people championing the Commerical, Profitable OSS cause -- which everyone in the ecosystem benefits from. (More Profit == Keep Building More OSS). I happen to li…

I hate these new "open core" freemium companies.

The best "open source " business is one that gets profit from doing something else and publishes some open source software on the side . Like react.

Open core are just companies that want to throw around the "look we are cool, open source" mantra , but in reality are dealers giving you the first dose free to hook you up in their business.

Where would we be if apache, linux, freebsd, openssl, firefox , and so many other 90s OSS had adopted that crappy model .

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#149

Post by closeparen »

dgudkov wrote: post #147
closeparen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What makes you think that the big cloud is somehow more security-conscious? Because they said so?

The major cloud providers are serious engineering shops whose business and reputation actually depend on technical and operational competence. And the Silicon Valley community is full of current and former employees who will tell you what it's like inside.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#150

Post by imiric »

msy wrote: post #5

The problem with this business model is it creates a tension between the OSS version and the paid versions - you want the OSS version to be good, but not such a good solution that nobody feels the need to pay for your SaaS/consulting/etc. That tension seems to inevitably lead to obvious features missing or functionality/knowledge that's needed to operate at any scale coistered away as closed source so the sponsoring…

> That tension seems to inevitably lead to obvious features missing or functionality/knowledge that's needed to operate at any scale coistered away as closed source so the sponsoring entity can make some money.

This is not inevitable at all. You're right that there's a tension there, but there are companies that manage to do this right, and please both OSS and commercial users.

The fact many companies don't is not an indication that this business model doesn't work, but that it's very hard to do correctly.

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