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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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The tragedy with any form of software development is that it becomes a commodity very quickly. I can't think of anything that is less commodity like than software. Commodities are raw materials than can be easily substituted. For example Ukraine is invaded so we all switch to American grain. Try switching SQL Server for mysql or changing your Python code base to Ruby. Software is sticky.

What you are describing is lockin, which is a mechanism companies use to ensure you keep on using their software. But think about libraries. Imagine a library that handles dates and times correctly. You probably need one for whatever you are doing. Would you pay for one? No of course not because this is a solved problem and just about any language has this built into their standard library. You could build your own b…

> but it would have no economical value. Because it is a commodity.

This is trying to redefine the word "commodity". Normal commodities like oil, grain and electricity very much have economic value.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#152
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's pointless to call this anything other than source available. I obviously strongly disagree with this. An FSL licensed project turns into full, undeniable open source after two years. > 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 it. Two years isn’t a lifetime. If there is value left the community has full right…

> Two years isn’t a lifetime.

It is in software development. You don't even deny that the project stays source available while developers care about it.

> If there is value left

So, once you've extracted as much value as you want from something, the community is free to have whatever's left? I think "you can have the scraps" is an excellent summation of that philosophy.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#153
post #104
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'm not saying it's bad or impossible, just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind. If you want to use it that way and it works for you, great.

The thing is that support services aren't scalable. Many software businesses want a scalable source of revenue, that's why they go for cloud services.

They don't want to compete with copy cats, though, because they want monopoly-level margins.

Then they complain that Open Source won't let them have those astounding margins.

This is not an issue with Open Source licenses.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#154
Becoming an adult is hard. It can be even harder if you live a sheltered, privileged life. Such as the life of the computer programmer. But to found a successful business, you need to be an adult. Or be sheltered by one (or more).

If you grow up programming, you are privileged: you are intelligent enough to create something complex, useful, and are probably competent enough to get a job whose starting salary is likely twice that of the average person. As an intelligent person, you may believe in a world run by logic and merit. The code either works or doesn't, has bugs or doesn't, looks clean or doesn't. You write good code, you get paid lots of money.

On top of all this, as you write code, you learn that there is a collection of people on the internet who have certain values and principles, and that you are actually using their work, for free, basically out of nothing but good will. This is inspirational, so you decide you will dedicate your life to the same. However, making something for free and giving it away means you can't pay for Mountain Dew. So you decide to make a company, so you can make and give away the code, and still make money.

There's a problem, though. So far you are still thinking like a privileged programmer. But [capitalist] business requires a different mindset. The values and principles of business are not those of the noble engineer. Business values profit, and its principles are based on solving a problem for a customer. But more than anything, business demands the will to compete, at any cost. This is dog-eat-dog. There's no room for generosity, unless you're already winning, and the generosity is ensuring you'll keep winning.

An "Open Source Company" is, by definition, nonsense. It's trying to combine two completely ideologically separate things, having both cakes, and eating them too. Sure, you can have a business that also makes open source. But your business can't be dependent on that open source to make a profit. If it does, then eventually you will have to come out from your shelter and get wet, or you will lose the business, and possibly the code too.

Most of the people in the world don't care about the values and principles of open source. They care about solving the many problems they have every day, so they can feed and shelter their families and still have some leisure time. Most people don't care about your software license. They just want to use a product that makes their life easier. And that's what a business is supposed to do. Open Source is a distraction from that aim. If you really want to solve someone's problem, do that first. Later, once you are very rich and successful, and have many different aspects of the business that generate profit, then you can release your code for free, without it becoming a distraction.

The people who value open source code may not like that your code is closed. But they will respect your honesty, and a product that solves a problem well. And you get to make something you like making, and solve problems, and feed and shelter your family.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pointless to call this anything other than source available. I obviously strongly disagree with this. An FSL licensed project turns into full, undeniable open source after two years. > 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 it. Two years isn’t a lifetime. If there is value left the community has full right…

"Source available; delayed open-source release" or "source available; delayed open source" is what I would call this kind of license. It accurately describes both the present and the future legal status of the code. I wouldn't use "delayed open source" on its own because it could be misleading. Since it omits the current status, people may believe "delayed open source" software is some kind of open source already. I…

> FSL could try is to "reclaim" "source-available"

All the adults in the room realise that "source available" is just an accurate descriptor for what they do, but sentry won't accept anything without the term "open source" in it. They view themselves as open source and the fact that they don't use an open source license is merely an incidental thing they do to deal with some of the challenges of being open source. Instead of admitting their position, they seek to change the definition of open source to match what they are doing.

> The best advice I can give to people embroiled in one is to care less about "technically category X" if at all possible.

I think there is nothing technical about FSL being source available. Open source is about being communally built and communally owned. Everyone contributes and everyone is free to profit. By contrast, this is a license where everyone is free to contribute but only the owner is free to profit. The only difference is that two years after the owner stops profiting, the software opens up to everyone else.

Source available is honestly better for everyone than closed source, and sometimes even better than open source. The only really bad thing you can do is use a source available license while misleading people into thinking you're open source, because you are taking their work under false pretence.

https://open.sentry.io/

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#156
One of these again...

If you call yourself an "Open Source Company" and you are not an Open Source Company, then yeah, people will criticize you for it. No, that's not a sign that the world is evil to you or that Open Source does not work or anything else. It's just that you lied to people, and you're not getting applause for that. Deal with it.

Ultimately, all of these stories come down to this: There's a company that really would like to get the positive image of Open Source, but on the other hand, really would like to have a business model that's incompatible with Open Source. So they want both, they can't have that, then they try to have both, and then they complain that they can't have it.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#157
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…

I'm not saying it's bad or impossible, just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind. If you want to use it that way and it works for you, great. The thing is that support services aren't scalable. Many software businesses want a scalable source of revenue, that's why they go for cloud services. They don't want to compete with copy cats, though, because they want monopoly-level margins. T…

> that's why they go for cloud services.

We also have this.

> just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind

Yep. Free software was designed with user rights in mind. Open source was then designed to sell the idea of free software to companies, removing the "user rights" parts, which sounded frightening to businesses, focusing on the development model, targeting developers and not users. Free software is defined with the famous 4 rules, open source is based on the open source manifesto, basically a copy of the Debian Free Software Guideline (from the Debian project, which, coincidentally, was closer to the Free Software Spirit at the time, probably still is). They are both about the same set of software and licenses, for the most part.

There's nothing in those texts / philosophies about doing business, for or against (only that free software was explicitly designed to allow selling software, because why not - and at the time, to distribute software, you probably had to copy it to floppy disks and give them, so you had some copy cost to absorb). It's indeed up to businesses to figure out the business model around FLOSS.

But that's true of many things, isn't it?

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#158
post #63

The tragedy with any form of software development is that it becomes a commodity very quickly. That's why open source works so well for commodity software. The challenge is that while everybody needs commodity software, they aren't necessarily willing to pay for it. People pay for other things like managed services, support, etc. But not for software directly. Take operating systems as an example. Unless you have ver…

> Apple and MS seem to continue to resist this notion but they are increasingly exceptions. I din't think resisting is the correct word: Linux could be perfect from the user perspective but not the device one: battery handling in a notebook, good support of certain devices, etc. Linux does not replace the whole needs of users or organizations and that is why MS and Apple continue to exist. They existed before Linux e…

You could probably modify Linux to fix those problems, but most users won't know how to do that and want something that just works.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#159
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…

There are lots of successful open source companies. How much did IBM buy Red Hat for? How profitable was it? There are businesses making money out of every major open source project and contributing to it. The business model fails for reasons other than it just being open source: 1. trying to sell open source as a product rather than as a way to sell something else - services, hardware, whatever. 2. being the main de…

> "...Red Hat..."

Successful tech companies don't sell themselves, particularly to has-beens like IBM.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Source available; delayed open-source release" or "source available; delayed open source" is what I would call this kind of license. It accurately describes both the present and the future legal status of the code. I wouldn't use "delayed open source" on its own because it could be misleading. Since it omits the current status, people may believe "delayed open source" software is some kind of open source already. I…

> FSL could try is to "reclaim" "source-available" All the adults in the room realise that "source available" is just an accurate descriptor for what they do, but sentry won't accept anything without the term "open source" in it. They view themselves as open source and the fact that they don't use an open source license is merely an incidental thing they do to deal with some of the challenges of being open source. In…

> I think there is nothing technical about FSL being source available.

Note that I used "technically" as the opposite of "typically". My suggestion is to care less about being in a category you don't want to be in when you are different from its representative members where it matters to you. (In this case the category is source-available licenses.) Focus your advocacy on how you differ instead of arguing membership. ("Yes, we are a source-available license. Don't let it turn you away. There are critical differences between us and source-available licenses you don't like. We are better than old read-only and new Commons-Clause licenses because..."—not literally this, but that's the idea.)

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