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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

#161

Post by Nevermark »

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…

You don’t need VC’s to be organized as a corporation and/or have a growth/profit mindset

It removes a lot of pressure to not have pure investors expecting constant returns. Easier to do the right thing for the project.

But growth is likely to be necessary, and sensible, in any product space competing against ambitious corporations who are going to be strongly growth oriented.

Booking profits so you are prepared for downturns, opportunities, or large expenses isn’t just reasonable. The more people & customers involved, the more reason not to burn through all revenue as it comes.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#162

Post by oblio »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #132
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.

I admire your optimism, but I think we already lost.

Hopefully I'm missing some background long term trend that proves me wrong.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#163

Post by thfuran »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #153
dazed_confused wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, as is typical for things linked from HN, this whole article seems very web-y and SaaS-y. There are other kinds of open source projects, believe it or not. You mean the rest of computing...

However little that is. What isn't implicitly a SaaS these days anyway? :/

What does being implicitly a saas mean?

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#164

Post by syllogism »

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…

Maybe "trust" in a purely technical sense, but we live in a society. If a vendor has a part of their contract that would put them under penalty of fraud, customers don't usually worry whether they can independently verify it's true.

For instance, if you write in your agreements that data goes into this bit of open-source code and leaves it and goes nowhere else, and you list out some processes you take to ensure this is true, and the whole thing is an outright lie, that's really bad for you in ways that are clear and enforceable. It's also hard to hide from your own employees, and people come and go. You're unlikely to make that claim unless it's true.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#165

Post by ricardobeat »

martypitt wrote: post #156
xtracto wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, l…

> 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. How is "Be a company that harvests personal data for profit, and publishes a javascript library on the side" a good model? And, how is it better than: "We build this thing. It's all we do. Here's the source. If you use some features, you gotta give us money?"

What the company does is irrelevant in that example - it might as well have been IKEA publishing React and it would still stand.

Now compare your “give us money” model, or open-core, to UNIX, Linux, Firefox, and the others mentioned.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#166

Post by WJW »

keepamovin wrote: post #135

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 h…

Perhaps off-topic, but "north star" is such a hilarious business euphemism. The actual north star is ignored by 99+% of people on the northern hemisphere, not visible at all to people on the southern hemisphere and I bet most people would be completely unable to actually identify it in the night sky if asked.

Now that I think about it, business north stars are also widely unknown and ignored so maybe the analogy is more apt than I thought...

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#167

Post by beremaki »

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…

Profit is one of the least ambiguous term possible.

If you pay yourself 100% of your revenue as income you don't make any profit which is your choice.

Profit is needed to sustain periods when revenue decreases and to act when an investment is needed (for pivoting, adapting to evolutions in the market, scaling or whatever move the business has to make).

I don't see what is controversial here for a business, profit is like capitalism 101.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#168

Post by justinclift »

mindwok wrote: post #9

The author calls out they are specifically talking about open source solutions that compete with paid offerings. IMO, the jury is very much still out on whether open source "wins" in this regard. In the past decade we've seen a huge rise of open source products, and in the last 5 years or so we've seen many of them move away from that. MongoDB, the Hashicorp stack, Elastic, Red Hat, MinIO, the list goes on. There are…

> MinIO

Looking at the MinIO repo, they seem to have changed from APL2 to AGPL3.

Is that the "move away" from Open Source you're meaning in relation to them?

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#169

Post by mdavidn »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #99
reverius42 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in the US? Do you report that revenue as personal income on your taxes? If yes, then I think it’s fair to call it profit (since you’re also presumably deducting expenses).

Yes, sole proprietor, all revenue reported as personal income ... hence I consider it income . It would be profit if I was organized as an LLC that agreed to pay me $X/year and took in $(X+Y) in revenue.

Huh? “Profit” is not ambiguous, even in your business. It’s a value you calculate each year on Schedule C.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#170

Post by justinclift »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #104
mindwok wrote: post #9

The author calls out they are specifically talking about open source solutions that compete with paid offerings. IMO, the jury is very much still out on whether open source "wins" in this regard. In the past decade we've seen a huge rise of open source products, and in the last 5 years or so we've seen many of them move away from that. MongoDB, the Hashicorp stack, Elastic, Red Hat, MinIO, the list goes on. There are…

How do VLC and Blender manage?

Blender has an optional SaaS solution ("Blender Cloud": https://cloud.blender.org/about) which people pay for to fund things.

There's also the Blender Foundation, which accepts donations and funds things too.

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