161–170 of 207 posts
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…
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You're right that it's no one on HN's responsibility to outline the full risks of starting a business, but no one is claiming otherwise. Presumably jraph's goal in writing their comment is to convince us that starting an Open Source company is a good idea -- but they haven't succeeded, for the reasons mentioned. If they want to convince more people, then they should come up with counterarguments to the top level post…
> but they haven't succeeded, for the reasons mentioned No, I haven't succeeded because I haven't tried yet. However, I am surrounded by open source companies that succeeded. The comment I responded to obviously reasons theoretically, and confuses some things. I will answer two aspects of it: > Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the…
>For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing.
I agree with this, and that the makers of P likely enjoy a big (and genuine) advantage in being considered the authority in all matters P. But for a competitor (me, in your example), spending time with your existing, working code is much less time and effort than writing brand new code, and that difference in my effort levels is the disadvantage, for you, of going Open Source vs. closed-source.
>SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy
I wasn't aware that SQLite was a profitable enterprise. I have to admit that this is a very strong example for your case, given the competition in this area from other FOSS software (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
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…
Not all software is easily monetized or particularly valuable. The value of standardizing on an interface and outsourcing the maintenance and security to others provides more value than the software itself.
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> 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.…
EDIT: having read through the two licenses, I'm actually convinced that the FSL might be less permissive than the BSL in its intended use-cases. The BSL effectively becomes open source whenever owner stops providing the software commercially (rather than 2 years after) which guarantees that there will never be a time where the service is unavailable (if I'm interpreting it correctly). BSL includes a provision saying that a product is defined as competing based on the date of its release, rather than FSL which might allow the licencor to release new services that make someone else's retroactively competitive. It also isn't clear about free offerings, where the BSL expressly permits any non-paid services.
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…
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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.
For many tech companies (and especially their investors), selling out and realising a return is the very definition of success.
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…
https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...
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…
I think the ideal situation would be where you are paid for the development itself, rather than selling the resuling software. Maybe with a pool that interested parties can invest in for initial development, new features or continued maintenance, like kickstarter or bug bounties. But that probably wouldn't have the high margins that the software industry has become accustomed to.
I happen to be in a special situation here. One of my softwares, Redis, has a very permissive license that was used by many vendors to sell it. At the same time, I'm a lot into 3D printing. So I guess this gives me some perspective on both of the sides of the matter, and what I think, TLDR, is: Bambulab effect on the 3D printing ecosystem is going to be very positive. A few considerations: 1. Prusa is blaming the Bam…
That's another side of open source: if you don't rely on it to make a living (though it did help in getting my first job as a developer!), there's that pure joy in seeing your software get picked up and used by others. This little discovery made my day.
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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. F…
You choose open source or you don't. Either way is fine. Just take responsibility for your decision.
It's simple, really. I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business... It's not meant for that.