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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

#171

Post by martypitt »

ricardobeat wrote: post #165
martypitt wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm happy for those companies that become commercially viable through pure open source - and those are some great examples - although they're not financially viable on their own:

- Firefox's primary income stream is embedding Google search.

- Linux is funded primarily through companies like Canonical and RedHat, which charge for premium features.

I'm sceptical that if either of those examples were to launch today, that they'd survive using the same strategies they used years ago. I'd wager that if Canonical launched today, it'd be as Open Core, which isn't far off what it's actual business model is.

However, those are great examples of companies whose primary focus is in shipping "The Thing", and finding a way to build a business around it. That's far better than making "The Thing" a side-hustle, which is what the React example was advocating.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#172

Post by Kiro »

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…

I presume you pay yourself, so you rely on profit. The profit is nullified in the books but in practice it's no different than using the profit for dividends.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#173

Post by peter_retief »

I have always cringed at people calling open source "freeware", I had a boss many years ago who had this mindset, for him expensive software was a guarantee of success.

For me, open source is the power of collective wisdom, the propriety software that I have seen through the years has always seemed a bit sad, lonely and unread.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#174

Post by SenHeng »

hcks wrote: post #160
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like what’s your point really

Bikeshedding the meaning of profit.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#175

Post by j-a-a-p »

martypitt wrote: post #155
brabel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Core is a really risky bet. Any dedicated developer can fork your project and add the Premium feature they like the most, and then there's nothing your company can do about it. When people use an open source project, they usually expect everything in the project to be open source and will go to great lengths to not pay you, including sabotaging any of your efforts to try to get paid.

I think this is a great point. I'd hate to see Open Source become even less commercially viable then it is today. I don't know the answer here, but I agree with the risks you've highlighted. I think part of the issue is in mindsets of the community, where they see any Github source project, and immediately think "I'm entitled to use this without paying". I doubt that attitidue will shift, but I think it damages the a…

> "I'm entitled to use this without paying"

Agree, this happens a lot. But the other side of that coin is the free publicity via Github and the exposure to an avid community of engineers. Something you would not get so easy with closed source.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#177

Post by zogrodea »

brabel wrote: post #152
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…

I am kind of amused to see someone here on HN, of all places, who allegedly runs a business use scare quotes around the word profit and make it sound like there's something ambiguous about it.

Is the word "allegedly" meant to cast doubt on the story? The user mentioned working on "Ardour" in the comments, and it wasn't hard to find what he was talking about from a quick Google search that led me to Wikipedia [0].

I think the quote marks around "profit" are appropriate here because the comment was about defining that specific word.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer)

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#178

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

> as is typical for things linked from HN, this whole article seems very web-y and SaaS-y

I see loads of variety in things linked on HN.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#179

Post by mordae »

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…

"Profit, not usage, is a measure of success"

I pity you.

Think again when you visit a public library, ride on a public road, walk through a public park, breathe the air that's been freed from most of the 90's pollutants... what terrible failures /s

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