Open Source does not win by being cheaper • Hacker News Board

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#181

Post by martypitt » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 8:43 AM UTC

mordae wrote: post #179

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

This discussion is on the topic of Commercial, Open Source software.

If a company is wholey funded by the government through taxpayer dollars (as in your examples), then I agree - profit isn't the driving consideration.

But that's not what this conversation is about.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#182

Post by nickelpro » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 8:44 AM UTC

Dumb title, of course it does

Author is trying to say Open Source businesses do not win by being cheaper.

Open source codebases win all the time by being cheaper, no one pays for compression algorithms or network time daemons or media transcoders. Open source obliterated those markets entirely.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#183

Post by j-a-a-p » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 8:46 AM UTC

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #24

I think the key point which is missed here is - Open Source gives you the choice. It does not necesarry mean cheaper (in a moment) but it means if you're not happy with vendor pricing, quality or there are other factors in play, you have alternatives. With proprietary technology choosing technology means marrying vendor for life

> With proprietary technology choosing technology means marrying vendor for life

I learned the term Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the age that closed source would warn businesses to move to open source. I guess the roles have been reversed?

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#184

Post by csydas » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 8:48 AM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #149

dgudkov wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At some level in the infrastructure this may be true, but this is not my experience working directly with the RND/Engineering teams and Infrastructure teams on a lot of the big cloud providers. They will undoubtedly have many tricks to get whatever you have on their cloud working again, but there should not be an expectation that they aren't going to just get a fast and dirty fix going. It might work, but it will be a kludge in many cases.

Same with security; quite a few of the S3 on-premises providers have backdoors that allow a person to bypass even the S3 immutable functions -- while I can understand that for specific customers who are using the S3 infra for Storage as a Service needing a way to clean up data from customers who left, such features are not advertised, and IMO, such S3 vendors should not be allowed to call their product "immutable", as it's anything but and most clients wouldn't even know about such backdoors.

The actual tech behind the providers might be pretty nice (this is arguable though...), but I would not say that this has any bearing on their trustworthiness as a provider.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#185

Post by jongjong » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 8:56 AM UTC

I think a lot of open source projects aren't made open source by choice but by necessity. Sometimes making a product open source is the only way for it to gain any adoption at all.

The author is focused on a tiny number of elite open source projects. They are not representative of the vast majority of open source projects.

Some companies have the right business and/or government connections and they can easily sell lucrative licenses for their products but they are a minority. Most people and small businesses do not have that kind of network. Without the right business network, you will struggle to earn any money at all. It doesn't matter how good your product is or how much money it could save someone. Nobody will believe you, nobody will even try it out. The adoption hurdle is too big, even if the long term benefits could be massive.

Making a product open source is the only way to get your toe in the door because it gives you a tiny chance of having your product noticed and that's really all that matters sometimes.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#186

Post by keepamovin » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 9:36 AM UTC

WJW wrote: post #166

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 m…

Hahaha. Yeah I guess so. Well what it means for us is it's a priority. I guess that word harkens back to navigation on ships. I suppose nobody ever does that anymore. Hahaha

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#187

Post by poisonborz » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 9:59 AM UTC

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…

There is a very easy distinction that so many projects make: target group business or home user. Paid support, scaling features can be reserved for commercial world where most software makes its profit anyway. Doesn't fit every use case of course, but it doesn't have to. Most computing should be personal.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#188

Post by andai » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 10:06 AM UTC

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

Is there some sort of Hacker-er News that filters that stuff out?

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#189

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 10:22 AM UTC

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 was a commercial product, and when it was open sourced many of the existing customers kept supporting the project.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#190

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 10:24 AM UTC

jorlow wrote: post #96

ignoramous wrote: post #45

> What is a transparency problem? It’s when a solution being closed source creates distrust between the client and vendor. Eterprises don't care that much about code. And if they do, business continuity clauses may alleviate most of their closed source concerns. After all, how many financial firms switched to OpenOffice Calc from Excel? > She argues that Amplitude is pretty expensive, particularly prohibitive for som…

> Eterprises don't care that much about code. And if they do, business continuity clauses may alleviate most of their closed source concerns. After all, how many financial firms switched to OpenOffice Calc from Excel? This is true of tools like excel, but for things like server infrastructure (at least in big tech companies) they are very hesitant to put something into production without at least source code access (…

Every day companies put stuff in production on iOS, macOS, watchOS, Windows, SQL Server, Oracle, INTEGRITY OS, AEM, SAP, Sitecore, and a myriad of closed source enterprise products.