Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Source does not win by being cheaper

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 287 posts

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#191

Post by pjmlp »

xtracto wrote: post #148
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…

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.

React only exists thanks to FB money, even though so many like to hate on FB.

The "gets profit from doing something else" is a very narrow use case for most software.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#192

Post by brabel »

zogrodea wrote: post #177
brabel wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Allegedly because I don't have time or interest to check it, and because if you're running a for-profit business and you need someone to clarify for you what profit means, I feel like there's something weird going on.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#193

Post by itsafarqueue »

maxloh wrote: post #146
lolinder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HashiCorp is the latest big name to do it—they switched to the BUSL, which more or less says you can only use the product if you aren't offering it for sale in competition with HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl

That seems to be a fair license to me. The entire codebase will be open-sourced a few years after a version is released. You can use the old version and fix security vulnerabilities yourself. If you really want the latest features, you pay.

Doesn’t this turn on the definition of competition (in the license). I remember reading about a bunch of game and server tech being in very murky water following the license change.

If they ever decide to enter your specific business they have an automatic kill switch on you.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#194

Post by aatd86 »

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.

Positive income is profit. Negative income is loss.

I'd rather profit. :p

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#195

Post by Applejinx »

brabel wrote: post #192
zogrodea wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Allegedly because I don't have time or interest to check it, and because if you're running a for-profit business and you need someone to clarify for you what profit means, I feel like there's something weird going on.

There is, but it's not where you think it is.

That's the guy who runs Ardour. It's a fundamental DAW on Linux, as familiar as Excel on Windows: it is the foundation of Harrison Mixbus. He's also fundamental to the JACK audio subsystem. It's possible you've heard of him as one of the two first programmers at Amazon.

His objection is mighty valid, here. You cannot say profit is a basic principle of open source. The whole point of open source is communication of ideas in the form of software and the ability to reformulate those ideas freely, leading to an empowering of communities of software users and the ability to DO THINGS.

That's the point. Making wealth for individuals isn't in the equation.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#196

Post by jameshart »

beremaki wrote: post #167
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…

If profit was completely unambiguous, accountants wouldn’t have had to invent the word ‘EBITDA’.

The article rather ambiguously says:

> Profit is what allows the company to hire employees, grow, and sustain itself—it is quite literally what funds ongoing development

There’s a key distinction between reinvesting profits - using accrued money to develop or acquire capital assets that can grow the company - and expenses.

Cash used to ‘sustain the business’, ‘grow’ (increase sales) and ‘hire employees’, as well as ‘ongoing development’ in the sense of business development, is largely going in the ‘operating expenses’ bucket. It doesn’t come out of profits, it comes out of revenue and it reduces your profits.

But in the case of a software focused organization, engineering staffing costs and ongoing product development can absolutely be reinvestment into developing software assets - but with a lot of caveats.

So it’s certainly a little ambiguous for the original article to claim that all those things are ‘what profit is for’. Often they are preprofit expenses.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#197

Post by nonameiguess »

brap wrote: post #22
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…

What’s the pattern you’re referring to? I’m curious how these infra projects keep AWS/GCP from killing them

If your product is sufficiently complex, you may have organizational expertise in running it that the cloud providers can't match, though I can't think of any examples of this. There security requirements like fips-validation and released STIGs that make organizations depend on your product. Off the top of my head, other than these, I can't think of anything RHEL offers that Amazon Linux doesn't, but plenty of orgs still choose the RHEL ami for their EC2s. Some orgs may want or be required to self-host. Some orgs may use your cloud but only in a FedRamp-accredited or classified enclave, where many managed services available in the commercial enclave are not available or not yet approved by your sponsoring agency.

I don't know how much of a moat this constitutes for vendors like Elastic, though. Those markets are inherently smaller than what they hoped to get out of managed Elastic cloud, and more labor-intensive to service. It's more of a moat for the big five defense contractors and why Raytheon is still writing all the software for spy satellites rather than Google and Lockheed does all the hardware rather than SpaceX. Of course, they're not open source, but the contracts usually specify the government owns your code, not you, and they can share it with any other contractor they choose if they want to replace you.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#199

Post by jameshart »

nickelpro wrote: post #182

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.

Yes, the switch of context at the ‘Profit not usage is the measure of success’ heading, from talking about open source tools to open source businesses was so abrupt it gave me whiplash. I went back and reread the first paragraphs to check I hadn’t missed some words.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#200

Post by Applejinx »

maltalex wrote: post #37
musicale wrote: post #28

> For some, this might be a tough pill to swallow. But a for-profit business exists for profit. No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. > Definitionally and practically. Profit is what allows the company to hire employees, grow, and sustain itself—it is quite literally what funds ongoing development That's g…

> No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. What? If Apple or FedEx could get customers to (sustainably) pay them without actually providing a product in return, do you think they would have kept making phones and delivering packages just for the hell of it?

Apple began as people making home computers in their garages, so they could have computers. How on earth can you, on Hacker News, not understand the compelling allure of having a computer in your home in an era where that was just about unthinkable?

There's a lot of homo economicus in this Hacker News comments section. It's genuinely weird and unsettling, though I guess it stands to reason that here's where you'd see 'em. We're talking human paperclip maximizers, just generalized to 'profit'. Open source and free software are kind of kryptonite to this mindset, an active danger, therefore you're seeing a lot of pushback.

Wealth is for DOING STUFF.

Open Source maximizes DOING STUFF, not 'profit'. It can actually reduce the amount of profit in the world, through decentralizing power and undermining the ability to engage in profit-taking and the cornering of markets.

It is frequently engaged in by people who have reasonable amounts of wealth in their own right and have turned their attention to doing stuff rather than amassing more wealth the most efficient way they can. Sometimes, open source amounts to doing stuff in the most efficient way you can, directly competing with anybody who's stuck having to also make profit while doing stuff.

This is just reality.

Post reply on HN