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The life and death of open source companies

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Re: The life and death of open source companies

#191

Post by bruce511 »

growse wrote: post #179
bruce511 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll join the no-insult-intended train. I offer up the following not to disparage your company (since its clearly working for now) but to explain to others why this is a terrible -business- model. The problem you have is that the barrier to entry for a competitor is zero. Equally the costs for a competitor are always lower than yours. As long as you are small and niche, it's OK. But if you "prove the market" you basi…

> But if you "prove the market" you basically allow company-B to do what you do, literally exactly what you do, but without the development overhead. If someone can out-compete you by simply cranking the infrastructure handle on your source-code, doesn't that indicate that you're not using your built-in advantage of owning the feature backlog well enough? Or, put another way, if the entire value of your business is i…

I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean by "owning your feature backlog."

But sure, if you dont want your staff to become your competitors then don't put tour code under a license that puts that carrot in front of them.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#192

Post by growse »

bruce511 wrote: post #191
growse wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you "prove the market" you basically allow company-B to do what you do, literally exactly what you do, but without the development overhead. If someone can out-compete you by simply cranking the infrastructure handle on your source-code, doesn't that indicate that you're not using your built-in advantage of owning the feature backlog well enough? Or, put another way, if the entire value of your business is i…

I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean by "owning your feature backlog." But sure, if you dont want your staff to become your competitors then don't put tour code under a license that puts that carrot in front of them.

> I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean by "owning your feature backlog."

If you're stewarding the project, you have the sole authority over over which features land when. You can prioritise and drag (or even reject) PRs to suit your business case and your customers. Everyone else has to accept features when you choose to release them, or fork.

This is a massive competitive advantage, if used effectively.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#193

Post by amadeuspagel »

silisili wrote: post #57
amadeuspagel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these companies open source everything, or even the most valuable parts.

Picking on Google here, their most valuable part by far is injecting ads into search. Most agree their search is nothing special, getting worse even. We've seen tens of companies write good enough search engines. You could write one 10x better tomorrow and still likely fail. Their code is not the secret sauce - their user lock in is. A lot of the same could be said for FB.

This post has nothing to do with my comment or the broader discussion.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#194

Post by yesco »

Qwertious wrote: post #110
PeterZaitsev wrote: post #77

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 :)

>The Open Source is about freedom for users not about making life easy for developers or the Company. That's exactly what open source is about. Open Source was explicitly invented as a more business-friendly version of Free Software, without the whole "freedom" spiel.

Realistically "Free Software" will never actually mean "Free as in Freedom", but instead "Free as in $0".

I'm fully supportive of the Free Software movement but if you have to explain the name actually means a different thing than what it says in plain English then you are going against the grain and being unreasonable. You aren't going to succeed in changing the language but rather, you are just going to confuse the majority of people who hear the term in passing.

Libre can work because it shares roots with liberal, but realistically "Open Source" gets the point across quicker, even if it lacks the nuances of the "Freedom" aspect.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#195

Post by ChatGTP »

JW_00000 wrote: post #128
ChatGTP wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me where I can see the source code for the Google maps APIs please?

Isn't that exactly his point? They open source "a ton of work", but not everything; thereby "not competing on code alone". The code of, say, Android or Google Web Toolkit is open source, but the products they build on top (App Store, Gmail/Maps/...) is closed. It only makes sense to open source the parts on which you're not competing.

Uber open sourcing a bunch of periphery services while having benefited from a huge amount of existing open source libraries to build said service is not even slightly the same thing.

There is absolutely nothing here about open sourcing the bits of code that make them the real money. The business logic implementations, that's what I'd be interested in seeing. That's what we're talking about.

Most of these companies open source because they're great strategies for recruitment anyway. Ie, they get something out of open sourcing these periphery services.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#196

Post by thayne »

bruce511 wrote: post #188
thayne wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't scarce. There isn't a limited supply. There is no point at which the software company would say "sorry, we're out of stock". Unless maybe you are selling physical media with the software on it. With SaaS, possibly you are constrained by the capacity of your infrastructure, but that isn't usually a practical concern unless you have incredibly unexpected growth.

Well, for closed-source software there's a scarcity of suppliers, not supply. The value is not in "a copy of windows" it's that all copies of windows come from one supplier. Yes there can be competing products, that achieve the same goals, or there may be scarcity there too. Of course, even when achieving the same goals, some products are more desirable than others. There's no scarcity of OS options, but some would s…

"a copy of windows" is what you pay for (well, what you pay for a license to use). And there isn't a scarcity of copies of windows.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#197

Post by seba_dos1 »

bruce511 wrote: post #6

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…

> This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source. There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures.

Then it's good that "bazaar" vs. "cathedral" is completely orthogonal to "free software/open source" vs. "non-free".

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#198

Post by jraph »

bruce511 wrote: post #177
jraph wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you develop on this? I'm interested by what you mean by this. Income is mostly from support and consulting. These two things still pretty much rely on the actively developed product, so a big part of the company is dedicated to this. I'd say we are both a software and service company. I believe this is one nice way of developing open source software. No insult taken :-)

I'll join the no-insult-intended train. I offer up the following not to disparage your company (since its clearly working for now) but to explain to others why this is a terrible -business- model. The problem you have is that the barrier to entry for a competitor is zero. Equally the costs for a competitor are always lower than yours. As long as you are small and niche, it's OK. But if you "prove the market" you basi…

> Clearly the model -does- work, especially when the project is new and things are moving fast. But it's hard to grow.

The market is proven (and we have closed source competitors). The project is 20. It grows slowly but does grow. It also doesn't need to grow too much. Not every company wants to become very big. In the end, the company is (increasingly) profitable, employees get paid and customers are happy.

> Naturally there needs to be some incentive to keep the support staff in-house

The company, while not paying incredible salaries, pays decently and offers awesome working conditions. They perfectly know that we could get paid more elsewhere so it compensates by making it enjoyable to work at. And it works, many people have been there for a long time. Some of the first ones are still here.

More critically, the support team heavily relies on the product team for specific questions, and also supports custom projects built on top of the product, so it's not like they can just leave and create a competitive support business. The expertise in the finest details is with the product team and the infra team.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#199

Post by jraph »

rmbyrro wrote: post #170
jraph wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure, just don't complain about Open Source licenses after you chose it for your business. And don't claim it to be open source when open source doesn't work for your business. 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 n…

Ah, totally agree with this.

> I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business

Well, life is hard, things are not always easy, running am business is difficult and stressful, looking for ways to make open source profitable is noble, and also investors who "gave" an absurd amount of money want it back plus some more, of course.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#200

Post by Geezus_42 »

jraph wrote: post #104
rmbyrro wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that Open Source, by design, drammatically increases the likelihood of failure. It's already hard to build a successful business. Odds are already thin for you to succeed. Why choose a model that worsens it? Open Source was not created as a funding source to for-profit ventures. That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and t…

> That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source. You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does: - develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees. - sell support and consulting on this product - sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this pro…

I wish I could work at a place like that.
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