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Who eats who in open source

platformonomics.com

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Re: Who eats who in open source

#21

Post by eloff »

gwern wrote: post #15

> The unexpected and asymmetric competition from the clouds confounds open source companies, who must confront the fact the competitive advantage of knowing their software better than anyone else isn’t the insurmountable moat they had hoped. It is never fun to wake up and discover your product is now just a feature of a broader offering, but this is what is happening with software. Claiming open source is eating the…

Thanks for sharing. The discussion previously here is also interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18854854

Re: Who eats who in open source

#22

Post by jdsully »

wmf wrote: post #18
awinter-py wrote: post #17

Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3). The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql. These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This…

With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.

That's just simple competition that we've always had. Microsoft working on a competitor to your product was the huge fear of the 90s. Cloud providers competing with your own source code is a new phemonema.

The original thesis would be that brand loyalty would be strong enough to prevent forking like this. "You don't want that third-rate version, get the real thing from the original authors!". It appears that the customer base assumes quality is roughly equal considering its mostly the same code.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#24

Post by slovenlyrobot »

wmf wrote: post #18
awinter-py wrote: post #17

Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3). The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql. These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This…

With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.

Could a trick along the lines of the Apple SMC copyrighted phrase be used to poison a protocol against a cloud provider? Release your client and server under a license like AGPL, with an attached file not under AGPL that both components require.

It's not possible to say the code is non-free because it's explicitly free, but packaging and placement (such as e.g. default pip installs using a trademarked name) could ensure at least some pain is felt to make a typical client talk to a server that does not have that file. Perhaps the file's license allows to be embedded anywhere so long as it is only used to play the role of a client

Re: Who eats who in open source

#25

Post by 0xFACEFEED »

henryfjordan wrote: post #14
jandrewrogers wrote: post #8

The root of the issue is that licensing costs, the only costs that open source is guaranteed to reduce, can be a small percentage of operational costs in practice. If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience, it can literally be economically uncompetitive with a closed source product that does optimize those other…

> If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience I feel the opposite is true. There are many open source projects that are at least on par with their proprietary counterparts. Postgres is competitive with every SQL DB I've heard of except maybe in some niche use-cases. Redis is open source and incredibly performant. S…

Not the parent but I thought of AWS services like RDS and S3.

I believe the point being made was the money you save on licensing fees are insignificant compared to the amount you spend on paying people to maintain your infrastructure.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#26

Post by ummonk »

wmf wrote: post #18
awinter-py wrote: post #17

Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3). The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql. These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This…

With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.

Sounds like open source companies will just need to become patent trolls. At least if Google is unable to successfully win the appeal in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#28

Post by wmf »

slovenlyrobot wrote: post #24
wmf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.

Could a trick along the lines of the Apple SMC copyrighted phrase be used to poison a protocol against a cloud provider? Release your client and server under a license like AGPL, with an attached file not under AGPL that both components require. It's not possible to say the code is non-free because it's explicitly free, but packaging and placement (such as e.g. default pip installs using a trademarked name) could ens…

I don't think using evil for good is the answer here. The survival of these companies isn't that important (except to them of course).

Re: Who eats who in open source

#29

Post by zby »

The cloud is eating business relying on licensing. This is relevant for both open and closed licenses. By the way I have wrote a post on that when the MongoDB debate was raging: https://medium.com/hackernoon/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-.... The way for Open Source to survive is to make it attractive for cloud providers.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#30

Post by saagarjha »

wmf wrote: post #18
awinter-py wrote: post #17

Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3). The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql. These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This…

With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.

Which I’d argue is not something you should be protected against. Why should you be able to prevent people from reimplementing your product?
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