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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

#21

Post by drewdevault »

chii wrote: post #20
drewdevault wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, quite likely. This is not really a matter of FOSS or not, but it is something that Prusa absolutely needed to have foreseen and made a viable business plan to address. Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that. That could have taken many forms. They might have invested in a much stronger brand, aiming to make Prusa (needs a bett…

> Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that. none of those plans would work - at best they're a gamble. > China can't really compete on reputation nor will they. The competition is always going to be on price. It's why counterfits exists as a market, but not only counterfits but also white-labeled copies. The only thing that china ca…

Yes, it's a gamble. But having exactly one 3D printer model at a high price point and doing nothing else is also a gamble, and a much stupider one.

Western manufacturing is at odds with China for the reasons you stated, but free software eliminates this competitive advantage entirely and you need to plan for your output to be reused by your competitors as a fundamental part of your business model.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#22

Post by randomlinuxuser »

My point of view, as a linux user from my teens to now, early thirties, I'm just some random, so don't take this too seriously.

Are we totally out of touch? Let my explain myself, the idea that if the drivers/firmware were open source it will make the bet on some hardware safer sounds like this to me, "Someone could get it working and share the code in case the company goes out of business in a few years", emphasis on the someone part, here is the thing, the people capable of doing that is pretty small, I ask myself, for the time it would take to deal with that, I could earn more money in that time that I would save 'fixing' the drivers instead of just buying a new one from another brand or the second hand market.

I know people love the romantic idea of free software, open source, etc, I just want my shit to work well, which usually is open source stuff because in most cases it has a zero monetary cost and people use it, so it gets bug fixes from their own users that are trying to make their thing work. I'm equally happy when the software is propietary but works well, case in point the nvidia drivers, it just work well for my use case, the amd drivers are open, well, I can't use their gpus without ending with a headache every few days, doesn't matter if is open source or not, it needs to work well.

Back to my point, even for the power users, how many people will actually fix the drivers/firmware of some hardware they bought? We are in a position in life that is cheaper to just buy new hardware and use that time to learn new things that will pay more in the long term and I personally find we, the linux community are out of touch most of the time with what most people care about.

Also, I find amusing when people get the pikachu face when some big corporation uses OSS and makes profit off of it, isn't that the whole point of the OSS? When I use it on my pc I'm also making profit for myself, the corporations are just doing the same but at scale, and if your goal is to make profit, who wouldn't use all the tools available? They don't have to like OSS, don't have to share the values of the OSS, don't have to 'give back', but OSS allows anyone to use it, so why wouldn't they? Do you want to be a company that is 100% OSS? That's cool, just don't make the pikachu face when another company enters the market and use what have build and shared.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#23

Post by drewdevault »

pydry wrote: post #15
drewdevault wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic's revenue was north of half a billion dollars when they changed their license. Amazon was most decidedly not killing them. It was motivated by greed, like it always is.

Still posting losses. It's not generally considered a wise business move to wait until your corpse is already being feasted upon before changing direction. Long term they absolutely would have been killed - computing is being consolidated onto one of 4 platforms, all of which would squeeze out elastic using their market dominance as leverage.

Elastic's losses are a classic story of VC-funded promises of infinite, unsustainable growth. Success for Elastic is defined by the classic impossible measure of becoming a monopoloy so you can raise prices every year and cite growth indefinitely. They had everything they needed to reach a sustainable business model, and the problem was not in their licenses but rather that they set impossible goals for themselves.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#24

Post by remram »

We should come up with a name for this new generation of licenses. They are not "open source" or "free software", and using those words would be both confusing and immediately polarizing. But having nothing more specific than "source available" seems very insufficient, since most of them turn open source quickly or only deny rights that do not usually matter to the end-user.

(licenses in that family: BUSL, FSL, Common Clause)

Anyone has suggestions?

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#25

Post by pydry »

drewdevault wrote: post #23
pydry wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still posting losses. It's not generally considered a wise business move to wait until your corpse is already being feasted upon before changing direction. Long term they absolutely would have been killed - computing is being consolidated onto one of 4 platforms, all of which would squeeze out elastic using their market dominance as leverage.

Elastic's losses are a classic story of VC-funded promises of infinite, unsustainable growth. Success for Elastic is defined by the classic impossible measure of becoming a monopoloy so you can raise prices every year and cite growth indefinitely. They had everything they needed to reach a sustainable business model, and the problem was not in their licenses but rather that they set impossible goals for themselves.

You have literally just 180'd your argument from "they're rich and greedy they didnt need any more money" to "Im glad they are dying they squandered their opportunities".

May Amazon feast on their rotting open and free corpse, eh?

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#26

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

chii wrote: post #19
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…

> decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge. That is what i associate with any open source company.

I’m not convinced that Open Source is a marketing terms that matters much for many industries (SaaS, hardware, probably others). If anything the continued push back against people trying to stay aligned with the Open Source community and have commercial enterprises tells me that in many ways you’re probably better off not trying in the first place. I personally don’t think that’s the right message.

It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#27

Post by high_priest »

chii wrote: post #17
jampekka wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The true tragedy is the economic system that makes this a tragedy.

software has zero marginal cost, so therefore, if a piece of software can be used by the majority of humans, it makes sense that it ends up costing very little per instance of it. It's not a tragedy. It's actually a good outcome imho.

Software has zero marginal cost, that software engineers can imagine.

My workstation runs all the time and I don't care that it consumes this 100$ of electricity a month. Who cares about amortisation of new hardware? New, shiny is new, shiny. There are some large, expensive server machines running my software? I don't see the bill, so the costs don't apply to me. There are dozens of engineering hours required to even partially understand how the final product should look like. But an already well fed software engineer doesn't think that every minute of his life is precious and it costs way beyond the price of his dinner cheeseburger.

Such is the fallacy of "Software engineering is free"

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#28

Post by jraph »

chii wrote: post #17
jampekka wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The true tragedy is the economic system that makes this a tragedy.

software has zero marginal cost, so therefore, if a piece of software can be used by the majority of humans, it makes sense that it ends up costing very little per instance of it. It's not a tragedy. It's actually a good outcome imho.

The tragedy is that building such software should be actually very easy and incentivized, since it brings so much benefit to society. But it's not incentivized, often not easily economically viable because of the way the economic system works.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#29

Post by drewdevault »

pydry wrote: post #25
drewdevault wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic's losses are a classic story of VC-funded promises of infinite, unsustainable growth. Success for Elastic is defined by the classic impossible measure of becoming a monopoloy so you can raise prices every year and cite growth indefinitely. They had everything they needed to reach a sustainable business model, and the problem was not in their licenses but rather that they set impossible goals for themselves.

You have literally just 180'd your argument from "they're rich and greedy they didnt need any more money" to "Im glad they are dying they squandered their opportunities". May Amazon feast on their rotting open and free corpse, eh?

I haven't 180'd anything. The throughline is the same: they have more than enough money and they had many opportunities to use it effectively, but the tied their ankles together with their infinite-growth business model.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#30

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

chii wrote: post #20
drewdevault wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, quite likely. This is not really a matter of FOSS or not, but it is something that Prusa absolutely needed to have foreseen and made a viable business plan to address. Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that. That could have taken many forms. They might have invested in a much stronger brand, aiming to make Prusa (needs a bett…

> Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that. none of those plans would work - at best they're a gamble. > China can't really compete on reputation nor will they. The competition is always going to be on price. It's why counterfits exists as a market, but not only counterfits but also white-labeled copies. The only thing that china ca…

> nor will they. The competition is always going to be on price. It's why counterfits exists as a market, but not only counterfits but also white-labeled copies.

I’m not convinced that this is true. DJI, Roborock, Dreame, Xiaomi are all brands that compete to some degree on brand reputation.

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