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Death of an open-source business model

joemorrison.medium.com

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Re: Death of an open-source business model

#201

Post by open-source-ux »

There never was an open-source business model.

Among the thousands of open-source projects, the ones championed as a successful business make a tiny proportion i.e. the exception not the norm.

Meanwhile the SaaS business model continues to eat the software market. A model that gives users less control than the desktop software model.

Open-source software has been critical to the success of the SaaS model. You could argue SaaS is the true success of the 'open-source business model'. Just not the way open-source advocates expected it to be.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#202

Post by chrisseaton »

dredmorbius wrote: post #166
chrisseaton wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget that the OSI and the people behind it neither own, nor invented, the term 'open source.' They want to give you the impression that they do and they did, but they don't and they didn't.

False. In the application to software, Bruce Perrens most definitely did define ther term, based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the Free Software Foundation's Three Freedoms definition of Free Software, in June 1997: https://opensource.org/docs/osd https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines https://perens.com/2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-open-so... The term was not previously used with regard…

> The term was not previously used with regard to software

This is just not a true thing to say. See my other replies for examples from before 1997.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#203

Post by chrisseaton »

phaemon wrote: post #199
chrisseaton wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid this just isn't true. Ask other people around at the time: > I joined Caldera in November of 1995, and we certainly used "open source" broadly at that time. We were building software. I can't imagine a world where we did not use the specific phrase "open source software". And we were not alone. The term "Open Source" was used broadly by Linus Torvalds (who at the time was a student...I had dinner with Linu…

So where are all the examples on public mailing lists and Usenet of them using this? I'm afraid I simply don't trust people's hazy memories of conversations from years ago.

> So where are all the examples on public mailing lists and Usenet of them using this?

Here's one

http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html

Also - even the USPTO rejected their claim as a trademark.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#204

Post by shp0ngle »

hannob wrote: post #21
fsflover wrote: post #3

> if you give your secret sauce away for free, and it gets popular enough, cloud providers will inevitably spin up competitive services using your very own code against you. For some reason, the author never mentioned AGPL. What's wrong with using this license if you want to defend your open-source business model?

AGPL doesn't allow you to say "I want AWS to pay me if they use my software". As long as AWS abides the rules of the AGPL they can use your software as much as they like and create offerings based on it.

Can AWS abide by the rules of AGPL though? If they don't opensource their modifications and their whole AWS system?

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#205

Post by MaxBarraclough »

chrisseaton wrote: post #143
qchris wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that there's a formal definition of capitalized "Open Source" by the OSI, but I'm also not enchanted by that being the only definition for lower-case "open source". I think that the lower case open source is really more about a general approach to software (or intellectual property in general, really). Some people want to use terms like "libre" to refer to projects that have most of the practical characteristi…

People forget that the OSI and the people behind it neither own, nor invented, the term 'open source.' They want to give you the impression that they do and they did, but they don't and they didn't.

I don't see a good reason to view it as akin to a power-grab. It's profoundly unhelpful when terms are diluted and muddied. We should use the OSI's definition not because they say so, and not for legalistic reasons like trademarks, but because it's important to have meaningfully precise language.

It's right that when a thread is submitted of a project falsely claiming to be open source, the HN community unfailingly tears it to shreds. We don't want the term to be cheapened into becoming meaningless. I don't see that the origins of the term are relevant.

Personally I tend to capitalise, I typically use Free and Open Source software to be more clear that I'm referring to free software as defined by the FSF, and open source as defined by the OSI. It's unfortunate that I've found this to be necessary, to close the door on obtuse misuse of these terms.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#206

Post by chrisseaton »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #205
chrisseaton wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget that the OSI and the people behind it neither own, nor invented, the term 'open source.' They want to give you the impression that they do and they did, but they don't and they didn't.

I don't see a good reason to view it as akin to a power-grab. It's profoundly unhelpful when terms are diluted and muddied. We should use the OSI's definition not because they say so, and not for legalistic reasons like trademarks, but because it's important to have meaningfully precise language. It's right that when a thread is submitted of a project falsely claiming to be open source, the HN community unfailingly t…

Ideally they would have picked a term that they could prove to have invented and could have trademarked, then there wouldn't be an issue.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#207

Post by MaxBarraclough »

chrisseaton wrote: post #206
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a good reason to view it as akin to a power-grab. It's profoundly unhelpful when terms are diluted and muddied. We should use the OSI's definition not because they say so, and not for legalistic reasons like trademarks, but because it's important to have meaningfully precise language. It's right that when a thread is submitted of a project falsely claiming to be open source, the HN community unfailingly t…

Ideally they would have picked a term that they could prove to have invented and could have trademarked, then there wouldn't be an issue.

I suppose so, but the term is typically understood in the software community as a pretty precise term of art, and people shouldn't try to muddy it.

It's still better than free software, which invariably makes the uninitiated think of freeware.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#208

Post by jabl »

julianlam wrote: post #170
jabl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I recently stumbled upon that struck me was Bryan Cantrill's writeup at http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts... and https://sfosc.org/docs that was linked from that blog post. Quick takeaways about open source business models: - Dual licensing: Well, poison. Who's want to sign away their copyrights so that some company can make a buck? It's essentially proprietary software that also…

Excuse my ignorance, but what's the difference between dual licensing and a free software product?

In dual license, you offer the product alternatively under an open source license, or a commercial license. Typically the open source license is chosen to as onerous and scary as possible to force companies to buy the commercial license. And it requires you to hold all the copyrights so that you can relicense it, giving most contributors cold feet. A typical example of this is MySQL or Qt, or the various server-side licenses adopted by MongoDB etc (though those are onerous enough to not be certified open source by the OSI, but the principle remains the same).

In a free software product, the code itself is available under an open source license, often one that doesn't prevent use by companies. The product is some particular version of the code built, QA'd, vetted and supported by the vendor. The typical example being RHEL. But in addition to RedHat, this model can be used also by single-product companies.

For more detail see e.g. https://sfosc.org/docs/book/business-models/

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#209

Post by jfengel »

3np wrote: post #189
jfengel wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took the opposite route in 2010, and it didn't work out well for me. We sold it as a premium product, and it was hard to get adoption. Which made it hard to actually prove the benefits we claimed should exist. That's not proof that we'd have fared better if we had open-sourced it. We took exactly the opposite route of MongoDB, with very stringent schemas to ensure data quality. That required a large up-front invest…

What is the "it" you're referring to here?

The company was called Highfleet. We built ontology-based databases. Not OWL ontologies; we were actually doing ontologies before OWL. We were briefly and tangentially involved, but we thought they had picked the wrong level of ontology. We had a full-featured logic language for really strong definitions, so that you have strong guarantees about data quality and good ways to reason about data integration between databases.

In the end we never found the right use case for it. The advantages were all in maintenance rather than development, and even people who could be talked around to it wouldn't see the payoff. There were a trillion other problems, and maybe better management than me could have made it work.

Re: Death of an open-source business model

#210

Post by indymike »

jabl wrote: post #208
julianlam wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse my ignorance, but what's the difference between dual licensing and a free software product?

In dual license, you offer the product alternatively under an open source license, or a commercial license. Typically the open source license is chosen to as onerous and scary as possible to force companies to buy the commercial license. And it requires you to hold all the copyrights so that you can relicense it, giving most contributors cold feet. A typical example of this is MySQL or Qt, or the various server-side…

Almost every one of these models is based on differentiated licensing. I want your software, but different features/licensing. There's really not much of a difference between open core and "dual licensing". I think for open source, there are only a few revenue models that really matter:

* Aggregators - Redhat and AWS (and cloud providers). They sell and deliver collections of open source software, driving value from configuration and easier deployment.

* Differentiated licensing - Toss all the variations on pay for something other than the GPL version or additional features into this bucket. It's a model that is rapidly becoming obsolete.

* PaaS / Saas - host it for the client. Value is delivered by better operations. Competitors often are aggregators in the form of cloud vendors.

* Support & Services - Free software, paid support, paid consulting. This limits the market to larger companies or at least people who need a much higher level of support. Competitors can be other contributors to the code base.

* App Store Delivery - I'm seeing lots of GPL software where the authors are putting the "official version" in app stores (lots of this going on in Windows) and charging for it. Competitors can be anyone who can build and deliver the app, but since many apps need a back end, the hosting of app data can be a moat.

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