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Open Source does not win by being cheaper

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Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#201

Post by jameshart »

syllogism wrote: post #164
jmpeax wrote: post #125

> Minio is a great alternative to companies mindful of who has access to user data. Of course, AWS claims that AWS personnel doesn’t have direct access to customer data, but by being closed-source, that statement is just a function of trust. Can't a company claim to be hosting something via open-source software but using a closed-source in-house software masquerading with the same API endpoints as the open-source ver…

Maybe "trust" in a purely technical sense, but we live in a society. If a vendor has a part of their contract that would put them under penalty of fraud, customers don't usually worry whether they can independently verify it's true. For instance, if you write in your agreements that data goes into this bit of open-source code and leaves it and goes nowhere else, and you list out some processes you take to ensure this…

Yes - people here talk like vendors are inscrutable black boxes, which suggests to me they have never been through a serious vendor selection process (on either side). This is not a problem businesses are unaware of, and solutions and enforcement mechanisms exist.

SOC2 may be kind of a tedious drudge to go through, and provide limited actual security, but a third-party auditor’s SOC2 attestation for a vendor goes some way to assuring you that they have some level of access controls and processes to protect your data. It’s not nothing. And the lack of a SOC2 attestation for a vendor is a red flag for sure.

Back in my proprietary SaaS days we used to regularly undergo third party security audits, code escrow processes, and numerous standards compliance hoops, to create sufficient assurance to clients to sign a contract.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#202

Post by kevincox »

foundart wrote: post #136

For me as an engineer who influences technology acquisition, open source wins by being grokkable. - If my colleagues and I can see the source, we can decide whether or not we think it will fulfill the claims it makes. - Once we're using it, if we run into a bug or an unanticipated use case, we can, at a minimum, research a solution and suggest it in a bug report. Alternatively, we can open a PR. (edited for formattin…

This is definitely valuable. It must be once a week that I read the source of a dependency to see what it is doing. Then I can make a quick workaround and usually a bug report.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#203

Post by pif »

andai wrote: post #188
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…

>as is typical for things linked from HN, this whole article seems very web-y and SaaS-y Is there some sort of Hacker-er News that filters that stuff out?

It's not really a matter of filtering. Web and SaaS are interesting topic. But it is irritating and frustrating how many articles, and commenters, refer to web programming as the whole universe of software development.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#204

Post by Applejinx »

Nevermark wrote: post #161
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…

You don’t need VC’s to be organized as a corporation and/or have a growth/profit mindset It removes a lot of pressure to not have pure investors expecting constant returns. Easier to do the right thing for the project. But growth is likely to be necessary, and sensible, in any product space competing against ambitious corporations who are going to be strongly growth oriented. Booking profits so you are prepared for d…

The basic problem here is HN posters unable to conceptualize the idea 'right thing for the project'. They're stuck in 'investor mode' so to them, anyone interacting with the project (or the world) can only be interested in extracting profit from the system, rendering what the project does, meaningless.

Not a good way to get work done. At the end of the day you have to have done something.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#205

Post by mindwok »

justinclift wrote: post #168
mindwok wrote: post #9

The author calls out they are specifically talking about open source solutions that compete with paid offerings. IMO, the jury is very much still out on whether open source "wins" in this regard. In the past decade we've seen a huge rise of open source products, and in the last 5 years or so we've seen many of them move away from that. MongoDB, the Hashicorp stack, Elastic, Red Hat, MinIO, the list goes on. There are…

> MinIO Looking at the MinIO repo, they seem to have changed from APL2 to AGPL3. Is that the "move away" from Open Source you're meaning in relation to them?

Yeah that’s what I was referring to. Still open source, but the move was controversial because it was taking away some freedoms from users of the previous license.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#207

Post by jrochkind1 »

> Granted, MongoDB eventually switched to a special SSPL license to add specific restrictions on Cloud Providers from distributing a service without contributing to the project, which isn’t OSI approved, but is open-source practically

As an open source consumer (as well as author, but not as a business), I consider it "practically" a part of open source that I can choose to run open source software on any vendor or platform I want, not just ones who have a licensing deal with the software authors. This is a very practical matter.

It may well be that you can't actually build a succesful business on actual open source. The arguments about how you can succeed with an open source business seem to be mostly based on making the source code _available_, with no need for it to be actually open source. It may be that "source-available" without actually being open source can be a viable business model in many more cases than actual open source.

I think the sustainability/viabiilty of open source is indeed currently under question.

But the difference between source-available software without an open source license, and actual open source licensed software, really does make practical difference to the consumer.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#208

Post by bombcar »

brabel wrote: post #152
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…

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.

Profit has many meanings. The IRS considers my wages to not be profit to my company, but they are profit to me.

I could setup a non-profit that explicitly doesn’t aim to profit, but it does so by paying my very comfortably. Profit‽

This disconnect is what causes many businesses that are successful (they earn enough for expenses and rainy days) to explode and die when sold, because they don’t earn enough for all that plus interest expenses plus return on capital.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#209

Post by jeremyjh »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #207

> Granted, MongoDB eventually switched to a special SSPL license to add specific restrictions on Cloud Providers from distributing a service without contributing to the project, which isn’t OSI approved, but is open-source practically As an open source consumer (as well as author, but not as a business), I consider it "practically" a part of open source that I can choose to run open source software on any vendor or p…

> I can choose to run open source software on any vendor or platform I want, not just ones who have a licensing deal with the software authors. This is a very practical matter.

The MongoDB license prevents cloud providers from reselling a Mongo IAAS. It does not restrict you from hosting your own database on any infrastructure you want (cloud or otherwise). Is there a license that does prevent you installing on specific clouds?

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#210

Post by thinkmassive »

imiric wrote: post #150
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…

> 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 entity can make some money. This is not inevitable at all. You're right that there's a tension there, but there are companies that manage to do this right, and please both OSS and commercial users. The fact many companies don't is not an…

One of the main reasons to donate a project to a foundation, such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is to protect the community against this type of rugpull. A requirement for them to even consider adopting a project is that it isn’t under majority control of one single commercial entity.

Do people honestly believe none of these projects compete with commercial solutions, or are they mostly oblivious these exist at all?

https://www.cncf.io/projects/

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