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The life and death of open source companies

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: The life and death of open source companies

#201

Post by chii »

jraph wrote: post #28
chii wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> since it brings so much benefit to society

if it brought benefit to society (at large), why doesn't said society pay for the benefit?

Why isn't there an opensource funding model from society, except for trivial donations that don't move the needle?

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#202

Post by jraph »

bruce511 wrote: post #183
akoboldfrying wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for responding. >For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing. I agree with this, and that the makers of P likely enjoy a big (and genuine) advantage in being considered the authority in all matters P. But for a competitor (me, in your example), spending time with your existing, working code is much less time and effor…

The real potential competitors are current staff. The risk is not that -I- want to invest all the time and energy, its that a small group of existing experts aka your current staff, decide to do it. There's also possibly a small % of users who end up knowing enough to end up doing "mostly supporting others". They can end up becoming competitors as well. So yes, this model can work, as its currently doing for you (and…

> basically the staff can walk anytime, and effectively take all the customers with them.

I suppose something like the ownCloud / Nextcloud breakup could happen.

You need a big enough set of employees with all the skills required (product & customer relations) such that these employees will be collectively more efficient than who remains to be willing to leave at the same time and still want to work on the same thing, and an important set of customers to be willing to switch to the new business.

Given how we like each others and how nice it is to work there, I believe the company would need to fuck things up big time for this to happen. What caused this at ownCloud is a political change (from true FLOSS to open core, maybe other things) and it took a co-founder + a big bunch of core contributors to leave.

I would say, if this is the biggest risk, the company is probably okay :-)

I agree with you on the fact that it is probably hard to achieve this though.

And still, ownCloud is still alive. I don't know how relevant they are and why people would choose them over Nextcloud, I'm somewhat amazed they are still there.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#203

Post by jraph »

Geezus_42 wrote: post #200
jraph wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Can't promise anything, but feel free to drop a line, my email is in my profile.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#204

Post by bmurphy1976 »

oefrha wrote: post #67
AVincentInSpace wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caring about what happens to the thing you bought five years down the road when the company that made it goes bankrupt is nor "ideology and politics"

I’ve got a shitty laserjet from HP that’s approaching 20 years old and still working more or less. It doesn’t have WiFi so I’m not sure it’s ever received an update to its closed firmware. Now, I know nothing about 3D printing, but I fail to see why a 3D printer needs firmware updates to remain functional five years down the road, if it’s working today and the hardware doesn’t break down. If I understand TFA correctl…

> Now, I know nothing about 3D printing, but I fail to see why a 3D printer needs firmware updates to remain functional five years down the road, if it’s working today and the hardware doesn’t break down.

Most don't need updates to remain functional, but this is still a very immature and rapidly evolving industry. The quality difference in the last two years is significant and a lot of the advances are in firmware, not just hardware. The difference between old and new firmware could be a higher quality print in half the time.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#205

Post by antirez »

smueller1234 wrote: post #169
antirez wrote: post #44

I happen to be in a special situation here. One of my softwares, Redis, has a very permissive license that was used by many vendors to sell it. At the same time, I'm a lot into 3D printing. So I guess this gives me some perspective on both of the sides of the matter, and what I think, TLDR, is: Bambulab effect on the 3D printing ecosystem is going to be very positive. A few considerations: 1. Prusa is blaming the Bam…

I haven't ever used a 3d printer. But your comment made me realize that if PrusaSlicer is based slic3r, it's actually also using software that I wrote many, many years ago. That's another side of open source: if you don't rely on it to make a living (though it did help in getting my first job as a developer!), there's that pure joy in seeing your software get picked up and used by others. This little discovery made m…

Awesome story! Yes, indeed PrusaSlicer is based on Slic3r :)

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#206

Post by pydry »

indymike wrote: post #87
pydry wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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". I don't read Drew's comment that way at all. He's pointing out correctly that they were well resourced, and had built a $.628 Billion revenue business (at the time). Well done. Incidentally Since the change, they've grown to just north of $800M, s…

>I don't read Drew's comment that way at all.

Perhaps you missed the part where he tried to imply that they were swimming in profit by stating their revenue and sweeping the cost of paying for the development of this software under the carpet.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#207

Post by Qwertious »

pydry wrote: post #206
indymike wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". I don't read Drew's comment that way at all. He's pointing out correctly that they were well resourced, and had built a $.628 Billion revenue business (at the time). Well done. Incidentally Since the change, they've grown to just north of $800M, s…

>I don't read Drew's comment that way at all. Perhaps you missed the part where he tried to imply that they were swimming in profit by stating their revenue and sweeping the cost of paying for the development of this software under the carpet.

You're missing the fact that the spending is not inherently required - if they pared back their ambitions their costs would be lower, at the cost of potentially losing out on future 10x revenue.

Chasing 10x is a choice, not a force of nature.

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