211–220 of 287 posts
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It's not about compensation, it's about finger-pointing. "WE didn't bill your card 40 times draining your bank account -- STRIPE did! Go sue them, not us!"
You are still getting sued.
"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…
Now you can make money running a nonprofit, by having the organization pay you, but few people do that, even in open source. Usually, you want your company to be worth something. A company often requires personal investment, and if you want to stop, you want to be able to sell the company and get some return on that investment, or at least, not lose everything. But in order to do that, you need profits. On a nonprofit, because obviously, you can't make profit, you can't get anything back from what you created.
FOSS can be a win because of stability and control; cost is rarely the driver.
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However little that is. What isn't implicitly a SaaS these days anyway? :/
What does being implicitly a saas mean?
Of course, I am operating all those via an Open Source HomeAssistant app, connecting to an Open Source HomeAssistant instance running on an Open(ish) Hardware Raspberry Pi. But all of that means fuck all, when the malicious vendors make a cloud server a required control intermediary. Despite all that Open Source, my home appliances are still run as a Service. That's one of many cases of what I mean by "being implicitly a SaaS".
"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…
If you don't make profit, you are a non-profit organization, or at least, you should be. Companies of all kinds, including open source companies are for making profit. Now you can make money running a nonprofit, by having the organization pay you, but few people do that, even in open source. Usually, you want your company to be worth something. A company often requires personal investment, and if you want to stop, yo…
> On a nonprofit, because obviously, you can't make profit, you can't get anything back from what you created.
I do not agree with your assessment. I do not want the "company" to be "worth" anything. The software is the value, and in keeping with the open source license, the software is a gift to the rest of the world. There merely has to be sufficient revenue associated with it to allow people to work on it at an appropriate level. Profit and "value growth" is not part of the goal.
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The article is talking about businesses being on Open Source foundations, not the myriad of other possible Open Source projects. In that context profit is what's left once revenue is received and expenses paid. Implicit in those expenses are (fixed) salaries, employee contracts, payslips and so on. What a business does with the profit can be varied. Firstly it can be added to cash reserves, which can contine to pay e…
TFA said: > To be clear, I’m talking about open-source projects that compete with popular paid solutions. [ ... ] > Excluding non-profit projects that are sponsored by donations or parent organizations, a typical open-source business needs profit to be the ultimate north star. So, I think you've somewhat misinterpreted the space the author thinks they are referring to. Ardour is a small project in terms of man-power…
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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…
You arrived at an employment contract with your employer. The contract is an exchange of value: your labor for some of their money.
If you are being paid more than the price your employer could otherwise obtain your labor for, then I suppose you could call some of that profit. But that is rather unlikely. Your employer is buying your labor, and is almost certainly paying you less than the value (to them) of whatever it is you do for them.
"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 presume you pay yourself, so you rely on profit. The profit is nullified in the books but in practice it's no different than using the profit for dividends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Your wages are not profit by any definition I've seen. You arrived at an employment contract with your employer. The contract is an exchange of value: your labor for some of their money. If you are being paid more than the price your employer could otherwise obtain your labor for, then I suppose you could call some of that profit. But that is rather unlikely. Your employer is buying your labor, and is almost certainl…
And people do enrich themselves via that method.