251–260 of 287 posts
Dumb title, of course it does Author is trying to say Open Source businesses do not win by being cheaper. Open source codebases win all the time by being cheaper, no one pays for compression algorithms or network time daemons or media transcoders. Open source obliterated those markets entirely.
It is just annoying that the title is incorrect by literally one word.
My hypothesis about open source is that it's all about tax evasion. I can write some software for others to use, not charge them anything and thus no tax liability is generated. If they do the same, we've generated value for each other without the tax man getting a cut.
Lots of open source programs (IMO, pretty much all the good ones) grow organically out of community efforts or out of academic projects.
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…
I totally get this. Pulling the rug out from users definitely feels a bit grimy.
I'd like to think most people are generally good, and in that light wouldn't it be worth considering that companies or people who do this are just approaching the market wrong? Incompetence vs. maliciousness. If they are transparent from day one about what will be free forever, and what will eventually be paid, then I wouldn't consider that shifting on their community.
That assumes they are true to the roadmap, and make adjustments based on feedback and contributions.
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From today, or from when they first joined? Also consider that a project needs to not only have existed, but to already have an established track record of being vendor-neutral before it can join. Kubernetes joined CNCF on March 10, 2016. Prometheus joined May 9, 2016. In 2017, these 10 projects joined: - Linkerd - gRPC - CoreDNS - Containerd - rkt - CNI - Envoy - Jaeger - Notary - TUF Of those 12, only one (rkt) has…
Now remove the ones with FAANG funding.
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Maybe size of enterprise matters? I work in $LargeCorp and legal was very aggressive about insurance and liability redlines on the last contract I had to deal with.
Why would a SaaS provider expose themselves to catastrophic risk of reimbursing a large enterprise for the enterprise's lost profits due to downtime? I think refunds of the cost of the SaaS are sort of common, but that's quite different and capped. "Oracle offers no financial compensation (e.g., credits, refunds or otherwise) in the event a Service Level Objective is missed." https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Conten…
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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.
I.e. aim for maximum growth of happy customers/users in the long term to best grow and thrive in the long term.
Short term worries about quarterly growth can seriously inhibit long term potential. Often without this huge opportunity loss being recognized.
Alternately, a rejection of profit as healthy can limit the ability of a non-profit focused project from achieving more also.
The key is, aim long term, for best positive impact, then work back from that to now, and use all constructive positive-sum tools available.
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However little that is. What isn't implicitly a SaaS these days anyway? :/
Your browser. Your OS. Your video editor. Your DAW. Most embedded systems found around your home and workplace and transportation. Air traffic control. Scientific data analysis. Most video/computer games.
I'll grant you those, though I've been hearing noise about DAWs starting to move to the browser. And, of course, you omitted image editing, which at this point is almost completely taken over by a small number of SaaS offerings (Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Canva).
> Your OS.
I'd wish. At this point Microsoft is, both explicitly and unironically, saying that Windows "is a Service". I literally saw that on a Win10 installer screen the other day.
> Most embedded systems found around your home and workplace and transportation.
Much good it does me if the control plane goes through a cloud server. See my other comment in this subthread.
> Air traffic control.
Hopefully, maybe, but I'm no longer certain of it. Web SaaS apps have been popping up in ground and maritime transportation for a while now, so aviation may be already affected too.
> Scientific data analysis.
That's cloud-dependent these days.
> Most video/computer games.
Most high-end video games are SaaS now. Even in single-player mode, as again, the vendor's servers are on the control path, and the game won't boot without at least acquiring a license from a server and checking for updates.
Just because it doesn't run in a browser, doesn't mean it's not SaaS.
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You use the profit to pay your salary. You could choose not to, or use the money for other things. That's no different than any other company.
Money used for business expenses like salary is not profit. Profit is (roughly speaking) what's left over after you deduct all your business expenses from your revenue.
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There is, but it's not where you think it is. That's the guy who runs Ardour. It's a fundamental DAW on Linux, as familiar as Excel on Windows: it is the foundation of Harrison Mixbus. He's also fundamental to the JACK audio subsystem. It's possible you've heard of him as one of the two first programmers at Amazon. His objection is mighty valid, here. You cannot say profit is a basic principle of open source. The who…
Fair enough, but saying ""Profit" is a strange and ambiguous term here." is bonkers regardless. It's not strange nor ambiguous, anyone reading this post should know exactly what those terms mean and the way an open-source company trying to make money would use the term. Whether you find it obscene or whatever that people want to make profit off open source seems like an unrelated discussion: profit is a basic concept…
In practice, yeah. Counts for me: I inherited enough money to develop the world around my open-source work, though I began that work while I was still extremely poor.
Understand that what 'need to make money' means to a Silicon Valley tech bro, is one hell of a lot different than what it would mean to a normal person. If you live in a place where the cost of living isn't impossibly brutal, if you are willing to accept that if you get sick you'll die unless you are lucky enough that government healthcare comes through for you, if you're prepared to leave nothing behind you (like a Terry Pratchett wizard, dying drunk, happy and owing vast sums of money), then there is much less stopping you from getting into open source.
It's a bit like the music business, really (which I also work in, by virtue of my project). If you can afford to persistently do the work, you get to live the life and in the long run, be the guy who's done the work, to whatever degree of recognition that gets you. I know numerous sound engineers who've blown a fair bit of money doing it, and have no great financial security, but they were in the room when the magic happened, and when the echoes die away in the live room that's what they cared about.
When you die, your bank account is just numbers. I suppose you might want to arrange that it then does something. You could also do something while you're alive, and be there to see it.
Making wealth for individuals isn't in the equation… except when they're predatory vampires there to suck wealth FROM those who do the work. Being in the music business naturally I know about those stories. I'm given to understand this happens in Silicon Valley, and open source, too ;)