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Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

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Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#261

Post by cthalupa »

amenod wrote: post #252
cthalupa wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, let's take a look at ElasticSearch, since that's the current hot topic. If Lucene followed the same logic being espoused here, then ElasticSearch as we know it wouldn't exist, because they wouldn't be able to use Lucene, which is an incredibly core component to ES. Elastic employs several people to work on Lucene full time at this point, so they're "giving back" in that regard, but they're still making money of…

You have a valid point, and I don't have the answers to your concerns yet. I am sure best practices that protect Lucenes of the world will develop, given chance. For example ES could buy out rights for independent development, or they could simply pay part of their income to the original developers. Having constraints for selling and building on other people's work doesn't mean that one shouldn't be able to do it, ju…

> For example ES could buy out rights for independent development, or they could simply pay part of their income to the original developers.

This sounds exactly like a lot of proprietary software licensing agreements :)

>Having constraints for selling and building on other people's work doesn't mean that one shouldn't be able to do it, just that previous link in the chain should be financially rewarded for it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with building and selling proprietary software, but that's really what's being described here.

If financial reward is what you most care about, write proprietary software. If FOSS is what you care most about, then the AGPL is probably a good fit for you. It won't force anyone to pay you for using your work, but it would force them to give back to the community.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#262

Post by quickthrower2 »

anon1m0us wrote: post #124
throwaway2048 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lock in is far more complete than it ever was in the Microsoft era, with Microsoft of the 90s, you could mostly still choose to just stop buying their crap, and stick with what you had while you migrate, or work out an alternative. The minute you stop paying a cloud vendor, your entire infrastructure vanishes in a cloud of smoke, and if you relied on their "value add" proprietary services, you are left with basic…

schadenfreude for all! Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. The world thought programmers were just a bunch of nerds to be taken advantage of. Microsoft said no. The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. The nerds got their way. They got free everything. And now the OSS worls is a convoluted mess. It cos…

Dispite the argument that it plays into the cloud providers hands, open source has been great for software. For example ASPNET MVC would probably not exist with Ruby on Rails.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#264

Post by tybit »

mythz wrote: post #86

Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…

I think it’s interesting to speculate what would happen if there was a significant cost to running OSS as a cloud provider.

I suspect what would happen is that they would look at the cost and wonder if it’s not worth building an alternate solution in house.

They would be able to build it to work and scale as it works best for their technical setup.

Lock in would be much worse even if it’s not ideal even with OSS and OSS would be less used in general.

I think if you look at e.g Redis vs the Dynamo/Cassandra split the OSS ecosystem is much better off in the former.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#265

Post by coldtea »

solomatov wrote: post #253
coldtea wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because it's random and mostly wrong ramblings. > Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Not really. They hated it for abusing their monopoly, and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. > Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. Not really. Some believed software must be free as in beer and speech, most didn't care. They certainly didn't hate MS for it.…

>and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. The GUI of their OS at that time is still superior to what linux desktop provides us with today.

I wont disagree.

But the OS was also full of holes (pre-XP: 95, 98, ME), programs would take down the whole system, updates required tons of restarts, and several other issues (BSOD, etc). People use to make memes against Windows, without even being Linux users: regular Windows users were frustrated.

Linux desktop efforts never managed to get a coherent vision, as every 3-4 years somebody had the idea to remake everything and screw compatibility (Gnome 1 to 2, 2 to 3, KDE 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, etc, lots of critical desktop apps changing for no reason, others abandoned, etc. And don't get me started on the audio drivers situation back then, or how it took until 2019 and we still don't have a solid X replacement thats adopted by everybody).

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#266

Post by abdullahkhalids »

funkymike wrote: post #246
amenod wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you can make money on Open Source > We don’t build the code ourselves. Ha, ha, well put. That much everyone agrees on, and Amazon especially so. :) The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS ?

> The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS? Contributors to OSS are giving away their time and energy. That seems to be at the core of open source. I'm not going to demand you pay for what I produce - I'm going to give it to you for free with minimal restrictions in the belief that I will also benefit from others doing the same. It seems to me that asking how to make money by giving away one's work…

You have completely sidestepped the most important part of the debate. There are very nice people who are doing the majority of the work to clean the street out of the goodness of their heart. Then the garbage company, who does a minority of the cleaning, is getting paid for both its work and the volunteers' work.

The volunteers will be happy if either no one ever gets paid for their work, or they do. In no scenario is it acceptable that someone else gets paid for their work, especially at the level of a significant percentage of the world GDP. This is just basic human psychology - no one will ever be okay with someone else getting the recognition for their work. Nothing much to do with open source particularly.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#267

Post by ozim »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #223
evanweaver wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying they should do it for the “exposure”.

This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert (exposure) and then capitalizing w/ a consulting business makes sense. The core issue is that consulting scales at O(n) where n is your personal time investment. It's not like offering a service where you spend all your time working on the service and get to…

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Free in software is not about getting paid. Money is not the problem. You can expect getting paid as much as you want, you just have to let other people access code, change and distribute it as they wish.

Thinking it is "free as in free beer" is shallow. I don't need any of those crap android apps even if they are free, I want to have ability to see those apps code so I can see if they are sending my private data somewhere, and I have to have ability to remove that code. I can even pay license fee if I find some app useful, if price is to high I find alternative or just don't use it.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#268

Post by donatj »

mythz wrote: post #86

Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…

"Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors"

I think you're forgetting the end users of the applications running on the open source regardless of cloud provider. The value they are reaping is near limitless.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#269

Post by prepend »

mythz wrote: post #86

Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…

“Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it”

Why is it unfortunate. OSS developers are volunteering and donating their talent.

Is it unfortunate that homeless people reap the benefit from patrons who sponsor charitable homeless shelters?

Or is it unfortunate that students realize wealth from the nonprofit university?

There’s lots of charities. I thought the whole point is for people to donate what others get value from.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#270

Post by quickthrower2 »

burtonator wrote: post #52

I'm currently experimenting with this directly. Specifically trying to make Open Source sustainable but for a consumer project. I think Open Source really works for infrastructure projects and it's possible to do really well either working on a system like Kubernetes or Elasticsearch. Not so well for projects that are more focused on consumers. My app, Polar, is focused more on consumers and is an app for people to m…

To me that seems like the kind of product that should be proprietary so you can make a living.

You could then invest money in marketing this to students etc.

You could then open source parts of it, but keep the full product paid for.

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