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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

#261

Post by Applejinx »

Nevermark wrote: post #257
Applejinx wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My view, for ambitious projects likely to be in a competitive space, is that “right thing” converges in the long term for profit-seeking and non-profit-focused paths. 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 recogniz…

That's fair. Good luck selling investors on this 'long term' thing.

Better to, like Bezos, retain control and COMPEL them to deal with you over the long term. That guy is somebody who understands the value of power over profit.

Never underestimate the amount of chaos a homo economicus can run into when they're dealing with a fanatic, a prophet, or a vindictive businessman with a taste for vengeance. You don't only need to worry about self-interested idealistic hippies. You might also run into someone who is able to take a position using open source against you specifically to undermine you, and who can take a loss if it's for the purpose of taking you out.

This too is 'long term' in a sense. I like your 'long term' better, mind you. I'm just saying.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#263

Post by thfuran »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #215
thfuran wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does being implicitly a saas mean?

Everything. Like e.g. my robot vacuum that I couldn't operate between 1600 yesterday and noon today, because the Internet was down and the robot insists on being able to talk with servers in China to be able to vacuum the floor. Same with my A/C and floor thermostats, except those at least have IR remotes or wall panels for local control. Of course, I am operating all those via an Open Source HomeAssistant app, conne…

Oh, yeah. There's a lot of iot webshit out there.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#264

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Kiro wrote: post #259
CrazyStat wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And if you don't take a salary that money becomes profit, so the profit is effectively used for salaries. Claiming my company is not profit-driven because I use 100% of the surplus revenue for my salary is of course nonsense.

Were your company (partially or wholly) owned by capital, there would almost certainly be different decisions made (in many different areas) because of capital's desire for a return on its investment. If you were lucky, capital would be interested only in long term value (i.e. eventually selling it, and making a profit on the stock at that time). If you were unlucky, all the short term decisions would be made with an eye to generating profit that can be returned to the shareholders as dividends. Either way, that scenario would be a "for-profit" company.

As it is, your company (like mine) is just trying to generate as much revenue as it can within whatever other parameters matter to you.

What would you call the difference between a capital-dividends-driven organization and one that only cares about actual revenue?

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#265

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

SenHeng wrote: post #174
hcks wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what’s your point really

Bikeshedding the meaning of profit.

Perhaps you think it is trivial. I don't. Open source has the potential to bring lots of benefits to society, but if coupled to a particular conception of what "profit" is and the way in which companies "doing" open source should relate to it, I believe that a lot of those benefits will be squandered.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#266

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #258
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Your browser. Your video editor. Your DAW. 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…

SaaS does not mean "the software opens a socket and communicates with a server for brief portions of its runtime". It does not mean "cloud-based". It does not mean whatever Microsoft wants it to mean.

SaaS means that a substantial portion of the compute task associated with "an application" can only be completed via a server request (whether it's to initiate the compute task, or fetch the code that will run it, or some combination of the two).

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#267

Post by FireBeyond »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #216
GuB-42 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the USA, a 501c3 organization that sees revenues of over about $10k needs a fairly extensive board, officer insurance (to protect board members from claims about misappropriating funds) and other legal stuff. I considered this years ago, but decided that it was not worth the effort. > 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 yo…

You can be a non-profit and not a 501c3. A 501c3 is an exempt purposes non-profit, specifically "charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals."

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#268

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Applejinx wrote: post #260
brabel wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>So open source is only for people who are already wealthy enough to not need to make money 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 l…

What's your project?

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#269

Post by pylua »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #120
pylua wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many companies I expect at least a security review of the open source before developers can use it. This can have a lot of red tape.

I wonder if there’s a business model around sharing the results of security reviews. Even if Company A can’t fully trust the review of Company B, you could A could provide a lot of context for B to reduce the cost of starting an evaluation from zero.

Usually it is just rubber stamping the results of a tool like black duck, Vera code , or any scanner and the ongoing maintenance around that.

Not to mention how you configure the open source also affects if you could be vulnerable to a cve.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#270

Post by Nevermark »

Applejinx wrote: post #261
Nevermark wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view, for ambitious projects likely to be in a competitive space, is that “right thing” converges in the long term for profit-seeking and non-profit-focused paths. 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 recogniz…

That's fair. Good luck selling investors on this 'long term' thing. Better to, like Bezos, retain control and COMPEL them to deal with you over the long term. That guy is somebody who understands the value of power over profit. Never underestimate the amount of chaos a homo economicus can run into when they're dealing with a fanatic, a prophet, or a vindictive businessman with a taste for vengeance. You don't only ne…

Agreed on Bezos, for a long time.

Perhaps one reason he retired, is Amazon got so big he couldn’t see any more significant long term growth, relative to its monstrous size, without enshittification:

Extorting income from partners, using sales data from third parties to compete with them, forcing ads and a gamed search onto customers.

He could only (or only wanted to) hold off Wallstreet for as long as he had a better plan.

Other than staying private, with stakeholders who care about the discipline & rewards of only finding quality growth (even if that path isn’t always clear), I don’t know of a way out of that trap.

I am no hippie, but I don’t think public ownership has found the perfect structure yet. There must be a way to better incentivize positive sum-only games. Keeping individual company growth tied more closely with customer improvement.

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