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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

#291

Post by mythz »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #283
mythz wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair and equatable distribution wouldn't factor into any consideration for Companies paying developers and cloud hosting companies to run their businesses. IMO the best way would be for all OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to impleme…

Do you mean I could install this software on a box physically located in a building owned by my employer, but not on a virtual host? I think you are trying to mean not that. Like, if I install it myself, it's okay, but if the "cloud vendor" installs it for me, that violates the license? I think I understand the sorts of entities you have in mind to allow or not allow; I'm not sure it's clear how you'd write a license…

It would just need to prohibit usage by the 3 major cloud monopolies, using any language that just applies to all 3 of them, e.g. a commercial license is required if earning over $1 Billion total from hosting Services.

It could also prohibit any commercial cloud hosting without written permission, for which it's automatically granted to every company that isn't Amazon, Microsoft or Alphabet.

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

#292

Post by teddyh »

jwildeboer wrote: post #216

I’m finishing my 14th year at Red Hat as we speak. In that time Red Hat had two digit growth every single year. We employ around 13000 people. And in all those years I have read at least one article per week claiming that it isn’t possible to make money with open source. Weird.

Except you don’t work for Red Hat anymore. You work for IBM.

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

#294

Post by isostatic »

Guthur wrote: post #236
anth_anm wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embrace, Extend, Engulf? I'm not sure what you call it when Amazon can pretty much just take your project over when you piss them off. Mongo is getting EEE'ed.

Imo mongo tried to change the rules of the game to be in their favor and AWS reacted in their best long term interests. And whether or not you like it that's fair, AWS were not in breach of the original software contract.

Microsoft were never in breach of anything legally. If they'd have had their way we'd still be on IE6.

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

#295

Post by incompatible »

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…

The problem with that setup was that Microsoft wanted all the money to go to Microsoft, not to "nerds" in general.

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

#296

Post by dragonwriter »

teddyh wrote: post #292
jwildeboer wrote: post #216

I’m finishing my 14th year at Red Hat as we speak. In that time Red Hat had two digit growth every single year. We employ around 13000 people. And in all those years I have read at least one article per week claiming that it isn’t possible to make money with open source. Weird.

Except you don’t work for Red Hat anymore. You work for IBM.

IBM has not completed the acquisition (and when it does,Red Hat may still exist as a subsidiary), so, no, people who work for Red Hat that haven't left and gotten hired by IBM still work at Red Hat, not IBM.

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

#297

Post by jrockway »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #164
bunderbunder wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to suspect that the major cloud vendors are well along on pulling a classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" gambit on that front. I'm sure there are a percentage of people operating in the cloud who stick judiciously to an open-source stack, and remain masters of their own future as a result. But it seems more common to spread some open source icing on top of a cake made out of ingredients like Beanstalk,…

In the 1980s the lock-in was in hardware: you buy this server, you get our OS and software stack. In the 90s and 2010s it was software: you buy this software because others are not compatible with it. Today's lock-in is cloud services. Will people ever learn?

Is it, though? I feel like the nuts and bolts of cloud services are super commoditized and I can pick up and leave whenever I want. Kubernetes on Amazon (where I am) is going to be close enough to Kubernetes on GCP, and even close enough to just buying some servers and running Kubernetes myself. I don't know all the details of how I will do load balancing when doing it myself, but I work at an ISP and I'm sure the network engineers will help with that. Overall, I'm super non-worried about cloud providers. They're like credit cards, when someone offers you more cash back or more miles or whatever, you just switch to them and don't even think about it. (Why do I even use Amazon? Sheer laziness. Having servers in my own datacenters would probably be much cheaper, but I honestly just want to program and not randomly take a week to install some critical patch to MetalLB, or upgrade the Linux kernel, or find that the Intel EM2384732FOO NICs I got have some bug where they drop every 9878th TCP session.)

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

#298

Post by __jal »

mythz wrote: post #118
jjeaff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are mostly right, but I don't think the major cloud providers have much of an uncrossable moat. Cloud services are and will continue to become more and more commoditized. Sure, there is proprietary lock-in. But because of OSS, it is also becoming easy to avoid the lock-in. For example, rather than use a hosted elastic service, I was able to launch an elastic stack on k8s in less than an hour of configurat…

Once you have your production systems running on a cloud vendor it becomes increasingly difficult to move off it regardless if you're only using OSS components, there's an inherent risk with every migration that grows the more services you use and years you host on it that needs to be offset with any migration and given the major cloud vendors are comparatively priced, there's little incentive to invest their time an…

> You could choose to build out your system to be completely cloud agnostic but that is generally regarded to be economically irresponsible [...].

I don't see it being anywhere near that clear-cut.

Seems more akin to what the RDBMS world went through for a long time, and still does, because people insist on using things other than Postgres[1]. You can stay SQL-standard compliant, writing your app to be portable. Or you can use these appealing proprietary extensions to the spec, and not be portable.

Seems like a majority of folks writing in-house choose to use the extensions, and the majority of folks who want others to use their software make an effort to be cross platform.

You'll probably see a similar split with cloud services, although I'm not sure it will necessarily follow the same lines.

[1] That's a joke, there.

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

#300

Post by [deleted] »

isostatic wrote: post #294
Guthur wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo mongo tried to change the rules of the game to be in their favor and AWS reacted in their best long term interests. And whether or not you like it that's fair, AWS were not in breach of the original software contract.

Microsoft were never in breach of anything legally. If they'd have had their way we'd still be on IE6.

[deleted]
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