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Problems With Open-Source Business Models

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Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#31

Post by bragh »

softwaredoug wrote: post #8

> But many of these companies experience difficulties with respect to their business models, as can be seen from a bevy of recent licensing schemes that attempt to straddle the line between open source and proprietary. It's not clear to me that Open Core has really failed. Case in point, Elastic just IPO'd for billions and has an open core. In their case they completely develop their project. Their community is somet…

The problem with Elastic is that their security features are not in the open core and so people tend to skip on that by not even rolling their own IP whitelisting/authentication with a reverse proxy. This results in a huge information leak ending up in the news every few months and you having to explain to your sysadmins and IT that no, Elasticsearch is not insecure as a product, it's just how those people at SoLoMo PwnMeNow Inc. used it.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#32

Post by zzzcpan »

studentik wrote: post #18
ghaff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the GPL is about at all. No (OSI-approved) open source license has the distinction that you draw and one that did wouldn't be approved. (And it wouldn't be an open source license in the eyes of the Free Software Foundation either.)

Thank you! So charging for commercial usage is not considered 'open source' even when source is actually available?

Charging for software is unrelated to open source. You can open source your software under one license and charge for it under a different one.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#33

Post by [deleted] »

bragh wrote: post #31
softwaredoug wrote: post #8

> But many of these companies experience difficulties with respect to their business models, as can be seen from a bevy of recent licensing schemes that attempt to straddle the line between open source and proprietary. It's not clear to me that Open Core has really failed. Case in point, Elastic just IPO'd for billions and has an open core. In their case they completely develop their project. Their community is somet…

The problem with Elastic is that their security features are not in the open core and so people tend to skip on that by not even rolling their own IP whitelisting/authentication with a reverse proxy. This results in a huge information leak ending up in the news every few months and you having to explain to your sysadmins and IT that no, Elasticsearch is not insecure as a product, it's just how those people at SoLoMo…

[deleted]

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#34

Post by tinyvm »

I strongly disagree with the hypothesis raised in the article.

First , most open source companies these days are Ventured Back ( Elastic , CockroachDB, MongoDB etc..) meaning the core of the issue isn't "AWS" not paying license fees or people creating tech on top of Open Source , it's VCs who want their money back times ten.

Companies like MongoDB/Elastic have raised hundred of millions and yet are still not profitable.

Who's fault is it ? Did the MongoDB community ever asked the company to go that way ? Did MongoDB presented a roadmap to the community saying that they would have to be "profitable by Month X" or they would change their licence to make more money ?

Nobody has forced those founders/companies hands to make their products open source nor to raise that much capital.

If the industry is turning that way it is essentially because those businesses have used Open Source as a mean to reach the widest possible audience in order to increase growth and show great metrics to VCs and investors to raise absolutely obscene amount of cash.

Vue.js and Laravel are two very well maintain and extremely profitable open source project.

Those projects did not asked for 150M$ in fundraising and then realized : "Ooops we won't meet our 100% YoY Growth to satisfy VCs promises".

If some companies are switching their licensing , it's mostly because they overestimated their technology value and can't show to investors the numbers they promised.

This isn't due the "AWS Problem" or because of a "wrong business model" with FOSS.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#35

Post by kemitchell »

If by "open source business model" you mean a model that entails getting paid for production of open source software, directly, there are several.

Paid open source development happens all the time. If you pay me, I will release open source to do such-and-such.

Despite decades of continuous doomsaying, new dual licensing companies pop up all the time. If you use my open source to build closed, pay me for an exception to my copyleft license's terms.

Those are just the simplest and best known. There are others, as well as all manner of hybrids, explored and unexplored. My latest work theorizing approaches---modelling business models, so to speak---is here: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/10/17/mapping-models.html My outline of "purebred" models begins here: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/10/17/mapping-models.html#...

> Amazon and Google are not going to use your software, particularly your management software, “out of the box”, proprietary or no. They’re going to build their own management UX and UI, because they have their own particular requirements to serve their needs, and they’re going to build them using existing platform APIs.

Licenses like MongoDB's SSPL leverage exactly this fact to address their business concerns. Mongo knows the big cloud providers are going to do their own custom service rigging, and that they'll keep it closed and proprietary. SSPL gives permission to use Mongo to offer Mongo as a service, but requires open release of the service rigging.

I don't think companies writing and adopting these new licenses want to sell cloud providers proprietary licenses through their sales funnels. I think they'd rather stop cloud providers from offering their databases as services, full stop, or cut special deals with the cloud providers to resell their cores (Mongo) or popular add-ons (Redis, Elastic, ...).

> You’re not going to resolve your own business mistakes by reverse-engineering a licensing solution to what was essentially a business model problem.

Business model and license do not inhabit separate domains. They always intertwine.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#36

Post by zzzcpan »

ghaff wrote: post #22
studentik wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! So charging for commercial usage is not considered 'open source' even when source is actually available?

You can absolutely charge for a product that is based on an open source project. A simple example is you charge for support of an open source project. However, you cannot tell users that they can't use the (unsupported) open source bits for commercial purposes without paying you. Doing so would not be allowed under any approved open source license.

> However, you cannot tell users that they can't use the (unsupported) open source bits for commercial purposes without paying you. Doing so would not be allowed under any approved open source license.

OSI approved open source that is. And you can tell users anything you want actually. What you can't do with OSI approved open source license is choose a license not approved by OSI, doesn't matter what it says.

But OSI approved open source is not true descriptive open source. SQLite, for example, is universally recognized open source, but not OSI approved. You can go this road and use a descriptive term and ignore OSI and its corporate backing.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#37

Post by metajack »

studentik wrote: post #18
ghaff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the GPL is about at all. No (OSI-approved) open source license has the distinction that you draw and one that did wouldn't be approved. (And it wouldn't be an open source license in the eyes of the Free Software Foundation either.)

Thank you! So charging for commercial usage is not considered 'open source' even when source is actually available?

The first of the four freedoms of the free software definition is the "freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)." This would include using the software for commercial purposes.

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

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#38

Post by niftich »

This post raises a lot of good points about the futility of this new wave of split-restriction licenses, but misses fairly obvious one. Entrepreneurs think they want to have an "open source business model" because they have marketshare-scaling problem: they want their software distributed to a wide audience such that it gains usage and mindshare, but not wide enough where AWS is selling their work as a managed service at prices they couldn't by themselves.

And by and large, giving software away in a combination of gratis and libre maximizes the gains of mindshare and experience from both the curious amateur and the intrigued professional; the intellectual and societal implications may be different, but it gets used by the bulk of users in the same manner as shareware.

For many of these newer projects, the libre aspect isn't a heartfelt belief -- it's a sort of loss-leader strategy to enable access to a particular type of audience, and unlock a particular type of language for marketing. Handfuls of people may exercise their rights to fork and/or redistribute, but plenty of intrinsic barriers exist to keep these from being a competitive threat -- until a sufficiently equipped and dedicated party like AWS or Google Cloud, that is.

It's no surprise then, that some offerings are drifting more towards traditional shareware, where restrictions on use are the norm. In this space, we're seeing a conflict unfolding about the ideology and terminology used to describe such split offerings.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#39

Post by scj »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #21
MrTonyD wrote: post #3

I've been working in Open Source for a long time now - decades. The problem I see is that so many rich and wealthy companies (and their billionaire owners) are the big beneficiaries of open source. Look at Spark, Hadoop, Linux, gnu tools and others - who uses them at a large scale? It is the wealthy companies who avoid paying salaries for the development of those tools. So I've become convinced that we should disting…

The biggest issue with this is very few "small" companies envision staying small forever. Who would risk building their company on a stack that you lose the license for if you do too well? I think what really happened is people didn't quite realize, or didn't think it would matter, what they were giving up when they open sourced their software. It sounds good and feels good but 5-10 years later when it's a core compo…

"Who would risk building their company on a stack that you lose the license for if you do too well?"

A similar question exists for laborers that need to invest in learning tech stacks. Why spend time mastering something that certain companies are discouraged from using? Especially if a non-encumbered variant exists.

Wouldn't it be more practical to learn tech that employers can easily use?

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