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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

#41

Post by pylua »

hinkley wrote: post #34
jandrese wrote: post #3

I've always been annoyed that companies will pay 6 figures for a support contract, but won't consider hiring a full time engineer for the same or less pay to support an open source product that does the same thing. The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frust…

- Vendor contracts are hard - So we avoid doing them - So we never get good at them - So every contract is a painful lesson in trying Open source wins because I don't have to involve the entire company to use it. I can literally just raise my voice to see if anyone in the group cares and then use it. And even when it's free for small companies, not approving a license is holding up something that we think is already…

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.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#42

Post by johnnyanmac »

version_five wrote: post #32
jandrese wrote: post #3

I've always been annoyed that companies will pay 6 figures for a support contract, but won't consider hiring a full time engineer for the same or less pay to support an open source product that does the same thing. The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frust…

Your company needs the maturity to manage that engineer. Companies with products have customer success and sales etc and their own engineering management and product hierarchy to translate your end user issue into a software fix. That doesn't happen automatically by staffing and engineer in house. How would a company even figure out the profile they need?

I hear logic like this and suddenly I 100% understand how a startup can "disrupt the industry", even if 90+% of the time that is a huge exageration, if not an outright lie someone promises in a pitch. I guess if they can't find that lead, the lead will find, or rather found, a company for such a need.

And I guess paradoxically, this is exactly how contracting firms form to begin with. So I guess startup culture isn't really that new.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#43

Post by [deleted] »

ilyt wrote: post #18
Dalewyn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hire an engineer, the liability is your problem. If you donate to open source, liability is still your problem. Both of these situations are patently unpalatable for most businesses. Meanwhile, if you pay someone for a support contract the liability is their problem. You see, whether a problem that comes up is fixed is actually irrelevant. The real question is how much liability you can get rid of.

Good luck trying to get any actual liability out of them... Like, go try to make Oracle write you a contract where their base going down compensates your lost profits. You just won't get it, unless you throw some hideous amount of money their way (and they will just pay insurance company and pocket the rest).

[deleted]

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#44

Post by musicale »

maltalex wrote: post #37
musicale wrote: post #28

> For some, this might be a tough pill to swallow. But a for-profit business exists for profit. No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. > Definitionally and practically. Profit is what allows the company to hire employees, grow, and sustain itself—it is quite literally what funds ongoing development That's g…

> No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. What? If Apple or FedEx could get customers to (sustainably) pay them without actually providing a product in return, do you think they would have kept making phones and delivering packages just for the hell of it?

> What? If Apple or FedEx could get customers to (sustainably) pay them without actually providing a product in return, do you think they would have kept making phones and delivering packages just for the hell of it?

That's a strange counterfactual. Why would customers keep paying a company that doesn't provide any goods or services to anyone? They're not really "customers" anymore if all that is happening is money transfer to the company.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#45

Post by ignoramous »

> What is a transparency problem? It’s when a solution being closed source creates distrust between the client and vendor.

Eterprises don't care that much about code. And if they do, business continuity clauses may alleviate most of their closed source concerns. After all, how many financial firms switched to OpenOffice Calc from Excel?

> She argues that Amplitude is pretty expensive, particularly prohibitive for some early-stage companies, and larger companies could save a fortune by using an open-source version. While this pitch might resonate with early-stage companies, those same price-conscious early-stage companies will either use an open-source version or a free tier.

AWS' go-to-market (GTM) hinged on attracting startups and individual developers by offering them low cost (metered) services. They got this part very right, because Airbnb, Stripe, Twitch et al went on to become large enterprises and grew alongside AWS. There's not many things that can compete with low cost / free. You can always move upmarket later. Just ask ARM and Intel.

For dev tool upstarts, open source has become the defacto GTM (it isn't, as TFA rightly points out, a business model). So, unless you're Snowflake level good (and you can fend off FOSS shops like Databricks), you're better off with an open core model.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#46

Post by AlotOfReading »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #25

"Open Source" doesn't win, period, because it doesn't compete with anything. Open Source is not a business model or a product. It's an engineering widget. You can use it to build a product, or you can use it to make a jig to shore up an uneven table leg. Nobody cares about the license or whether they can read your code. They care if you build a product that solves their problem. You know why companies use Open Source…

I guess I'm lucky that the open source things I deal with are far and away better than the proprietary options. I'd choose Clang or GCC any day of the week yet another 7 figure proprietary toolchain with licensing terms with obvious bugs, for one recent example.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#47

Post by c0balt »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #25

"Open Source" doesn't win, period, because it doesn't compete with anything. Open Source is not a business model or a product. It's an engineering widget. You can use it to build a product, or you can use it to make a jig to shore up an uneven table leg. Nobody cares about the license or whether they can read your code. They care if you build a product that solves their problem. You know why companies use Open Source…

> B) Freemium

A good example of this would be open-core. It may be source available, like Grafana, but Premium features are paywalled (Grafana Enterprise for SAML, more datasources, ...). Other examples might include GitLab which is mostly source available but also has Freemium-ish model.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#48

Post by kelnos »

musicale wrote: post #28

> For some, this might be a tough pill to swallow. But a for-profit business exists for profit. No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. > Definitionally and practically. Profit is what allows the company to hire employees, grow, and sustain itself—it is quite literally what funds ongoing development That's g…

> No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc.

That's just an avenue to make profit. If those activities weren't profitable, they probably wouldn't get done, outside of government regulation or subsidy.

Sure, some businesses are "labors of love", but they still would likely not exist if they were break-even, certainly not if they were money losers. Or at least they wouldn't exist for long.

And this is the problem with capitalism: I agree that things should be as you say, but they unfortunately aren't.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#49

Post by johnnyanmac »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #25

"Open Source" doesn't win, period, because it doesn't compete with anything. Open Source is not a business model or a product. It's an engineering widget. You can use it to build a product, or you can use it to make a jig to shore up an uneven table leg. Nobody cares about the license or whether they can read your code. They care if you build a product that solves their problem. You know why companies use Open Source…

> You know why companies use Open Source, for the most part?

But that's the thing. Most large companies generally don't, not unless that product is truly battle-tested. They are usually fine throwing out money to another company as long as they can get support. Support around an open source product is very hard to do unless you structure your company this way

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#50

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

"Profit" is a strange and ambiguous term here.

I've been running an open source, libre project for closing in on 24 years now, and generating revenue from it for about 17 years. There's never been any "profit", but there has been revenue.

I regard profit as what's left of the revenue after you pay the people who work on the project and any expenses, which is the way most corporations and accountants would view it.

The only sort of open source project that needs "profit" defined this way is one funded by a capital investment of some kind, where the investor expects a "return". While there are some open source projects that fit this description, the vast majority do not.

Also, as is typical for things linked from HN, this whole article seems very web-y and SaaS-y. There are other kinds of open source projects, believe it or not.

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