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The life and death of open source companies

lucumr.pocoo.org

41–50 of 207 posts

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#41

The tragedy with any form of software development is that it becomes a commodity very quickly. That's why open source works so well for commodity software. The challenge is that while everybody needs commodity software, they aren't necessarily willing to pay for it. People pay for other things like managed services, support, etc. But not for software directly. Take operating systems as an example. Unless you have ver…

>The tragedy with any form of software development is that it becomes a commodity very quickly.

I can't think of anything that is less commodity like than software. Commodities are raw materials than can be easily substituted. For example Ukraine is invaded so we all switch to American grain. Try switching SQL Server for mysql or changing your Python code base to Ruby. Software is sticky.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#42

Sorry, Armin, but this is such nonsense. Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutt…

> reduce production costs to get down to similar price points

How on earth is anyone supposed to compete with near slave labor in China?

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#43

Sorry, Armin, but this is such nonsense. Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutt…

> reduce production costs to get down to similar price points How on earth is anyone supposed to compete with near slave labor in China?

Certainly you can't get a similar product made at the rock-bottom price points that China will ship it for. But, you can get a lot cheaper than Prusa, and there are vulnerabilities in the Chinese market you can exploit.

And, to be honest, Chinese manufacturing is not the open slave market it used to be. They've cleaned up their act quite a lot, and the quality of life in Shenzhen isn't that bad. China isn't winning just because they have cheap labor, but also because they have made numerous innovations and smart investments in manufacturing. The poverty rate is only 6% higher in Shenzhen than in San Francisco.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#44
I happen to be in a special situation here. One of my softwares, Redis, has a very permissive license that was used by many vendors to sell it. At the same time, I'm a lot into 3D printing. So I guess this gives me some perspective on both of the sides of the matter, and what I think, TLDR, is: Bambulab effect on the 3D printing ecosystem is going to be very positive. A few considerations:

1. Prusa is blaming the Bambulab OSS situation, but the reality is that they struggle a lot in innovation, recently. I'm a Prusa Mini and MK4 owner, so I'm kinda of a fan of them, but still... They had struggled to move raise the bar, happy enough to innovate very slowly, with their huge delays with the Prusa XL, and exploiting the fact that other companies were just doing terrible copies. Bambulab before anything else saw that from the POV of technology there was too much left on the table.

2. Prusa itself based its work for PrusaSlicer on an existing open source slicer (written by an Italian guy, btw). While they continue to release PrusaSlicer as a free software, as the license requires to do, what they did renaming the software "Prusa Slicer" is a form of ownership appropriation. PrusaSlicer is a great software that can be used with many non-Prusa printers, my point is just that different ethical perspectives may lead to different conclusions. One could argue that Bambulab created their own slicer instead of just contributing to PrusaSlicer because the naming and the setup of the project makes it hard to do so.

3. Bambulab is also being cloned. The fact that their hardware is not open source does not mean people can't copy the design. The general ideas that make Bambulab printers great can't be patented or copyrighted. See the Creality K1... it resembles Bambulab printers a lot.

4. After Bambulab showed the 3D printing community that it was possible to build better printers, the whole 3D printing landscape became immediately much, much better. They raised the bar. Maybe Prusa will struggle and even fail in the next years (that's my prediction: they will fail, but slowly, since the management is too lacking), but the 3D printing world will be overall much better. In just two years, the average 250$ FDM printer jumped from terrible to totally ok, and this is some kind of value that Bambulab provided, regardless of licensing.

5. One thing that is killing Prusa is in some way they don't use OSS software enough! The future is Klipper, but still they continue with their not-invented-here syndrome to develop their Marlin twist.

6. Finally: using open source does not make you ethically required to open source your stuff. Open source licenses have terms: you just need to follow those terms. If you open source stuff, you are great, but failing to do so does not make you terrible. Remember that in the 3D printing ecosystem there isn't any cloud-companies situation like in the SAAS scenario, where there is a monopoly that allows only a few to exploit OSS value.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#45
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge. That is what i associate with any open source company.

I’m not convinced that Open Source is a marketing terms that matters much for many industries (SaaS, hardware, probably others). If anything the continued push back against people trying to stay aligned with the Open Source community and have commercial enterprises tells me that in many ways you’re probably better off not trying in the first place. I personally don’t think that’s the right message. It is hard to be o…

> It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition.

Proposal: SaaS. Offer your product as a paid hosted service. Sure, other players can take your shiny awesome product, and launch a competing service. Compete with them! As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#46
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not convinced that Open Source is a marketing terms that matters much for many industries (SaaS, hardware, probably others). If anything the continued push back against people trying to stay aligned with the Open Source community and have commercial enterprises tells me that in many ways you’re probably better off not trying in the first place. I personally don’t think that’s the right message. It is hard to be o…

> It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition. Proposal: SaaS. Offer your product as a paid hosted service. Sure, other players can take your shiny awesome product, and launch a competing servi…

A closed source SaaS is the worst for customers in terms of risk. An open source SaaS runs into the freeloader problem:

> As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.

That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS. It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers. The time advantage does not appear to matter there.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#47
post #6

I feel like the problem is defined in the title. Open Source. Company. These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well. Over and over we see the same story playing out. Companies need to make revenues to sustain the employees. Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the…

I think you are missing an important point here.

1. Open source is about the code belonging to the community

2. Open source projects can not survive without funding - as you develop

3. So, both (open source and company) can be compatible if and only if funding belong to the community. In other world, if the open source company is decentralised and democratic. And that is what we need to fight for.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? I don’t have an opinion on that. I know that Prusa is clearly keeping some firmware closed (for now?) that they previously developed in the open. They also talk about their disadvantages of being open. Does it change the undercutting? Probably not, but I don’t believe that many more Open Source players wil…

>Our funding did not motivate the license change. I can say this with clean conscience. I understand that I have biases here but I also do not want Open Source to turn into something that is exclusively for plumbing. Here's the thing: you are no longer working in open source. If that's right for your product and your company, then so be it, I wish you success. FSL is an interesting development in this space. But, you…

> Here's the thing: you are no longer working in open source.

That’s just not true. I personally and Sentry too write open source software every day. Not every thing we create is FSL licensed.

But I will take you up on the offer.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Our funding did not motivate the license change. I can say this with clean conscience. I understand that I have biases here but I also do not want Open Source to turn into something that is exclusively for plumbing. Here's the thing: you are no longer working in open source. If that's right for your product and your company, then so be it, I wish you success. FSL is an interesting development in this space. But, you…

> Here's the thing: you are no longer working in open source. That’s just not true. I personally and Sentry too write open source software every day. Not every thing we create is FSL licensed. But I will take you up on the offer.

Sorry, I'm aware of that nuance but I worded myself poorly.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#50
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition. Proposal: SaaS. Offer your product as a paid hosted service. Sure, other players can take your shiny awesome product, and launch a competing servi…

A closed source SaaS is the worst for customers in terms of risk. An open source SaaS runs into the freeloader problem: > As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes. That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open sourc…

> That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS.

Sure, but that's the thing! If you want to call your product open source, you have to be OK with users taking your product, and running it themselves, and giving nothing back. They are not "freeloaders", they are normal users of your open source code.

> It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers.

Compete with them!

PS and BTW you do get something back even from your free users: free marketing and user training.

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