51–60 of 207 posts
In my personal encounters there are usually tons of confusion between FOSS, OSS and source available. My gut feel is that there's some degree of exploitation of the mix ups and most turn a blind eye to the underlying issues.
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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be...
> and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.
So depending on whether your source is free as in beer or free as in speech, dictates what business strategy you might have.
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…
Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.
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…
You may also be one step behind when it comes to infrastructure related bugs or support if you want to focus on providing the best product. Competitors who host your product have a much smaller scope to worry about which may lead them to have a better infrastructure and support structure that customers flock to. E.g. Elastic vs AWS
Except infrastructure and support may also be the only revenue stream for the original developers too.
Some may say that’s exactly how it should be in the free market and I agree (since you chose the OSS license model over something else like FSL), but it does highlight how the original developers may feel this is an unfair situation.
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?
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…
Very few companies compete on code alone. Those that do I understand the model a bit more, but still usually have the velocity to run away from copycats. Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very few companies compete on code alone. Those that do I understand the model a bit more, but still usually have the velocity to run away from copycats. Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.
None of these companies open source everything, or even the most valuable parts.
A lot of the same could be said for FB.
We should come up with a name for this new generation of licenses. They are not "open source" or "free software", and using those words would be both confusing and immediately polarizing. But having nothing more specific than "source available" seems very insufficient, since most of them turn open source quickly or only deny rights that do not usually matter to the end-user. (licenses in that family: BUSL, FSL, Commo…
Commons Clause is not in that group, as it's not time-limited.
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 Bam…
Prusa is a standard bearer of the open source 3D printing community and has done a lot of things right and has a lot of goodwill. But they required a competitor to shake things up. Prusa appeared to not be very good at incorporating community contributions, but I haven't really investigated that in-depth, so I may be wrong. In any case, I hope Prusa step up their game in competing and do not fail. They are an example of an open hardware company that shows that Free and open source and commercial activities are not inherently incompatible.
Nonetheless, I bought Bambu Lab's X1C and AMS combo for my business, because I can't really afford to wait on Prusa to deliver their MK4 MMU3 kit. I still purchased two MMU3 kits from them. The irony is that the Bambu Lab printer failed to work out of the box and hadn't worked out a solution thus far, but that's just my individual experience and partly my personal failing.
In the future, I hope my business becomes successful so that I can fund true free software and open source projects so that more of what I used for my business are open source. I don't really want to use a Bambu Lab product any more than I have to. I'll readily jump on open hardware solutions that meet my business requirements.
Bambu Lab may deliver a better product, but at what cost? Always be mindful that these companies are not our friends, especially business that are more transactional. They don't necessary care about the ecosystem at large. If they can get a monopoly, they will.
If you're an open hardware company, be hungry. Don't rest on your laurel. The open source community can only take you so far if you have an inferior product. Not everybody cares about you being open source.
Now, you will hopefully have a lot of community goodwill from being open source. They're your biggest fans and often your biggest customer. If you are open source without being an open source company, you're not really taking advantage of the resources available.
We should fight hard against patents and anything that might threaten democratic 3D printing and manufacturing. Support companies that support the OSS spirit embodied by RepRap. Tell people why this is important.
Let us not forget that the 3D printing business and hobby got started by the expiration of patents and the work of RepRap, the original gangster 3D printer.
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…
> My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small. I would suggest the contrary: if you want to build a company and believe open source is the right way to do it, please do try! We don't have enough open source companies, we need more successful examples of this. It's hard and there are traps on…