Who eats who in open source • Hacker News Board

Re: Who eats who in open source

#61

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #45

jacques_chester wrote: post #9

I work at Pivotal and disagree with a fair amount of the characterisation thereof, but my bias is mostly informed by actually working there for the last 6 years. Let's look at the heart of the argument instead. > If you squint, open source could be seen as a very generous charitable donation to some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet. Broadly: yes. Except backwards. FLOSS can be seen as a public…

> A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. True in the general case of course, but there are arrangements that can be used to mitigate this. Crowdfunding with a threshold mechanism, ala Kickstarter, is one of these - reaching the crowdfunding threshold is a stable equilibrium. The intuition is that if every funder's contribution is critical to the threshold being reached, the funders are esse…

I don't think crowdfunding will work with enterprise budgeting processes. That's where the sustaining money comes from for most OSS development.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#62

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

syshum wrote: post #20

jacques_chester wrote: post #9

I work at Pivotal and disagree with a fair amount of the characterisation thereof, but my bias is mostly informed by actually working there for the last 6 years. Let's look at the heart of the argument instead. > If you squint, open source could be seen as a very generous charitable donation to some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet. Broadly: yes. Except backwards. FLOSS can be seen as a public…

>>Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level. >>A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. A…

Copyleft doesn't guarantee payment and developers are not paid in patches. What you're arguing for is like-for-like bartering, which is a subset of all possible market exchanges.

The GPL creates neither excludability nor rivalrousness in the sense I am describing.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#63

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 5:09 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #53

Andrex wrote: post #48

> Pivotal got eaten by “Dockernetes” aka containers (ironically because Google was pissed off about Hadoop, but that is another story) Would anyone care to give a brief summary? It's the first I've heard of this.

I believe it's just saying that Google was disappointed that their MapReduce research didn't give them any market presence or power. Hadoop took the concepts and ran with it, with no direct benefit to Google. Pivotal benefited a lot with their commerical distro of Hadoop. Google didn't make the same mistake with K8S and it killed Pivotal's PCF.

Hadoop looked to be a big part of Pivotal's overall strategy early on but didn't pan out. Labs and Cloud Foundry have contributed the lion's share of revenue for most of Pivotal's life, though data products like Greenplum, Gemfire and RabbitMQ have also contributed a lot.

Kubernetes was never really about Pivotal in any universe I can think of. It was about AWS.

Disclosure: I work at Pivotal.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#64

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

siscia wrote: post #43

I wonder if advancement in orchestrator will shift the balance. There is a lot of effort into putting human knowledge into software, so that it can react to unexpected situation and self heal. K8s operators to be specific. If this software works well enough, what would be the competitive advantage of AWS?

I think the Operator pattern reveals a real shortcoming in Kubernetes: there's a wide gap between the core orchestration problem and the many fiddly particulars of individual pieces of software.

What we gained in homogeneity for cloud-native software we're now losing in wide heterogeneity of Operator software.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#65

Post by nojvek » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

beatpanda wrote: post #27

I was hoping this article was going to be more like “who makes enough money to eat working on Open Source Software?”

Me too. I don’t think there are many people making enough money to eat working on Open Source software. If you see GitHub, the largest most active projects are funded by Mega Corps like Micro Face Goog.

I wonder how many companies are successful with open source but paid licence for commercial use.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#66

Post by marktangotango » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 8:07 PM UTC

zby wrote: post #29

The cloud is eating business relying on licensing. This is relevant for both open and closed licenses. By the way I have wrote a post on that when the MongoDB debate was raging: https://medium.com/hackernoon/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-... . The way for Open Source to survive is to make it attractive for cloud providers.

How does one make their project attractive to cloud providers? For the sake of discussion; an infrastructure project like a job scheduler or some such?

Re: Who eats who in open source

#67

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #61

zozbot234 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. True in the general case of course, but there are arrangements that can be used to mitigate this. Crowdfunding with a threshold mechanism, ala Kickstarter, is one of these - reaching the crowdfunding threshold is a stable equilibrium. The intuition is that if every funder's contribution is critical to the threshold being reached, the funders are esse…

I don't think crowdfunding will work with enterprise budgeting processes. That's where the sustaining money comes from for most OSS development.

A 'crowd' of enterprises is called a consortium, joint venture, foundation etc. While the funding arrangement for those is less formal than in actual crowdfunding, plenty of those do get funded out of enterprise budgets.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#68

Post by exceptione » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

wayneftw wrote: post #60

exceptione wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can guarantee data intensive businesses who make competent use of open source that I can reduce their infrastructure costs by 4x with ease I am interested in your perspective and experiences. > Oracle and SQL Server have architectures that are as obsolete as PostgreSQL, they don't compete on the basis of being modern, efficient designs but on the basis of having dramatically better operational tooling. What drama…

> What dramatically better tooling does SQL Server has? I don't know about Oracle but SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) are vastly better than anything I've seen for open source databases. SSMS is just a really good visual client with an excellent table/view designer, diagram builder and query builder with GUI management features that let you manage virtually every facet of your ser…

Afaik, those things are available in DBeaver [0] and MySQL Workbench [1] as well.

@jandrewrogers also mentioned a 4-fold performance increase by switching to proprietary solutions from pgsql. I am still wondering what those solutions might be...

---

0. https://dbeaver.io/

1. https://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/

Re: Who eats who in open source

#69

Post by zby » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #66

zby wrote: post #29

The cloud is eating business relying on licensing. This is relevant for both open and closed licenses. By the way I have wrote a post on that when the MongoDB debate was raging: https://medium.com/hackernoon/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-... . The way for Open Source to survive is to make it attractive for cloud providers.

How does one make their project attractive to cloud providers? For the sake of discussion; an infrastructure project like a job scheduler or some such?

I was more thinking about making the licensing attractive to cloud providers. The idea is that cloud providers are the dominant players - so for Open Source to survive it needs to be adopted by them. But yeah - I don't know how to do that. Licensing is not a core of their proposal, open sourcing their software does not impact their revenue directly - but might indirectly by letting other cloud providers compete with them using their own code.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#70

Post by ummonk » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #37

ummonk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like open source companies will just need to become patent trolls. At least if Google is unable to successfully win the appeal in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit.

A company enforcing software patents is no longer "open source" in a meaningful sense.

Yeah, but open source is just not a generally good business model, and open source companies seem to be rediscovering the reason intellectual property exists, leading to cognitive dissonance.

Open source is a good business strategy when you're trying to achieve vendor lock-in via price-dumping, a la what Google did with Android (and has been fined for in the EU).