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The life and death of open source companies

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Re: The life and death of open source companies

#61

Post by wslh »

PoutCo wrote: post #47
bruce511 wrote: 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.

The current code is perpetually licensed to the community, not owned by the community.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#62

Post by James_K »

It's funny how they lied about being open source twice and got the exact same reaction from it both times, but still haven't learnt their lesson. All they need to do to avoid backlash is call it source available (like it is) but instead they chose to mislead people for no real benefit to themselves.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#63

Post by wslh »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #8

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…

> Apple and MS seem to continue to resist this notion but they are increasingly exceptions.

I din't think resisting is the correct word: Linux could be perfect from the user perspective but not the device one: battery handling in a notebook, good support of certain devices, etc. Linux does not replace the whole needs of users or organizations and that is why MS and Apple continue to exist. They existed before Linux either! The business is not the OS.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#64

Post by James_K »

remram wrote: post #24

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…

It's pointless to call this anything other than source available. This license is just a no-compete license with extra steps. I see little practical difference between "you can't compete with us" and "you can't compete with us for as long as we're developing the software". Maybe we should call this a "you can have the scraps" license because the project only becomes open source when the developers stop caring about it.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#65

Post by moffkalast »

> So let's discuss Prusa: The Bambu A1 competes with Prusa's MK4 model but is signficantly cheaper, faster and does more. For the price of one Prusa MK4 with shipping I could buy three Bambu A1 printers or two Bambu A2 printers plus the AMS addon which adds multi-color printing.

I would argue that was always inevitable, Prusas are laughably overpriced and it's not like they're open source in the sense that you can build your own. They took the RepRap idea and commercialized it with an insane markup, benefiting from open source much more than Bambu probably did. For the longest time their PrusaPrinters model hosting site only supported .gcode files for their printers which was just a large fuck you to anyone with any other printer. Hence why Thingiverse ran circles around them with a half broken site.

There is a lot more community value in providing hackable low cost hardware like Creality did with the Ender, becase then people that have time but not money can you know... buy it. And then develop open source software or make models for it with that time.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#66

Post by konschubert »

silisili wrote: post #57
amadeuspagel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these companies open source everything, or even the most valuable parts.

Picking on Google here, their most valuable part by far is injecting ads into search. Most agree their search is nothing special, getting worse even. We've seen tens of companies write good enough search engines. You could write one 10x better tomorrow and still likely fail. Their code is not the secret sauce - their user lock in is. A lot of the same could be said for FB.

If google’s search is nothing special, why are all other search engines worse, including yours?

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#67

Post by oefrha »

AVincentInSpace wrote: post #39
DeathArrow wrote: post #18

>They offer a user friendly experience at a very attractive price point That's what most users care about. That it just works and it does that at an attractive price point. The rest is ideology and politics, which is fine if it's what you are into, but most people won't care.

Caring about what happens to the thing you bought five years down the road when the company that made it goes bankrupt is nor "ideology and politics"

I’ve got a shitty laserjet from HP that’s approaching 20 years old and still working more or less. It doesn’t have WiFi so I’m not sure it’s ever received an update to its closed firmware.

Now, I know nothing about 3D printing, but I fail to see why a 3D printer needs firmware updates to remain functional five years down the road, if it’s working today and the hardware doesn’t break down.

If I understand TFA correctly, I can buy a largely equivalent model with closed firmware at 1/3 the price, or a better one at 1/2 the price. Choosing the closed firmware one would be a no brainer for me. Edit: Rereading the passage, it seems even the 1/3 price model is better.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#68

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

cuu508 wrote: post #50
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> 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.

The issue for me is that there is no term for what we do with the FSL. It’s much closer to open source than source available as it literally upgrades to open source after two years.

On the user definition: open source doesn’t draw a line between an end user and a competitor. That’s part of the challenge here.

> Compete with them!

Personally I rather compete in a level playing field.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#69

Post by satvikpendem »

Maxious wrote: post #32
jillesvangurp wrote: post #8

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…

> You invent something, and then immediately turn it into a cheap commodity by releasing it for free. Exactly. A 71-line python script https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/commit/3c2e87573d3bd16f6... was groundbreaking when it came out and the fact that it springboarded into a startup is commendable. But 15 years later and Functional Software Inc. d/b/a Sentry has to support 100+ (according to their marketing material…

Sentry is also not open source anymore, according to their license.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#70

Post by dmezzetti »

My perspective as an open source developer of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai).

When you get started in open source, it's a great way for a small team to get the word out. Conversely, when starting as proprietary software or SaaS, you're looking at advertising, websites, sales calls and so forth. If an open source company is lucky enough to be successful, the next phase is having users and perhaps even funding. When the team grows and/or others put their own money or career into the company, they want an outcome. It becomes hard to ignore that there are thousands of people using the software and inevitably it becomes an exercise on how to claw back from the group of "free" users. There is also the fear that a big company will undercut the open source company by offering the software as part of a cloud service. This is my opinion on how we got here with confusing licensing changes.

Most don't have the means to accept little to no income from their work. But there shouldn't be a "fixed pot" mentality. In order to be a successful open source company, one has to see the "free" users as beneficial. Think of it as a big wide open world and that while some will never pay, if you add value in other ways on top of your open source offerings, there will be significant income opportunities. Could be consulting projects, hosted/cloud/SaaS versions or specialized components.

One should also look at operations. There will be a new wave of companies, especially in the AI space, that are lean and using automation to build great things with a very limited amount of resources. Perhaps they don't even need funding and can build a profitable company without it. In those cases, they won't have those internal pressures and hence likely to be more competitive. Something to watch in 2024.

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