71–80 of 287 posts
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It can sometimes be way easier to fire a vendor than an engineer.
But it's often easier to replace an engineer than a vendor.
Firing the maintainer and author of 90% of the commits of the OSS project your company is relying on in a way that it is hard to migrate away? Who can replace them??
"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…
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What liability are you referring to?
Component breaks due to bug, deployment misconfiguration, scaling failure, etc., and your company loses $1M during the outage. If it's a vendor with an SLA, you can (sometimes) get them to cover the $1M. If it's in-house, you're eating it. It's often cheaper to build/run stuff yourself (unless it's so commodified that you're benefiting from amortization across the vendor's many clients), but then you have to be self-…
The entire software stack from the bios up generally offers little guarantee, and if it does, it's often:
"The sole remedy shall be a refund up to the original purchase price."
What a silly claim by the author.
Of course OSS wins by being cheaper (in terms of $$$ paid). I agree that cost is not the only way it wins, though. Points made by the author on how it can win:
* extensibility
* transparency
I'd also add:
* lower barrier to entry (for a subset of technical users, at least). If you want to try it, you download it.
* optionality: in the spirit of libre open source, you should be able to stand it up yourself. If things go sideways with the company providing you the OSS app, you've lowered your risk.
* if the user is a dev (the product is infra) "many eyes make for shallow bugs"
Those are all compelling arguments.
However, weighed against all of that is the profit motive and sustainability of a business. People, even software devs, like to eat :) . And businesses need to make money to employ people and push a product forward.
Honestly, I don't think we've figured out how to build a pure big open source business outside of the following business models:
* consulting/support (Redhat); pursuing this has poorer margins
* loss leader for another service (like VSCode for the MS ecosystem). this isn't really a pure OSS business model
* hosting/SaaS (but the clouds impinge; I opined a few years ago on this: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3438 )
(I'm leaving out open core or SSPL companies because I don't consider them to be 'pure' OSS companies, myself.)
Maybe the answer is that we can't have a big open source business. Maybe smaller ones are just fine. I'd avoid VC though, in that case. Most don't like smaller businesses.
FYI, you can also have some of the beneficial attributes of OSS:
* transparency through clear communication and docs
* extensibility through clear, stable APIs and docs
even with a closed source company. Software companies have lots to learn from OSS as a development process.
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It's not about compensation, it's about finger-pointing. "WE didn't bill your card 40 times draining your bank account -- STRIPE did! Go sue them, not us!"
You are still getting sued.
E.g.: "We can just sue Microsoft" is a common one.
a) Their SLA literally states that they will compensate you only for the cost of the individual service they provided. The $1/month Azure DNS Zone outage caused your $100M/month business to vanish off the Internet? Here's $1 for your compensation!
b) The US Government sued Microsoft and failed to get very far. Are you the US Government? Do you have a budget for dozens of the best lawyers money can buy? Have you sued a multi-trillion dollar market cap org successfully ever? No? Why do you think you can... and win?
Generally this boils down to: "I haven't read the contract I signed, but I'm sure if things go bad I can just make the lawyers magically fix things for me."
Disclosure: I work for a closed source product company, but write a lot of open source that pairs well with our product. What a silly claim by the author. Of course OSS wins by being cheaper (in terms of $$$ paid). I agree that cost is not the only way it wins, though. Points made by the author on how it can win: * extensibility * transparency I'd also add: * lower barrier to entry (for a subset of technical users, a…
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I am engineer, now trying to sell enterprise software. May be I can shed some light. If a company says it is not their current focus even after paying 200k, you should looking into finding an alternative vendor who is willing to go above and beyond. A good vendor gets you by features and keeps you with exceptional service. I have seen vendors saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. In my opinion org…
I respect your position but it doesn't sound like you've worked for any company that's decided to "buy in to the ecosystem" for any sufficiently large ecosystem. Get all your data in DataDog and try to leave. Build your business on IBM and see how agile you are in 25 years. Same goes for pretty much any large enterprise software, even the free ones. Good luck leaving git. Good luck de-kubernetesifying someday to a hi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am engineer, now trying to sell enterprise software. May be I can shed some light. If a company says it is not their current focus even after paying 200k, you should looking into finding an alternative vendor who is willing to go above and beyond. A good vendor gets you by features and keeps you with exceptional service. I have seen vendors saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. In my opinion org…
I respect your position but it doesn't sound like you've worked for any company that's decided to "buy in to the ecosystem" for any sufficiently large ecosystem. Get all your data in DataDog and try to leave. Build your business on IBM and see how agile you are in 25 years. Same goes for pretty much any large enterprise software, even the free ones. Good luck leaving git. Good luck de-kubernetesifying someday to a hi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am engineer, now trying to sell enterprise software. May be I can shed some light. If a company says it is not their current focus even after paying 200k, you should looking into finding an alternative vendor who is willing to go above and beyond. A good vendor gets you by features and keeps you with exceptional service. I have seen vendors saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. In my opinion org…
> saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. These words were almost verbatim used this morning in a meeting. A small agile ISV was purchased by one of those big "holding companies" and now everything is "for consideration", "not on the roadmap", "not strictly required", or like you said "not their current focus". We've been raising issues like: "You're using frameworks and SDKs that went end-of-life y…