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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

#71

Post by satvikpendem »

CaptainFever wrote: post #33
randomlinuxuser wrote: post #22

My point of view, as a linux user from my teens to now, early thirties, I'm just some random, so don't take this too seriously. Are we totally out of touch? Let my explain myself, the idea that if the drivers/firmware were open source it will make the bet on some hardware safer sounds like this to me, "Someone could get it working and share the code in case the company goes out of business in a few years", emphasis o…

> Also, I find amusing when people get the pikachu face when some big corporation uses OSS and makes profit off of it, isn't that the whole point of the OSS? When I use it on my pc I'm also making profit for myself, the corporations are just doing the same but at scale, and if your goal is to make profit, who wouldn't use all the tools available? They don't have to like OSS, don't have to share the values of the OSS,…

> this is why AGPL should be what programmers are using. It doesn't discriminate, but it does make sure that any entities that use Free Software contribute back to the commons.

A competing vendor could offer the software verbatim and still profit due to marketing and network effects (AWS has multiple products that work better together than using disparate vendors for each product), and AGPL would not help in that case.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#72

Post by radiator »

jraph wrote: post #37
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…

> 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…

> please do try!

This is not very convincing as a reply to the risks pointed out in the previous post. The choice of the word "try" seemingly recognizes the risk of failure, but you seem to ignore the serious consequences of such a failure for founder and employees. I mean, this is not a game.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#73

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

satvikpendem wrote: post #69
Maxious wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

More accurately: the latest versions of some components have a two year exclusivity period. The version from two years ago rolling is fully open source* under Apache 2.

*: we just recently lowered the window from 3 to 2 years so temporarily the actual time is 3 years for a couple more months.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#74

Post by lifeisstillgood »

I'm going to go with hard agree.

Firstly finding the point of leverage (was distribution, now is?)

Secondly looking at Game theory, the Tit for Tat approach is simple and consistently useful and well understood - so some ability to "hit back" is very useful. This of course depends on common legal frameworks which is part of the problem but ...

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#75

Post by scott_w »

high_priest wrote: post #27
chii wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

software has zero marginal cost, so therefore, if a piece of software can be used by the majority of humans, it makes sense that it ends up costing very little per instance of it. It's not a tragedy. It's actually a good outcome imho.

Software has zero marginal cost, that software engineers can imagine. My workstation runs all the time and I don't care that it consumes this 100$ of electricity a month. Who cares about amortisation of new hardware? New, shiny is new, shiny. There are some large, expensive server machines running my software? I don't see the bill, so the costs don't apply to me. There are dozens of engineering hours required to even…

> My workstation runs all the time and I don't care that it consumes this 100$ of electricity a month.

That has nothing to do with zero marginal cost. The term specifically refers to the cost of producing a new copy of the software, which is so low as to be effectively zero. Almost 100% of the costs of software engineering are what would be called “fixed costs” in economics.

This is to differentiate it from the production of, say, a car, where the marginal cost of building a new Ford Focus is a significant portion of the price.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#76

Post by jillesvangurp »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #41
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…

>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.

What you are describing is lockin, which is a mechanism companies use to ensure you keep on using their software.

But think about libraries. Imagine a library that handles dates and times correctly. You probably need one for whatever you are doing. Would you pay for one? No of course not because this is a solved problem and just about any language has this built into their standard library. You could build your own but it would have no economical value. Because it is a commodity. There are countless examples like this.

SQL server is a great example. Buying SQL Server for a new project doesn't make any sense for most people. The only reason to use it would be that you are already using it or somehow stuck with it (because you work in some place with lots of legacy software). Otherwise, there are plenty of perfectly fine and free alternatives. Databases are a commodity. If you need one, there are dozen or so free mainstream alternatives. The economic value of new ones is very low unless they do something particularly novel. Which then promptly gets imitated by others. And I'm sure SQL server has a few nice bits and bobs that are amazing. But by and large most people would ignore it as an option at this point. I haven't touched it in twenty years myself. At the time we had a product that could use either mysql or sql server (and Oracle even). Mysql worked fine and there was little technical reason to prefer the other options other than some imaginary value that companies associated with it (like getting support that they would never use).

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#78

Post by jraph »

konschubert wrote: post #60
jraph wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your recommendation is based on what you want for yourself, not based on what’s good for the person starting the company.

I suggested, I didn't recommend. I chose my words carefully. Under the condition that the person believes open source is the right thing to do.

You need to believe in what you do when you start a company.

I also suggest based on the fact that I do work for such a company, which has been successful. Next year is its 20th anniversary. It's an amazing place to work at. You can create amazing work environments out of open source. And while it's quite rare, it's also far from being the only one.

Another commenter says that I seem to ignore the consequences of a failure. I don't. However, I'm surrounded by open source companies and they all seem to be great places to work at. Join us!

When you believe in open source, being able to work in agreement with these values is amazing. I can't imagine how stronger that must be for the one would indeed founded a whole business like this.

It's time people stopped spreading this belief that open source and sustainable business cannot go together.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#79

Post by PeterZaitsev »

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 this applies to Product Companies. If you look at Europe there is very large number of Service Companies developing Open Source and they are doing very well.

The key is - they are Not relying on having some form of monopoly in regards to such software for their success

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#80

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

James_K wrote: post #64
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 i…

> It's pointless to call this anything other than source available.

I obviously strongly disagree with this. An FSL licensed project turns into full, undeniable open source after two years.

> 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.

Two years isn’t a lifetime. If there is value left the community has full rights to do something with it. No legal worries can stand in that way. You can even rebirth a new company from that if you so desire.

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