Problems With Open-Source Business Models • Hacker News Board

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#81

Post by int_19h » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 2:27 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #50

MrTonyD wrote: post #3

I've been working in Open Source for a long time now - decades. The problem I see is that so many rich and wealthy companies (and their billionaire owners) are the big beneficiaries of open source. Look at Spark, Hadoop, Linux, gnu tools and others - who uses them at a large scale? It is the wealthy companies who avoid paying salaries for the development of those tools. So I've become convinced that we should disting…

You do that and companies just switch to a comparable and freer platform... From linux to BSD, from Mongo to X... etc. In the end, a lot of these changes are to stop resellers from building a larger business on the open-source version that competes with their own open-core model. In the end, they probably should have had those provisions to begin with, but were more concerned about early growth and first to market.

> You do that and companies just switch to a comparable and freer platform... From linux to BSD, from Mongo to X...

That's only sustainable for as long as there are those comparable and freer platforms to switch to. But if the argument being made here is valid, that is not guaranteed.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#82

Post by kevinAtStorj » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC

While traditional cloud providers have certainly made it difficult for open source companies to monetize the cloud, it seems that the marriage between decentralized cloud protocols and open-source is opening up new opportunities for OSS monetization.

Decentralization takes the principles of open source and applies them to the very infrastructure on which software runs.

At Storj, for example, we have an Open Source Partner Program that attempts to solve the ‘Amazon Problem’ by enabling any open source project to generate revenue every time their end users store data in the cloud.

Storj tracks usage on the network and returns a significant portion of the revenue earned when data from an open source project is stored on the platform. Critically, this enables open source projects to derive sustainable revenue from usage, whether by commercial customers or non-paying open source users.

In my opinion, this can help drive and support the next wave of Open Source monetization models.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#83

Post by wartakode » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 3:06 AM UTC

kevinAtStorj wrote: post #82

While traditional cloud providers have certainly made it difficult for open source companies to monetize the cloud, it seems that the marriage between decentralized cloud protocols and open-source is opening up new opportunities for OSS monetization. Decentralization takes the principles of open source and applies them to the very infrastructure on which software runs. At Storj, for example, we have an Open Source Pa…

Hi @kevinAtStorj, I'm really interested with 'Amazon Problem', is any further reference with this company behavior?

As I'm aware (personal experience) not only Amazon taking profit from open source, and there are more company use open source for their core product, but not giving any feedback to open source community.

Thanks

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#84

Post by xmly » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

If you are building a prop software/service above open source, your business success depends on two factors: 1. the popularity of the open source and 2. the goodness of the prod software/service.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#85

Post by c-smile » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 4:53 AM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #32

studentik wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! So charging for commercial usage is not considered 'open source' even when source is actually available?

Charging for software is unrelated to open source. You can open source your software under one license and charge for it under a different one.

Why do we need open source at all then?

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#86

Post by xmly » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 5:02 AM UTC

xmly wrote: post #84

If you are building a prop software/service above open source, your business success depends on two factors: 1. the popularity of the open source and 2. the goodness of the prod software/service.

Comparatively, the business who only builds one software is much simpler.

But for open source software itself, the success is not measured by money,but popularity and impact. Linus is successful on Linux work. People and history would remember him. Who cares about VCs in making history?

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#87

Post by tomcam » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 5:36 AM UTC

buboard wrote: post #29

This is almost absolutely correct. Pity there isn't even a model to monetize the blog post, though. Monetization is a problem across the internet that seems to benefit the behemoths. Perhaps we need a middle-ground between open source and proprietary? Open source often becomes a signal to find business partners with similar potential needs. Perhaps you could share source with only 'approved partners', so you can toge…

There are many ways one could monetize blog posts. It is not obvious to me that most blog posts are worth any money at all. Let’s take the best case scenario: How much are you willing to pay for the blogs that you read?

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#88

Post by finnreid19 » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:15 AM UTC

davidw wrote: post #46

To have a viable business, you need to figure out what sort of scarcity you're going to take advantage of: https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity... If the software is open source, the software itself is not scarce, so it makes it a bit trickier to figure out.

I run a Discord bot on ~30,000 servers and my bot is completely open source. Clones have popped up, but nothing can beat the network effect of having my bot's messages popping up in chats and other people adding it to their servers.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#89

Post by tannhaeuser » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:15 AM UTC

aey wrote: post #80

tannhaeuser wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopolization, privacy invasion/attention economy, and the demise and weaponization of the web as a medium for misinformation

Crypto currencies have captured 100b+ in value trying to solve those problems. Vast majority of the code is open source as well.

Yes of course. My comment was addressed at those coming up with dogmatist "no freedom 0" arguments when anyone dares to make a living with their work.

Re: Problems With Open-Source Business Models

#90

Post by grumpydba » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 7:16 AM UTC

MrTonyD wrote: post #3

I've been working in Open Source for a long time now - decades. The problem I see is that so many rich and wealthy companies (and their billionaire owners) are the big beneficiaries of open source. Look at Spark, Hadoop, Linux, gnu tools and others - who uses them at a large scale? It is the wealthy companies who avoid paying salaries for the development of those tools. So I've become convinced that we should disting…

The big bank I work for pays for red hat and hortonworks. And the other banks I've worked for do too.

So all the examples you give are funded by big companies. Works perfectly.