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Open Source does not win by being cheaper

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Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#81

Post by reverius42 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #50

"Profit" is a strange and ambiguous term here. I've been running an open source, libre project for closing in on 24 years now, and generating revenue from it for about 17 years. There's never been any "profit", but there has been revenue. I regard profit as what's left of the revenue after you pay the people who work on the project and any expenses, which is the way most corporations and accountants would view it. Th…

Are you in the US? Do you report that revenue as personal income on your taxes? If yes, then I think it’s fair to call it profit (since you’re also presumably deducting expenses).

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#82

Post by reverius42 »

musicale wrote: post #62
kelnos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, a business usually exists to provide some useful good or service to its customers. FedEx delivers packages. Apple makes phones and computers. Etc. That's just an avenue to make profit. If those activities weren't profitable, they probably wouldn't get done, outside of government regulation or subsidy. Sure, some businesses are "labors of love", but they still would likely not exist if they were break-even, cert…

Apple's mission statement isn't "try to extract as much money from our customers' wallets as possible" or even "deliver the highest profit and value to our shareholders." (Recall Tim Cook's comment on the "bloody ROI.") In fact I'd be hard-pressed to find such a mission statement for a non-financial firm - at least one that doesn't mention any other purpose for the company.[1] It's a mistake to think that companies o…

I think the point is that the stated mission is window dressing on top of the underlying truth. Following POSIWID, all for profit enterprises have making money as their core mission.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#83

Post by patmorgan23 »

jandrese wrote: post #3

I've always been annoyed that companies will pay 6 figures for a support contract, but won't consider hiring a full time engineer for the same or less pay to support an open source product that does the same thing. The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frust…

"The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frustrating. "

Isn't the next part of this where the vendor receives an angry letter that contains the words "notice of default" and "filing suit to compel specific performance". If a vendor takes your money and says "JK we don't feel like doing that" and your contract let's them do that you need to fire you attorney (or who ever signed that contract)

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#85

Post by tadfisher »

38 wrote: post #8
msy wrote: post #5

The problem with this business model is it creates a tension between the OSS version and the paid versions - you want the OSS version to be good, but not such a good solution that nobody feels the need to pay for your SaaS/consulting/etc. That tension seems to inevitably lead to obvious features missing or functionality/knowledge that's needed to operate at any scale coistered away as closed source so the sponsoring…

> That tension seems to inevitably lead to obvious features missing or functionality/knowledge that's needed to operate at any scale coistered away as closed source so the sponsoring entity can make some money. I dont think this is a problem at all. I maintain a small module, and have had many feature requests and support requests over the years. Until I am making enough money to pay my rent, I dont feel one bit guil…

With all due respect, your model as described is different: the way I read it is that you're charging for work, not charging for a product incorporating your work. The same tension doesn't exist, because you don't have an incentive to paywall a feature; if someone pays you, everyone benefits.

Forgive me if I'm off-base with my interpretation of your comment.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#86

Post by dazed_confused »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #50

"Profit" is a strange and ambiguous term here. I've been running an open source, libre project for closing in on 24 years now, and generating revenue from it for about 17 years. There's never been any "profit", but there has been revenue. I regard profit as what's left of the revenue after you pay the people who work on the project and any expenses, which is the way most corporations and accountants would view it. Th…

> Also, as is typical for things linked from HN, this whole article seems very web-y and SaaS-y. There are other kinds of open source projects, believe it or not.

You mean the rest of computing...

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#87

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Counterargument: Linux is on most servers, smart phones, and information appliances. Primarily because its scaling cost is near $0/host, and some users feed useful resources back into the digital karma pool.

If the goal is to share an opensource project as widely as possible, than most will sell associated services to generate support revenue. Some operate as a nonprofit entity to offer tax breaks on supported project services.

Trying to cram a GPL/BSD/Apache project into a 1990's shareware license model will usually fail.

Beer is good...

Milkshakes are good...

A Beer-Milkshake is a terrible idea =)

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#88

Post by freedomben »

brap wrote: post #21

I’m surprised it didn’t mention vendor lock-in, which is definitely a selling point for open source.

Agreed. This isn't just a trivial point either. As a decision maker this is one of my top considerations. Every org and person is different of course and there are plenty of people that don't care about lock-in as long as it's a company they trust, but it's definitely not a zero either.

When I worked for Red Hat as an OpenShift consultant, I met with many execs who were concerned about vendor lock-in. Going with OpenShift for them was a no-brainer

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#90

Post by tadfisher »

ignoramous wrote: post #45

> What is a transparency problem? It’s when a solution being closed source creates distrust between the client and vendor. Eterprises don't care that much about code. And if they do, business continuity clauses may alleviate most of their closed source concerns. After all, how many financial firms switched to OpenOffice Calc from Excel? > She argues that Amplitude is pretty expensive, particularly prohibitive for som…

I have not yet participated in an early-stage startup that cares about cost; they have mostly cared about time, and buying Amplitude/Segment/AWS/Heroku/etc is just seen as being faster than the alternatives, rightly or not.

If you're rolling Postgres on the metal, your funders will either not care or they'll ask hard questions about how much time you wasted, and you'd better have some decent answers or some sympathetic investors.

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