81–90 of 207 posts
The only problem is I don't think the 2 year term is sufficient to stop free-riding, and that probably requires adjustment on a per-project basis.
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…
Assuming you meant Linux kernel specifically, I think you are out of touch how "the linux community" works. Absolute majority of participants are paid by corporations and do what their managers tell them to do. Nobody is just looking to randomly (and for free) improve things average Windows normie would care about.
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…
Actually what you're referring to is specifically FOSS - free and open source which is used synonymously with 'open source'. Furthermore there is free as in gratis versus libre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be... > and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well. So depending on whether your source is free as in beer or free as in speech, dictates what busines…
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…
> 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.
A little bit helps the sand stick together. Too much and goodbye castle.
Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that trying to build a capitalist open source company is like trying to build an ant hill out of insecticide. FOSS software, at least in my eyes, is a tool to help achieve the ultimate goal of toppling capitalism. I love it when people try to make it compatible with capitalism, since it helps further the goal.
If you want to work at a truly open source company, it should probably be a non-profit foundation of some kind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elastic's losses are a classic story of VC-funded promises of infinite, unsustainable growth. Success for Elastic is defined by the classic impossible measure of becoming a monopoloy so you can raise prices every year and cite growth indefinitely. They had everything they needed to reach a sustainable business model, and the problem was not in their licenses but rather that they set impossible goals for themselves.
You have literally just 180'd your argument from "they're rich and greedy they didnt need any more money" to "Im glad they are dying they squandered their opportunities". May Amazon feast on their rotting open and free corpse, eh?
I don't read Drew's comment that way at all. He's pointing out correctly that they were well resourced, and had built a $.628 Billion revenue business (at the time). Well done.
Incidentally Since the change, they've grown to just north of $800M, so Elastic is still growing, but that growth is significantly slower than in years prior, so evidence supports Drew's assertion. Had Elastic done something different, they may have had more or less success.
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…
Companies also hold their cards close tending to not share their insights, information, and plans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Building a company inherently carries a risk of failure with it. You seem to be taking it the wrong way, you really shouldn't be building your company based on a few opinions of HN comments, nor it's their responsibility to outline the full extent of risks involved.
It's already hard to build a successful business. Odds are already thin for you to succeed. Why choose a model that worsens it?
Open Source was not created as a funding source to for-profit ventures. That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source.