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Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

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Re: Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

#91

Post by malwarebytess »

curryst wrote: post #79
malwarebytess wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's several 100+ million dollar businesses where I live that make their money on phone support/installation/deployment of open source software they maintain. Nobody pays for the software, but they'll pay out the nose on a yearly basis for support.

That creates a perverse incentive where you want your open source stuff to be hard to use so people have to pay you. Plus there's no guarantee that the developers will be the ones making money. There's a lot of ire at Amazon because of that.

I don't agree. One example of this business plan is the best software of its category on the market: open dental software.

Re: Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

#92

Post by alisonkisk »

dudus wrote: post #86
curryst wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That creates a perverse incentive where you want your open source stuff to be hard to use so people have to pay you. Plus there's no guarantee that the developers will be the ones making money. There's a lot of ire at Amazon because of that.

Or even worse, it creates an incentive for the big cloud conglomerates to offer that software as a managed service and pocket the revenue.

That's what Affero GPL is for.

Re: Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

#93

Post by blitzar »

phkahler wrote: post #15
ginko wrote: post #3

Sure, but WHO are you supposed to pay those $2k to?

I'm sure there will be several people and organizations willing to step in and be a clearinghouse / middleman to "make it easy".

I will just need to take a modest 25% to cover costs and we are good to go ...

Re: Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

#95

Post by ChrisLomont »

$2k/year per technical employee is likely more than is paid to commercial licenses per technical employee. At these prices open source would cease to be of value.

I work with a few companies with ~50 tech employees each. Both use significant commercial tooling. Both pay far less than $100k a year for it. If their use of open source (some scattered linux, but everyone has also a Windows PC and/or a Mac, etc.) cost them $100k a year, they'd both drop all of it and move to cheaper commercial solutions.

Pick a field. Pick commercial tools that a technical person in the field uses. Check prices spread over the lifetime of the tool.

Not even close.

Art people - $2k/yr buys a lot of solid software that open source doesn't come close to.

Software - $2k a year buys a significant amount of commercial tooling.

CAD - Open source doesn't even have an answer here.

Finance - Open source sucks here too.

Scientific computing - Matlab/Mathematica/etc - open source not close, $2k a year buys all your tooling over the lifetime of the tools.

And so on....

The reason I use some open source solutions is because they're adequate for the needs, and the cost reflects it. Had I needed to pay $2k a year for them, I'd have dropped them and bought decent commercial alternatives.

Re: Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

#96

Post by kawsper »

curryst wrote: post #79
malwarebytess wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's several 100+ million dollar businesses where I live that make their money on phone support/installation/deployment of open source software they maintain. Nobody pays for the software, but they'll pay out the nose on a yearly basis for support.

That creates a perverse incentive where you want your open source stuff to be hard to use so people have to pay you. Plus there's no guarantee that the developers will be the ones making money. There's a lot of ire at Amazon because of that.

It happens with paid subscriptions as well.

Some examples of this, that I can think of:

- Varnish Cache where you need a paid subscription, or community patches and you have to do the compilation yourself, to make it understand SRV-records instead of hardcoding IPs or hostnames.

- Nginx also need a paid subscription to understand SRV-records.

Both of these companies have realized that in order for people to effectively run the software within a cluster, you need support for SRV-records to get service discovery working.

Re: Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

#97

Post by kawsper »

whit537 wrote: post #90
mattbk1 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see you're still around!

Funny timing, btw. :) https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1431368348886052865

You were such an inspiration to me seeing how you were running Gratipay, I only did one PR, but it was so interesting following from the sidelines.

Re: Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

#98

Post by whit537 »

kawsper wrote: post #97
whit537 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny timing, btw. :) https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1431368348886052865

You were such an inspiration to me seeing how you were running Gratipay, I only did one PR, but it was so interesting following from the sidelines.

Not seeing you at github.com/kawsper so not sure what the PR was ... but thanks for the PR! :)

Re: Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

#99

Post by whit537 »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #95

$2k/year per technical employee is likely more than is paid to commercial licenses per technical employee. At these prices open source would cease to be of value. I work with a few companies with ~50 tech employees each. Both use significant commercial tooling. Both pay far less than $100k a year for it. If their use of open source (some scattered linux, but everyone has also a Windows PC and/or a Mac, etc.) cost the…

Per-user closed-source software cost for other technical fields is an interesting comparison. Thanks for surfacing it. :^)

Of your five examples, the first two reinforce $2k/yr as a reasonable spend, the second two are no-ops since you don't give a number, and the fifth case is unclear to me (a quick check of Matlab shows a $2k perpetual license with some fine print about support contracts, or an $860/yr annual license).

To your secondary point: the fact that in some fields there are no good open source alternatives suggests that there's room for open source alternatives to exist, if our companies can become self-enlightened enough to fund them. Yes, there will always be companies that mooch. I, for one, prefer to work for companies that don't. :)

Re: Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

#100

Post by marsokod »

tester756 wrote: post #88
littlestymaar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your software engineer, have a manager, was hired by the Human Resource department based on a contract written by the legal team. Your company also most likely has sales persons, marketing, project management and a product development team. Then you have office cost, health insurance plans, etc.

it's amortized between all devs.

Yes, and the x2 figure is the usual estimation when checking this at a company level.
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