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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

#91

Post by Arch-TK »

jraph wrote: post #78
konschubert wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ope…

Where do I find these open source companies? In the UK it seems like they don't exist. But maybe I am looking in the wrong places.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#92

Post by ChatGTP »

silisili wrote: post #53
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…

Very few companies compete on code alone. Those that do I understand the model a bit more, but still usually have the velocity to run away from copycats. Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.

Can you tell me where I can see the source code for the Google maps APIs please?

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#93

Post by akoboldfrying »

sh79 wrote: post #84
radiator wrote: post #72

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.

You're right that it's no one on HN's responsibility to outline the full risks of starting a business, but no one is claiming otherwise.

Presumably jraph's goal in writing their comment is to convince us that starting an Open Source company is a good idea -- but they haven't succeeded, for the reasons mentioned. If they want to convince more people, then they should come up with counterarguments to the top level post's arguments (and if they don't want to convince more people, that's fine too).

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#94

Post by nrabulinski »

konschubert wrote: post #66
silisili wrote: post #57

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?

At least a few search engines are either equally good or better. Kagi immediately comes to mind, but there have been others posted on HN over the years as well

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#95

Post by subtra3t »

sh79 wrote: post #84
radiator wrote: post #72

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.

> risk of failure with it

And licensing one's product seems to amplify that risk.

> based on a few opinions of HN comments

What if someone does do that? As a HN commenter I can't bypass the possibility that somebody takes my comment at face value without conducting proper research and analysis.

HN comments (and really all content on the Internet in general) should be written responsibly. I am not saying that GP didn't write their comment responsibly.

> nor it's their responsibility to outline the full extent of risks involved

But then you can't raise complaints when somebody does outline the full extent of risks involved.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#96

Post by akoboldfrying »

ChatGTP wrote: post #92
silisili wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few companies compete on code alone. Those that do I understand the model a bit more, but still usually have the velocity to run away from copycats. Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.

Can you tell me where I can see the source code for the Google maps APIs please?

"a ton of" does not imply "all".

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#97

Post by subtra3t »

konschubert wrote: post #66
silisili wrote: post #57

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?

I agree with you but at the same time I can see why you were downvoted. No need to be so rude.

But I feel that it's incorrect to dismiss Google as being a bad search engine. DDG and Brave both provide !bangs for google and many other search engines that a significant part of their userbase use regularly. I myself use google often when I'm searching for something extremely specific, something that Google may give me 2-3 relevant search results for. Other search engines would often not give me anything relevant at all.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#98

Post by sjfjsjdjwvwvc »

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #77

The Open Source is about freedom for users not about making life easy for developers or the Company. Open Source is not for everyone and many those crying how horrible Open Source is simply should not gone with Open Source to begin with :)

Why should someone start developing open source if there is no way to make a living from it long term ?

Should we just expect OSS devs to work for free (or scraps via sponsors/kofi)?

I guess there are a lot selfless individuals who would still use a significant portion of their lifetime to build OSS.

But what about software that needs significant effort to build and constant updates?

I find your view very cynical and I exactly the attitude why I wouldn’t start an ambitious OSS project for something more complex.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#99

Post by Voultapher »

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…

> So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage.

I disagree with that part. You have the people who know and understand the code, that's worth a tremendous amount. This also applies for new features, who else is gonna be as proficient as your people at building on top of it? Also a lot of enterprise contracts are all about assured support, who is placed better than you to provide it? You have the people that have the best understanding of the code.

Re: The life and death of open source companies

#100

Post by CaptainFever »

wslh wrote: post #61
PoutCo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing an important point here. 1. Open source is about the code belonging to the community 2. Open source projects can not survive without funding - as you develop 3. So, both (open source and company) can be compatible if and only if funding belong to the community. In other world, if the open source company is decentralised and democratic. And that is what we need to fight for.

The current code is perpetually licensed to the community, not owned by the community.

That's the legal reality of it, but I think what the GP meant was that the idea is that code effectively belongs to the communes (of course, credit is still due). It doesn't matter if this is done by licensing or releasing into the public domain. That's just the means to an end.
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