How Can We Fix The Broken Economics of Open Source? (medium.com) 203
"The economics of Open Source software are fundamentally broken," argues Matt Klein, a senior software engineer at Lyft (who created Envoy). Here's a heavily-condensed version of his essay on Medium:
If we take consulting, services, and support off the table as an option for high-growth revenue generation (the only thing VCs care about), we are left with open core [with some subset of features behind a paywall], software as a service, or some blurring of the two... Everyone wants infrastructure software to be free and continuously developed by highly skilled professional developers (who in turn expect to make substantial salaries), but no one wants to pay for it. The economics of this situation are unsustainable and broken...
[W]e now come to what I have recently called "loose" open core and SaaS. In the future, I believe the most successful OSS projects will be primarily monetized via this method. What is it? The idea behind "loose" open core and SaaS is that a popular OSS project can be developed as a completely community driven project (this avoids the conflicts of interest inherent in "pure" open core), while value added proprietary services and software can be sold in an ecosystem that forms around the OSS...
Unfortunately, there is an inflection point at which in some sense an OSS project becomes too popular for its own good, and outgrows its ability to generate enough revenue via either "pure" open core or services and support... [B]uilding a vibrant community and then enabling an ecosystem of "loose" open core and SaaS businesses on top appears to me to be the only viable path forward for modern VC-backed OSS startups.
Klein also suggests OSS foundations start providing fellowships to key maintainers, who currently "operate under an almost feudal system of patronage, hopping from company to company, trying to earn a living, keep the community vibrant, and all the while stay impartial..."
"[A]s an industry, we are going to have to come to terms with the economic reality: nothing is free, including OSS. If we want vibrant OSS projects maintained by engineers that are well compensated and not conflicted, we are going to have to decide that this is something worth paying for. In my opinion, fellowships provided by OSS foundations and funded by companies generating revenue off of the OSS is a great way to start down this path."
[W]e now come to what I have recently called "loose" open core and SaaS. In the future, I believe the most successful OSS projects will be primarily monetized via this method. What is it? The idea behind "loose" open core and SaaS is that a popular OSS project can be developed as a completely community driven project (this avoids the conflicts of interest inherent in "pure" open core), while value added proprietary services and software can be sold in an ecosystem that forms around the OSS...
Unfortunately, there is an inflection point at which in some sense an OSS project becomes too popular for its own good, and outgrows its ability to generate enough revenue via either "pure" open core or services and support... [B]uilding a vibrant community and then enabling an ecosystem of "loose" open core and SaaS businesses on top appears to me to be the only viable path forward for modern VC-backed OSS startups.
Klein also suggests OSS foundations start providing fellowships to key maintainers, who currently "operate under an almost feudal system of patronage, hopping from company to company, trying to earn a living, keep the community vibrant, and all the while stay impartial..."
"[A]s an industry, we are going to have to come to terms with the economic reality: nothing is free, including OSS. If we want vibrant OSS projects maintained by engineers that are well compensated and not conflicted, we are going to have to decide that this is something worth paying for. In my opinion, fellowships provided by OSS foundations and funded by companies generating revenue off of the OSS is a great way to start down this path."
Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:4, Interesting)
Just because people can build the software from source if they want to doesn't mean you can't get them to pay you for it.
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Exactly. This is why OSI has done more harm than good with their promotion of "liberal" open source licenses such as MIT or BSD licenses that let corporations plunder this public good for their personal profits. Instead if software developers actually understand that licences like GPL actually provide an avenue for monetization by enforcing the need for proprietary software vendors to actually pay for the usage in a manner that keeps their sources and/or modifications closed.
Re:Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a cost to "Plundering" an MIT or BSD licensed product. In general you begin creating a fork in the product, that only you will be able to maintain and control. So a 20 year old bug, that got fixed 18 years ago, will not make it into your product, because you swiped and altered the code around it for your product.
However if they keep the code clean, and will support the mainline development, then it is actually a win-win.
The problem with businesses and the GPL, is for them to be profitable, they need skirt the edge of the GPL rules, and often try fit into the different exceptions. Or other then trying so hard, we just say no GPL, but MIT and BSD is Ok.
Sometime you need to allow people to do bad things, to keep the door open for good things as well.
Re: Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:2)
I make a living writing MIT licensed software. You don't know what you're talking about.
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Serious Question here. What do you do and how do you do it? I am really curious.
Re: Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:2)
I work on infrastruture ("DevOps") for a startup in the mobile communications space. Whenever I work on a new project, I spin off the majority of the generic stuff into reusable MIT licensed modules, which I then tie together inside a small proprietary project. In the end, most of my work ends up open source.
Every module gets fully documented and tested before publishing, so that puts the code a step above the typical proprietary code from my colleagues, which often relies on institutional knowledge. If I'm
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Not only has it thrived for decades, a great many people have found ways to make money from it. And Linus Torvalds is hardly poor.
If you ain't makin' money, You're Doing It Wrong.
And other people have already proved that.
This is a non-issue, raised by people who don't think they "got their share".
Re:Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft business model of the time was to sell packaged software. Open Source was a risk at the time, because it offered alternatives. However it has changed to Cloud and software as a service, So people will be paying monthly fees and Open Source isn't as much a threat.
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Re: Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:2)
I get paid to write open source software. It's not donations. I don't know why everyone seems to think it's hard to find an economic model for open source. The economic model never changed. The only thing that changed is the plethora of "app" developers who don't have the first clue how the economics of software work.
Re:Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:5, Insightful)
A better way to put this:
Even if milk, flour, eggs, and sugar could be obtained for 0$, people would still buy cakes from the store.
Why? People will pay for convenience. Specifically, the convenience to free up their time for other, more desirable or productive tasks.
So, even if all the ingredients could be obtained for a genuinely 0$ price point, mom will STILL pay to have a cake made for her, for her little girl's 6th birthday party, because mom is busy doing other things and can better use the hour of her time that would be spent making the cake and (trying to) frosting it herself. Instead, she could be arranging for the party, or checking invites.
Same is true in software installation settings. Sure, the source code and tools are freely available. Do you have the time to spend every month or so vetting the compilation chain, building the suite you use from source, then vetting all the components built right? Or-- would you rather pay a nominal fee to a trusted source--- specifically, the very same group that maintains the free software you are using?
Right.. Exactly.
Re: Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:3, Insightful)
Even a simpler analogy: people buy bottled water.
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Hell my wife buys bottled spring water, and it is usually from the bottling company 20 miles away that pulls water from the same aquifer our house well pulls from.
I'm hoping it is the convenience of the packaging and being able to send the kids off to school and not worry about them remembering to bring back a reusable bottle...
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You can re-use the plastic bottles too. It's a bad message to the kids that they can just throw the bottles away.
Re: Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:2)
It's also a bad message to send to kids to re-use a disposable bottle. The plastics are different and often don't hold up to washing. Some have been shown to shed alarming levels of carcinogens into the beverage.
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Every disposable water bottle I've seen has been made of PET, often with a polypropylene cap. I'd be interested to know whether PET leaches anything harmful. Do you have further information? My impression was that it's perfectly safe.
Re: Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:2)
PET can be safe, but is know to shed chemicals at higher temperatures. It's not recommended you put hot beverages in PET for this reason. There is a significant difference between a hot beverage sitting in the bottle for an hour and a quick hot wash, though.
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A better way to put this:
Even if milk, flour, eggs, and sugar could be obtained for 0$, people would still buy cakes from the store.
But in this case you only need to bake the cake once, then it can be distributed for virtually no cost. Which is precisely why nobody is paying for a compiled version of an open source project.
Re:Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:5, Insightful)
The raw material in software is programmers time and creativity they should look to publishing for inspiration there.
Yes I just quoted Bill gates and defended publishing and copyright. sosumi
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Which leads to Bill gates recent rant on capitalism without capital , software breaks the capitalist idea of supply and demand once made software has virtually unlimited supply and any demand can be supplied through almost instant duplication.
That's not just software, it is anything that can be represented in digital form whether that's software, photographs, music, video, books, magazines, etc... The general business model is for the cost of producing it to be amortized across the people who want it. The benefit being that you profit by serving market needs in that the more popular it is the more profit you can make.
Until we make replicator technology from star trek the same won't happen for the manufacturing industry.
That's only partially correct. You don't really think the cost of manufactured goods are just the raw materials + the cost to repl
Re:Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:5, Interesting)
It's true. I want that open source quality even if I'm not going to personally audit most of the code that I download on the system. I'm happy trusting a source that has a good track record for that practice. I *do* still care about the standards being open and being set by developer mindshare, what engineers are excited to build, because you can get pretty burnt when the health of the platform you run depends on suits and marketing divisions that don't really care about it. Every Amiga fan knows what I'm talking about. After I had to jump ship from that platform, I ran Linux almost entirely to this day, because no CEO has the option to sink that ship.
Re:Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:5, Insightful)
But in software, someone has to pay.
Fix your cake analogy: The cakes are made in a batch now. Once they are made, everyone gets a cake... but whoever wants their cake first needs to pay for the entire batch, and watch everyone else enjoy the cake they just paid for.
Everyone is going to do the economically sensible thing: Wait until someone else is hungry enough to foot the bill for the entire batch, and then enjoy free cake.
The bits aren't the business (Score:3)
The bits don't just come in, set themselves up, configure themselves, integrate themselves with your existing business systems, customize themselves to your needs, and maintain themselves. The software itself is one ingredient in solving a business solution with a software system.
I've worked full-time, being paid well, working with and working on open source software for many years. Some companies hired me to handle their open source software, customizing and maintaining it, being the expert on it. See thi
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But doesn't your approach--installation, support etc.--presupposes that the free software already exists? Unless the company that wrote the free software, and the company that offers your installation+support services to the customer, are one and the same.
(I'm not trying to troll, I'm trying to understand the business model of whoever it is that writes the free software in the beginning. We have a linux sysadmin where I work, and I think he's well paid, but he didn't write Linux.)
Most often a bare-bones beginning exists (Score:2)
It varies. I would say I my experience, most often a bare-bones software exists, a starting point, before multiple people start working on it professionally. Someone, either a company or person, writes something small and simple to "scratch their itch" (solve their own need), then other people find it useful and a community grows up around it. That can easily mean someone puts in 20 hours building a script to load X onto Y hardware, then eventually others spend thousands of hours building it into something
I lost focus on the question. Post 40-line script (Score:2)
> I'm trying to understand the business model of whoever it is that writes the free software in the beginning.
My first reply may not have been well-focused on answering this question. I did some tangents. The main thing I'd say about "whoever it is that writes the free software in the beginning" is this:
The the BEGINNING, the software may very well take less than an hour to write. Someone whips up a simple script to solve their problem and posts that script on a forum.
If several people on the forum find
What software? (Score:2)
If there is specific software you are interested in, I can post some companies that provide the business services around the software, while supporting the core development team.
As one example Moodle is an open source learning management system (online campus) with 80 third-party companies who can set it up, configure and customize it, write custom modules, host it, and maintain it, provide training, etc (whichever more of services your school or company needs). Each of these contributes funds back to Moodl
Ask the developers here (Score:2)
I don't know any off hand since I'm not really involved with Gimp. Here's the developers mailing list, where you can ask the people who build Gimp about who can help you, people and companies providing paid support, training, customization, or whatever you want.
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman... [gnome.org]
I'd first get clear about what you want. Training? Do you want someone to write some custom modules for Gimp? Do you want an on-call Gimp expert?
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So, even if all the ingredients could be obtained for a genuinely 0$ price point, mom will STILL pay to have a cake made for her, for her little girl's 6th birthday party, because mom is busy doing other things and can better use the hour of her time that would be spent making the cake and (trying to) frosting it herself. Instead, she could be arranging for the party, or checking invites. Same is true in software installation settings.
The problem is that the world is migrating to cakes-as-a-service... or, perhaps more appropriately, to beer-as-a-service. And free-as-in-beer-as-a-service is not sustainable. TANSTAAFL.
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Hybrid models where advertisers pay to have them put in front of potential customers works though, and hte service ends up being free-as-in-beer for the consumer the advertisers want to reach. If that model didn't work, then OTA TV broadcast wouldn't have lasted very long, nor would OTA radio.
Re:Open source doesn't mean free software (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst all that is true, seriously why would you expect those who have infinite greed as they core motivator, to stop complaining about FOSS. They want monopolies, they want to pay bribes to government to use their proprietary software and then force end users to buy it to access government information, they want to lock down your data, they want to own the copyright on the content you create when you use their software, they want you to pay a fee again and again and again for nothing, just pay.
Closed source proprietary software is all about infinite greed, no limit to profits, total world dominance, absolute power. Come on seriously, look at the crazy way M$, Google, Apple, Facebook et al have behaved, absolutely insane psychopathic greed on full public display again and again and again. Always after they go public and the psychopaths from the major banking investors take over.
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You analogy has a flaw in it. If I could take this cake that I bought at the baker then copy it a billion of times, and give everyone that same cake. The Baker would be out of business, because supply has breached demand. The bakers only saving grace, may be to have to make a different style of cake every time.
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I was at a company that sold expensive enterprise software. We made more money from professional services than with our overpriced software. Someone to install it, train the customers, customize the heck out of it for the customers, write custom applications on it, etc. The big bucks come from stuff other than the product.
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The problem is that when someone pays five figures for a piece of software, they don't mind so much paying six figures to get it working. On the other hand, if they pay $0 for the software, they REALLY mind paying four figures to get it working.
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Yes, but for the people who pay you for it, what do they get out of the deal?
The current successful open source profit models falls under a few categories.
1. Time Computing/Remote Hosted/Software as a service/Cloud: The software is free for you to install. However there is a service that already uses that has a huge infrastructure behind it, already configured for your needs. You could download the application and install it, mess with the source, but for it to be useful you are going to need to invest in
Did you forget about #4? (Score:2)
You wrote #4 (we need to use the software, selling the software isn't our business), then you seemed to completely forget about that when you wrote your conclusion.
Cooperating with other organizations who have the same needs rather than having 100 different companies each build their own is better for everyone. See:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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You are assuming the product is popular enough to get so much interest.
Most software is designed to fix a particular problem. Perhaps only a hundred people will ever use it. Such programs you state will not get money, or interest.
There is no economics (Score:5, Interesting)
That requires both a buyer and seller. FOSS is free.
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Economics is the study of how to efficiently allocate scarce resources to meet unlimited wants and needs. Supply and demand is ONE way to do this, but not the only one.
Re:There is no economics (Score:4, Interesting)
No FOSS is not free. It just doesn't cost money for the buyer to procure it. Economics are still very much at play even when no money changes hands.
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What economics needs is resources that have to be managed. Then you have economics.
It is not broken... (Score:1, Insightful)
Fixing open source... (Score:4, Informative)
... requires developers to develop software people are actually already paying for. I've thought long and hard if I could find investors to change the AAA videogame industry from the bullshit payment models and shit service to "buy to own" and "game development as a service model".
AKA there should be enough nerds for us to basically revive 8-bit and 16-bit type AAA games as a service model (aka we build games together that we ultimately all own and the code is open) for those of us above average incomes and who are true enthusiasts, basically take advantage of enthusiast interest in technology and turn it into a "sams warehouse club" for nerds. I was thinking about this with how costco has membership. If you want to do OSS then you're going to have to do so with a product that there is a known demand for. People don't want the boring shit, they want entertainment and shit that actually is valuable enough to pay for, aka you do the shit people want and use the funds from the shit people want to do more serious stuff.
For instance game development requires tools programmers that could make dents in the CAD and Image processing industries - aka take potshots at the crappy tools made by Autodesk and Adobe. Now this is not to say that many private sector products are bad, but Open source software versions developers have no discipline because they are free, when your job or your company is on the line with the quality of your work it forces you to stand up and take notice.
Now while windows had huge problems as we all remember from an engineering standpoint, you have to acknowledge the savvy of making computers user friendly enough for people to actually want to use them. That was microsofts genius. People used DOS and windows back in the day because the market was big enough for games and other apps.
Re: Fixing open source... (Score:1)
So do you want a subscription to Origin Access or GameFly?
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So do you want a subscription to Origin Access or GameFly?
Not quite, the service would not be for the mass market, aka you sell games as a service to true enthusiasts until there was some kind of critical mass where you could build a AAA game the masses would be interested in (aka basically think of it as a club of developers and hobbyist developers where the hobbyists split the bill among 1000's of paying enthusiasts to defray the cost amongst a large group), you use enthusiasts to help pay for development and sell the game differently to different markets, aka n
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The problem is, you strongly limit yourself to a very small niche of people who either choose to remain with the same-old, or are mentally locked to it due to having a hard time dealing with change from what they grew up with(autistic people often have severe problems with that issue, for example). So, how do you get that business to sustain itself when you lose a large part of the initial customer base?
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The problem is, you strongly limit yourself to a very small niche of people who either choose to remain with the same-old, or are mentally locked to it due to having a hard time dealing with change from what they grew up with(autistic people often have severe problems with that issue, for example). So, how do you get that business to sustain itself when you lose a large part of the initial customer base?
Because many game developers within the industry are creatively frustrated, it would be a godsend for something like that. When I came up with the idea, I am thinking of gonig directly to many people in the industry and just slapping them upside the head and the lights would go on. I'm certain many people would be up for it since they are passionate about games and also frustrated by many of their evil publishers business practices.
I thought hard about how to sustain it, I didn't just drop the idea out of
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So more along the lines of Star Citizen or chapter subscription games like Walking Dead or Sin Episodes? The problem with working on a game incrementally is that players won't replay the same content over and over again unless it's PvP. That's probably why all subscription based games are mmo or episodic. We'll see if Star Citizen proves successful using a rather unique funding strategy.
That's the whole point of going back to 8 and 16-bit level games, aka you go back to a problem where the model makes sense and is actually tractable, you learn the ins and outs before you even attempt anything like a mid tier AA game or above. That's the whole point of catering to true tech and game enthusiasts (aka people who have genuine interest in seeing cool things done for the sake of cool nerdy things).
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Why not just buy cheap games that are good so the people that make them can afford to make another?
E.g. Stick fight.
Because the problem is the tools to make the art and animation are what need advancing, aka say you make something like metroid, the problem is many of the tools to do the art are still dark age level. You want to get to a point where you can imagine an art style and know how to execute it and not struggle with the look of the game. Consider pixel art of a given artist or small group of artists, the problem becomes if those key team members leave your style for the next game is shot full of holes, thats t
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What in hell do you mean by AKA? You've used it at least two different ways not using its common meaning (also known as).
Language evolves with use, aka words and acronyms acquire new meanings and additional definitions in terms of the intention of the author. This is the way language has always worked.
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I think it's a mistake to look at AAA game development as a software development project.
I don't, that's the whole point of going back to 8 and 16-bit games, aka the games are small enough to change the model. The problem with game development is how games are funded, what happens nobody on the finance side wants to fund a game to the point where its saleable. The reason they don't want to do that however is because they are not fully aware the tools are in the dark ages, when mmo's and f2p games proved gamers were stupid, AAA game companies stopped focusing on level editing tools for users b
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Hmm, even with small games isn't the content more critical than the code?
No they both matter, consider racing games - most of the need for speeds post Most wanted 2005 have sucked BECAUSE the mathematical characteristics of the cars feel off, aka you can't go and modify the physics code and change the car feel. The way the game feels to drive makes or breaks a racing game. The problem here is the tools that make the content are languishing. If in doubt go pick up a copy of Overload on steam and the level editor. Just tool around inside it for a bit. Notice that it has been
This is already how it works though (Score:2)
Trash Writing (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of working on something for free is the work, not some sly method of monetizing something that is labeled "free."
Might as well write an article about how soup kitchen volunteers can sinergize to maximal returns with Soup as a Service open core pricing.
Trash writing from a human being with trash ethics.
Huh? (Score:1)
I tried, and failed to understand why OSS economics is "broken". The linked article starts off with some problem with Redis, which apparently I'm just supposed to know whatever happened with it without further explanation. Then it goes off into a long winded meandering essay about a bunch of other things. Huh?
If you can't summarize a problem in at most a paragraph, I don't see how you can convince anyone there's a problem.
Stated succinctly, What the hell is this guy talking about, and why should anyone
Get paid more working on open source, via cooperat (Score:4, Informative)
I've worked full time getting paid quite well to work on open source.
Open source doesn't mean developers work for free. They get paid by the same people who normally pay them. It's just that cooperation makes them more efficient, so they can potentially be paid more. I'll give you one example that I have allot of experience with.
Universities (and others) are offering a lot of courses online these days. Suppose 40 institutions want to offer online courses. They each need an online system to manage those courses, an online campus. Suppose having such a system is worth $60,000 to each school. A programmer can build it in 500 hours at a cost of $30,000, so each school does it. (It'll cost them $30K and be worth $60k of value). Forty schools each spending $30k is a total of $1,200,000 spent. Later when they want other features they'll spend more.
Alternatively they can cooperate, building a modular online campus system that works well for all of them. Maybe that costs four times as much as building a system for one school - 2,000 hours, or $120,000. That's 90% less than it costs for them to each build their own. Later, when a school wants a new feature, it was already built for a different school. They just install it.
In the first scenario, the programmers each took 500 hours to provide something worth $60k. In the second scenario, 40 programmers at 40 schools spent a total of 2,000 hours. That's 50 hours per programmer to provide the same $60,000 of value to their school.
Who do you think can be paid more per hour: a programmer who takes 500 hours to get the job done, or one who gets the same job done in 50 hours?
Far from "working for free", by cooperating on an open source project we were able to provide the same value with 90% less work from each of us, so we were much more valuable and highly paid than a programmer who doesn't cooperate and use open source effectively.
Marketing, sales, licensing are expenses (Score:2)
> Or... An entrepreneur invests in a few programmers (not 40, which is overkill), writes the software, invests in advertising and sales, sells it
You as the customer can pay for advertising, sales, and the entrpeneurs profit, or you can just pay only the cost of the developers and skip the salesmen in their $1,000 suits. Would you rather pay for sales and sales marketing, and license audits by your vendors, or would you rather your money go to better software?
A fundamental misunderstanding. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing wrong with how open source works, it works fine. The problem is what some people want from open source.
Everyone wants infrastructure software to be free and continuously developed by highly skilled professional developers (who in turn expect to make substantial salaries), but no one wants to pay for it.
Here's the conflict, people want something for nothing and that can work out sometimes but it means you are at the mercy of people you have no control over. That said, since it is open, you can hire people that you have control over to contribute to the code. The fact that few chose to do this demonstrates a failure in leadership rather than a failure in open source.
TL;DR: you dumbass MBAs are shortsighted nitwits who deserve to bear the responsibility for every security breach that happens under your blind-leading-the-sighted leadership.
Re: A fundamental misunderstanding. (Score:4, Interesting)
I know a little about this first hand, from experiences I choose not to share.
Using real big-F Free Software is orders of magnitude more productive than using proprietary crapware. Many companies running on Free Software generate prodigious economic output. No CTO under fifty wants even to touch âoeenterpriseâ software, much less build business-critical systems around it.
However the men who actually write that Free Software capture almost none of the value they create. Many struggle just to make ends meet. Those who do earn a comfortable (never handsome) income do so at the cost of proletarianization. Work for Big Capital or starve.
Consider the depency chain of a typical production web app. The application code alone may have hundreds of direct and indirect library dependencies. Thousands if it's a Nodejs app. ;) Probably a quarter of those libraries are already abandonware. Almost all of them will be abandoned in a few years, because they take time to maintain yet bring no income to their authors.
In the short term this is great for companies. They pay nothing and get a lot of value. Free (like beer) software = profit! The capital owners would just as soon get rid of the free like speech part of Free Software. Thankfully we have some bold and incorruptible champions, like St Richard of Boston, standing up for software Freedom.
In the medium term this situation is a maintenance and security nightmare. Our production applications are like houses of cards. Propped up atop layers and layers of increasingly unmaintained software. At first we can work around this. We replace components that have become unsupported, either with newer FOSS components, or with home rolled software.
In the long run this is a potential disaster. More and more FOSS projects, having failed to provide material support to their maintainers, fall into abandonment. At some point the rate of abandonment surpasses companiesâ(TM) ability to keep up with maintenance. Rot starts to set in. Like aggressive termites or an invasive mold. The profit-generating superstructure sitting on this rotting base starts to become shaky, unstable.
I don't know how to fix this mess. At a high level we must either figure out how to ensure authors of Free Software area able to earn a good living *for their Free Software work*, not incidentally to it. Or we must accept a permanent secular decline in software development productivity, because the rich commons of Free Software will have fallen into ruin.
Re: A fundamental misunderstanding. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Tragedy of the Commons (Look it up; there is a good read on Wikipedia.)"
Exactly that. And then moronic egotism (its near relative). Just look at the entry: "Broken Economics of Open Source" but, then, what that "broken economics of Opern Source" means for the author? It basically ends up "I want tons of money from VC for something that will never have so much value form them" -it seems his target is "billionaire or nothing"... and even he has the guts to say "If I take out all the ways I know I can make money off of open source (consulting, services, and support), then there is no other way to make money that I know about". Simply brilliant, Monthy Python level, "what have the romans ever done for us?"
Now, what *should* be the proper way to make money out of open source? Well, it's right there, open to anybody to see, as long as they want to: software takes effort to write, but it doesn't take effort to replicate, then the answer is obvious: bill the "writing code" fact. In no part of any open source license says the code needs to be written for free; they are only about what you can do with that code *once* is already written (basically being "you can't control it anymore").
Now, the problem comes from the fact that people (not only corporations: people) very much prefer acquiring things they can already see better than things that are in the future. It's not only a thing of software: i.e.: most millionaires (specially unknowledged ones) will prefer paying, say, 5000$ for a pret-a-porter suit than 3000$ for a bespoke one and that says all.
Add to this the myopic greed of most corporations: right now I'm working for a big bank on an Openstack deployment with a strong backing from Red Hat (and quite a few in-house consultors from them). What's the best value those consultors bring? Being able to talk about our common problems with other Red Hat consultors working on very similar projects on other industries, even competing banks, and sharing the solutions they find. Of course, if we were clever, we could get rid of the middleman and just set our own communication channels with our competitors: there's even a MBA-buzzword for that: coopetition. But, of course too, we prefer paying money through our noses to Red Hat better than sharing efforts with our competition.
The very same idea could be expanded to the production of the software itself: take the common software requirements of Fortune 100 corporations: they could build an alliance and pay for the common software they need on themselves; it could be open source and developers could be payed for the part that takes the effort -it won't happen in a million years. Not because "open source is broken" but because *we* are broken.
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While it would be amazing from a socio-economic perspective to no longer spend time re-writing the same thing over again, it would be terrible for software developers, most of whom are writing that sort of derivative software.
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No need for a new license, just better educated developers: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy... [gnu.org]
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Dual-licensed free software, where companies pay to embed the free software in their proprietary software, while allowing free use by others, is no general solution.
This is not a feasible commercialization path for most software packages. It also again makes proprietary software free software's saviour. The FSF explains in your linked article that this is why they don't sell such exceptions themselves. I want open software to stand on its own feet.
Re: A fundamental misunderstanding. (Score:2)
If I open source some work, selling that work under a different license does not impact the fact that the work is open source.
Making money isn't an ideological exercise, it's a practical one. You may ideologically think we should live in a socialist utopia, but if you simply complain that our laws are not socialist enough, you will get nowhere, because no one will want to work with you.
In other words, before you introduce a new license, you'll need to introduce a thought revolution.
Good luck.
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Interesting points. My responses:
1. Capitalism doesn't charge for effort. It charges what the market will bear. For software there is often an especially big disconnect between development cost and revenue. Free software shouldn't be forced into cost-plus pricing. If you developed Minecraft in six months work, would you forgo billions as an unfair payment?
2. It wouldn't be feasible to have intrusive per seat, core, or cycle pricing, but developers would be free to vary the cost by the (self-reported bu
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1. Capitalism doesn't charge for effort. It charges what the market will bear. For software there is often an especially big disconnect between development cost and revenue. Free software shouldn't be forced into cost-plus pricing. If you developed Minecraft in six months work, would you forgo billions as an unfair payment?
Changing for something that doesn't take effort doesn't last for very long in real market economy. Market forces will push price to 0. If you try to make long term revenue stream from this you're essentially trying to bypass market economy. I kinda thought that capitalism is about worshipping market economy, not bypassing it. So from my point of view all schemes requiring payments for rights to use software, no matter whether for opensource or proprietary software are antithetical to capitalism.
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The point wasn't about any home user but about a regular user who doesn't, by definition, contribute in code or in any other way.
Math (Score:4, Interesting)
How can we fix the broken economics of free developments in mathematics ?
Stacking the deck (Score:5, Insightful)
I generally stop reading if the opening argument starts by stacking the deck:
"but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"
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The problem is that kind of revenue does not scale well, because it is based on labor hours and you only have so many hours to work and charge. To make the kind of money that the VCs care about, you need a revenue stream that can scale up and not be limited by your working hours.
Re:Stacking the deck (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe that means the economics of VC's are broken and that the economics of OSS are fine.
100% FOSS or no FOSS (Score:2)
There should be a license that doesnt allow any commercial software to be distributed on the same device or medium.
The same concept that debian uses to seperate main, contrib, non-free
But it skeptical it can be fixed now, there is too much money invested in capitalizing on other people work, it would be like ending slavery...
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Microsoft used to have an exact opposite of that licence - back when their war with open source was at it's peak, some of their development licenses had a clause referring to 'identified software.' It doesn't only forbid developers from releasing source code, it forbids them from utilising open-source development tools or libraries, and even from allowing their software to be distributed on the same media as open source software. This dates from the 'M$' era though, when they were at the most aggressively a
Excerpt says it all (Score:5, Insightful)
>>If we take consulting, services, and support off the table as an option for high-growth revenue generation (the only thing VCs care about)
As if high growth, and the concentration of wealth to those that drive it, were worthwhile goals for all human endeavours.
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Let's take all they ways people make money on open source off the table, then yes suddenly it is hard to make money.
Training (Score:2, Informative)
About a year ago I started a new business providing voice services to small businesses in my area (VOIP).
I specifically opted to use FusionPBX because it's completely free, so getting started is no cost other than some time figuring out how it all works.
After I got more familiar with it, I came to find the author actually provides training courses for more advanced features.
He charges a fair price for classes, and who better to learn more advanced features than the person who writes the software.
I really li
Fixing it means accepting user feedback (Score:3)
That's not gonna fix it. If anything it's going to make it worse.
People keep viewing pay software as the software authors demanding money from users. It's actually the other way around. Users paying software authors is how they signal what features they like or want. That's how users influence the direction of future software development - the software authors want to be paid more, so they make changes or implement features and fix bugs that the users want.
Without payment, open source is basically a dictatorship. The software authors dictate what features to add, what bugs get priority, what new direction the software should take. The users are powerless. This gives contributors and especially maintainers an inflated ego, which makes them even more resistant to accept user feedback and suggestions [videolan.org]. Paying maintainers from a foundation would just exacerbate this behavior by inflating their egos even more, and further insulating them from user feedback.. (The VLC developer eventually relented after a couple years, after much ass-kissing by users, and changed VLC so you could assign the mouse wheel to something other than volume.)
If you want to fix it without having users pay for open source software, then I can think of two ways. Either you need to eliminate the egos of the programmers and maintainers, which realistically is never going to happen. Or you need to set up a system where users can pledge a bounty payment for when the project implements a feature or fixes a bug the user wants. The payment should be held in escrow (refunded after a certain time to encourage timely action), to be awarded to the open source project only if the user-requested feature is added or bug fixed. That would fix open source by giving users a say in the course of software development again (other than ass-kissing), without the stigma of requiring all users to pay to use the software.
That'll turn open source software from whatever the hell the programmers and maintainers want it to be. To something which the users actually want, and which addresses their needs and requirements. The way things are right now, open source is frequently throwing free food at users when what the users really want is water. With the project maintainers and contributors ignoring user pleas for water because making food is more fun or fulfilling.
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Or you need to set up a system where users can pledge a bounty payment for when the project implements a feature or fixes a bug the user wants.
The problem is not the cost of the new feature development. The problem is the cost of maintaining that specific part in the future (long tail). If the feature is delivered and the bounty is awarded for that, that will not keep in mind the cost by the project maintainer(s). Hence it is likely to attract external bounty hunters, coders for hire, but not what is needed to have a stable revenue for the project itself.
Some projects lack broad range of skills (Score:2)
Apache model? (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't this already exactly how the Apache model works (or used to)?
Multiple companies each sponsored a developer to have a seat on the Apache project board giving them a controlling vote(s) on what direction to develop the project in next. All the companies contributing, and everyone else not, benefited by the resulting Apache project results. The sponsoring companies got their needs met sooner (and at all).
Parenthood (Score:2)
Many people like the "fun" of making a baby but not so many are prepared to accept the responsibility of supporting the child into adulthood. Producing software has many of the same attributes. Writing software is fun, creative. Fixing problems is a chore.
Continually updating your "progeny" to stay compatible with changing O/S and API requirements is boring. Making it compatible with the other programs in the environment is difficult and making it usable, wel
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Bwahahahaha! Sorry, couldn't help it.
The entire debt-based economy has problems (Score:2)
I dislike the entire debt-based economy and has for a while. One of the problems with it is that it is based on extracting more dollars from "consumers". You can also see this in DRM for music and video for example. In my Google DoubleClick essay I mentioned Novell and Sun as examples.
It's the progeammers value system (Score:2)
If you want a great example of why the open source ecosystem is broken, look at how we value code versus documentation. We expect to get ten of thousands of lines of code - someone's labor - for free but will then pay O'Reilly $50 for the book explaining the software? So writing code has no value but writing a book about the code does? Yes, open source economics is broekn but it is really the value system of the programmers that has been warped.
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If the book was available under an open licence, people wouldn't pay for the book either.
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I'm not so sure about that. Back in the early days, O'Reilly really took off by producing hard copies of Xlib man pages.
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Really? The FSF seems to get quite some.income out of their.manuals, among others.
Economics as such is broken, not OSS economics (Score:2)
The fundamental flaw is that in economics-as-we-know-it things are done purely for profit, not for getting things done. Which all too often leads to the wrong things being done, or the right things being done in a disastrously wrong way. For the economy, it's just as well as long as there is profit.
OSS economics now has the "problem" that OSS is about getting things done, not about profit. And it's about, if possible, getting the right things done the right way.
The clash between OSS and economics-as-we-know
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The fundamental flaw is that in economics-as-we-know-it things are done purely for profit, not for getting things done.
It's more an intrinsic part of basic human nature, not "economics".
It's why Socialism fails (in larger and diverse societies) and capitalism succeeds. Socialism fails because it depends on people doing things not in their own personal self-interest that benefits others but not themselves. You end up with the old Soviet trope "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us". Capitalism leverages that self-interest and allows people's pursuance of self-interest to benefit society and the world as a whole.
I mostly
With a charity share brokerage that supports PM (Score:2)
Couldn't find any similar reference, and not motivated by today's Slashdot to search more carefully. However I will repeat what I believe to be the best approach:
Use a CSB (charity share brokerage) to help manage the OSS projects. Software gets funded only when enough donors are willing to "buy" the charity shares for the project. The brokerage makes sure that the project proposals are complete including the success criteria, and evaluates the finished projects to report the results to the donors and the pu
Well, let's define what's "broken" here. (Score:2)
It's the ability of VCs to monetize open source software.
Not a problem for me, or for established businesses either.
Established ways (Score:2)
We already have several ways to "pay for" free and open software.
1) Dual licensing: Several high profile projects, including QT, Ghostware, and MySQL use these for benefiting both closed source commercial, and open software. There is even research on this topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
2) "Patronage": Since middle ages artists depended on wealthy "patrons" to commission their work. The end result was "open" in sense they were usually presented in cathedrals, or museums, but the work was paid for po
MIT vs GPL mndset (Score:2)
MIT devs believe they are developing solutions to problems. GPL devs think they are developing products. Only one of these groups has an issue.
I spend 90% of my time getting paid to write MIT licensed software. The economics work fine.
AGPL v3 -- iTextSharp -- license interpretation (Score:2)
The ambiguity is apparently so sharp that Google forbids usage [google.com] of any open source software using AGPL:
WARNING: Code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) MAY NOT be used at Google.
The license places restrictions on software used over a network which are extremely difficul
how can we fix economics? (Score:2)
Venture capitalism is completely unsustainable and broken.