Will Companies Cut Open Source Investment Because of COVID-19? (www.tfir.io) 37
The editor of TFIR posed an interesting question to Rob Hirschfeld, the Founder/CEO of RackN (which automates and integrates bare-metal infrastructure). Will the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic affect the sustainability of open source software?
Hirschfeld responded: "The idea that big companies are maintaining open-source projects for the community good is going to get tested, as companies look for places where they can conserve revenue. I think that's a really critical thing."
"The same is going to be true with open-source startups that are hoping to monetize support or consulting but have no real gate across the front of their infrastructure... Companies might decide they can use the open-source project and not pay the sustaining engineers that are working in that project.
"These are really serious concerns about the whole open-source model, which relies on goodwill and free money."
Hirschfeld responded: "The idea that big companies are maintaining open-source projects for the community good is going to get tested, as companies look for places where they can conserve revenue. I think that's a really critical thing."
"The same is going to be true with open-source startups that are hoping to monetize support or consulting but have no real gate across the front of their infrastructure... Companies might decide they can use the open-source project and not pay the sustaining engineers that are working in that project.
"These are really serious concerns about the whole open-source model, which relies on goodwill and free money."
Public money (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And if people are furloughed or otherwise not able to work on their ordinary duties then they can fall back to do work on some open source project.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
That would be great. Everyone can work on projects as directed by the government. We could extend that to other industries as well: the government could dictate where resources and production should go. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
Re:Public money (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be great. Everyone can work on projects as directed by the government. We could extend that to other industries as well: the government could dictate where resources and production should go. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
They did. That was the way America and the UK and the rest of the allies won WWII. Oh, you thought communists directed people to work? Haaahahahaahaha. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work"*.
* actually in WWII the Russians worked like hell and had a massive industrial output, but as an ignorant westerner I don't know that. Also, when we say the UK, as a Brexit Britain person, I pretend that the commonwealth didn't exist and only survived on handouts from the UK.
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A proper Brexiteer thinks the commonwealth = Australia, New Zealand & Canada and definitely doesn't include India, Malawi, Cameroon & Botswana.
One day I will figure out what criteria drives this apparently arbitrary division.
Re:Public money (Score:4, Funny)
they can fall back to do work on some open source project
This, exactly.
It's how open source got its start. You have some time on your hands (its dark 6 months out of the year in Finland so you might as well write an operating system). You build up your professional reputation and CV and then when paying jobs come along, you are already known in the profession. In closed source companies, the corporation owns your reputation. And since they don't want their best and brightest people picked off by the competition, they filter your work through their PR office. The people that go to conferences are the knuckle-draggers that they don't mind losing anyway.
A current example: (Score:2)
And if people are furloughed or otherwise not able to work on their ordinary duties then they can fall back to do work on some open source project.
The Tor Project says that Covid-19 based funding cuts caused them to lay off 13 people:
https://blog.torproject.org/co... [torproject.org]
Using your idea, those guys could contribute the Tor project.
(More seriously - that Tor blog about the impact of COVID-19 is relevant to OP's question.)
That would show weak strategy (Score:1)
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No they won't. (Score:2, Insightful)
No they won't cut it _because of_ COVID-19. They will cut it for other reasons such as greed, profiteering, fun, sadism etc. and then blame it on COVID-19. COVID-19 provides a convenient excuse, so why not?
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COVID-19 provides a convenient excuse, so why not?
Capitalism doesn't work that way. If a company isn't making money from an activity, they can just stop doing it. They don't need an "excuse" other than "It isn't profitable".
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Well, they still worry about publicity don't they?
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People seem to forget, how few companies profit from closed source proprietary software, with never ending bugs and demanding to be repurchased every single year, is really targeted by FOSS. The real core is the operating system and the office suite and that cuts profits for only two companies and saves money for, well, hundreds of millions of other companies. So in hard times, contributing a little to FOSS, saves an enormous amount of money in the long run, every year new licence fees, unwanted changes for
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This. Thread over.
If they were going to be cheapskates they'd already be cheapskates.
Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
And No.
As usual it depends. Some companies will cut their investment in open source because they just have less money to invest, others will still need software they depend upon maintained. There will probably be an influx of laid off people doing cut-rate consulting on projects they're familiar with.
It's a safe bet that open source will feel economic pain because everybody's going to be feeling pain. But in any economic catastrophe, some people do well. If a project can offer cash savings to a lot of businesses for relatively little cost, it may attract more support.
Yeah, like Closed source is CHEAP? (Score:2)
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When it comes down it middle managers just want to pass the buck when something goes wrong, so that's why they stick to propietary software. If Windows, WhatsUp or Oracle has a bug that's causing problems, simply get a P1 incident raised and pass the blame to the vendor, then you don't have to carry the can.
I've worked for managers who still see OSS to be the same as "shareware", ie, it's cheap, nasty, won't have proper enterprise level support and only supported by some guy working out of his basement in t
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last I checked the "open source" businesses would be willing to run, that has support, is expensive indeed. E.g. RedHat, SuSE....
You seem to think they'd let some hippie hook up a Debian box to their fiber SAN and download and cobble together whatever to run their mission critical systems. Nope. Guess again.
If anything, you should bet more on it (Score:2)
With everyone stuck at home and bored, there's just more people to work on it.
Slashdot open-source FUD (Score:3)
No, it was never about companies maintaining open-source projects for the “community good” and relying on “goodwill” and “free money”. It was about Open Source developers contributing their code and benefiting from other contributing in return. If they seel the combined code-base then they are in turn obliged to provide the source code
Downstrean companies also get control of their own code. Instead of one big company dictating onerous licensing terms to them. Why do you think Microsoft were desperate to hide the source code all these years.
“open-source” is a bastardizating of the concept, where companies get to take but don't take back. Aren't these “open-source” companies already abusing the process, by moving the code to the "Cloud",renting out the infrastructure and then failing to honour the terms of the license?
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There's plenty people who want a quid pro quo. But there's also those who think making the world a more efficient place is a useful service whether or not it gets exploited commercially, who want everyone to use their code. And that companies will volunteer code because it saves them maintenance, not because they're compelled by a license. I'm not a great fan of those using technicalities or loopholes to subvert the spirit in which the code was given, but a lot of people intentionally use the Apache/BSD/MI
Yes, because they will cut everything (Score:1)
False premise (Score:2)
The idea that big companies are maintaining open-source projects for the community good[...]
This idea is false to begin with. Companies pay developers to maintain (or contribute to) open-source projects for two reasons:
First, because they use those products as part of their business (either use internally, or they sell an add-on such as support for the product) -They need the project in order to make their money.
Second, because they get PR value from their support of the project -If this is their only reason for supporting the project, it could get cut as budgets tighten.
No "big company" is suppo
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The brand politics and a global new CoC get placed over the once "free" project.
Of course they will!!! (Score:2)
Not for the good of the community ... but for themselves. All the big cloud providers do more linux than windows .. even M$ is moving windows stuff over to Linux ... NOT out of the goodness of their heart, but because it's good business. Look at IBM .. they can't even function without Opensource. Kubernetes is integral for google and other cloud providers .. Red hat ( speaking of IBM ..) their openshift relies heavily on docker. M$ bought github but ...... Python is used all over the place. Or
Investment and open source? (Score:1)
Code for free is what a worker with a paying job, a skilled person does for free after work, on weekends, during holidays as a hobby.
The gives away to the world for "free"
A retired person does for free over days given their advanced and useful computer skills.
Want investment? Get a job and work for a company.
Want free money, ask a NGO, philanthropists, charity.
The "free" networ
this imples (Score:2)
this imples they were already investing (with money!) in OSS before covid19.
which they were not.
frotsy sips (Score:2)
Who? CEO of what? Is he trying to sell something?