8 ms·

The life and death of open source companies

233 points by zmk5 3y ago

DeathArrow 3y ago
>They offer a user friendly experience at a very attractive price point That's what most users care about. That it just works and it does that at an attractive price point. The rest is ideology and politics, which is fine if it's what you are into, but most people won't care.
- AVincentInSpace 3y ago
  Caring about what happens to the thing you bought five years down the road when the company that made it goes bankrupt is nor "ideology and politics"
  - oefrha 3y ago
    I’ve got a shitty laserjet from HP that’s approaching 20 years old and still working more or less. It doesn’t have WiFi so I’m not sure it’s ever received an update to its closed firmware. Now, I know nothing about 3D printing, but I fail to see why a 3D printer needs firmware updates to remain functional five years down the road, if it’s working today and the hardware doesn’t break down. If I understand TFA correctly, I can buy a largely equivalent model with closed firmware at 1/3 the price, or a better one at 1/2 the price. Choosing the closed firmware one would be a no brainer for me. Edit: Rereading the passage, it seems even the 1/3 price model is better.
    - bmurphy1976 3y ago
      > Now, I know nothing about 3D printing, but I fail to see why a 3D printer needs firmware updates to remain functional five years down the road, if it’s working today and the hardware doesn’t break down. Most don't need updates to remain functional, but this is still a very immature and rapidly evolving industry. The quality difference in the last two years is significant and a lot of the advances are in firmware, not just hardware. The difference between old and new firmware could be a higher quality print in half the time.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    >Caring about what happens to the thing you bought five years down the road when the company that made it goes bankrupt is nor "ideology and politics" Au contraire - caring about what happens to the thing you bought five years down the road is ideology. And wanting anything done about it is politics.
sinistersnare 3y ago
I always appreciate Armin's posts. I think the key point is that the FSL is necessary when profit is required. The GPL is a philosophy of social distribution more than a way to build a capitalist enterprise. Using GPL software ensures that software stays socially distributed instead of privately; but that can lead to issues for private profit.
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pydry 3y ago
If you need to see why stuff like the BPL and FSL is needed you only need to compare the commit histories of ElasticSearch and its fork when Jeff Bezos bravely "stepped up for open source" with OpenSearch (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-tr...). It's not like Jeff couldnt invest to make better software than elastic. They have the money. Theyd just rather feast off Elastic's plate until Elastic is dead.
- drewdevault 3y ago
  Elastic's revenue was north of half a billion dollars when they changed their license. Amazon was most decidedly not killing them. It was motivated by greed, like it always is.
  - pydry 3y ago
    Still posting losses. It's not generally considered a wise business move to wait until your corpse is already being feasted upon before changing direction. Long term they absolutely would have been killed - computing is being consolidated onto one of 4 platforms, all of which would squeeze out elastic using their market dominance as leverage.
    - drewdevault 3y ago
      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.
      - pydry 3y ago
        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?
quickthrower2 3y ago
It might be 3D but it is funny open source and printers coming up when closed source printer drivers help kick off RMS and GPL.
bruce511 3y ago
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 program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage. This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source. There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures. 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.
- EMIRELADERO 3y ago
  Even if they end up not succeeding, OSS companies are a good thing for another reason: they shift the Overton window. Some companies are getting boo'd on HN and elsewhere for changing their license from OSI-style to source-available, whereas 10 years ago there would be no source available to the public at all. This is, overall, a positive development.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    Well, there's no harm to them if they stop sharing their source X months after switching to source-available model. It'll even be a net benefit since CoPilot will not devour their code, strip its license out and spit (sorry, emit) to anyone who asks the right questions. An OSI approved license allows building upon that work, more importantly GPL prevents these improvements to go private. Source-available provides "for your eyes only" view to the code, and is just window dressing when compared to other models. I fail to see a net benefit, just a staggered backtrack.
- chii 3y ago
  > decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge. That is what i associate with any open source company.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
The tragedy with any form of software development is that it becomes a commodity very quickly. That's why open source works so well for commodity software. The challenge is that while everybody needs commodity software, they aren't necessarily willing to pay for it. People pay for other things like managed services, support, etc. But not for software directly. Take operating systems as an example. Unless you have very specific needs, Linux is probably good enough. That's true across most of the industry. Most device manufacturers at this point default to using Linux. Why bother building your own OS when the commodity option does the job. It doesn't make any sense to want to compete with free and OSS. Apple and MS seem to continue to resist this notion but they are increasingly exceptions. So, open source companies are a bit of a contradiction in terms. You invent something, and then immediately turn it into a cheap commodity by releasing it for free. And then you expect to get money for that. Investors get attracted by rapid growth. And giving something for free can produce some rapid growth. So, they've repeated fallen into the trap of investing in what proved to be worthless commodities. Some outlasted their IPO at least, which makes for happy investors. But those quickly turn into niche products. Because they are at that point commodity software providers competing with perfectly good OSS ones. Most new closed source database products out there only have a short while before their differentiating features are absorbed by open source ones. Twenty years ago there were lots of new database products. Most of those were OSS. Several of those then transitioned to closed source. But at this point postgresql does most of what used to make those products interesting. And if it doesn't, just wait five years. The finance model for OSS is very simple. You need OSS to produce closed source software. It's not optional. You can't compete by doing everything in house. So, most OSS software projects are financed by those companies using them the most. Those projects don't fix themselves. So, there are a lot of companies spending money on the commodity stuff they've built their business on. For example, Oracle keeps on pooring money into Java. Even though it is open source. They make money from it elsewhere. Same with IBM. MS is a big OSS contributor. Google too. Every big software company out there. None of them are driven by idealistic motives. This is economically necessary for them to do.
- jampekka 3y ago
  The true tragedy is the economic system that makes this a tragedy.
goodmachine 3y ago
Great post! The FSL is interesting because it correctly assumes the existence of parasites, ie 'harmful free-riders'. There are ofc too many projects doing what is in effect free R&D for larger entities... these free riders having zero interest in the health or longevity of open technical ecosystems, so game theory is the right lens, I think. I'd be very interested to learn of any other proposed structures along the lines of the FSL: particularly if anyone here has opinions on/ direct experience with them! --- Earlier incarnation/s of this approach are mentioned on the FSL page. Open Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model BUSL https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ FSL https://fsl.software/ https://fsl.software/
drewdevault 3y ago
Sorry, Armin, but this is such nonsense. Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutting them on hardware costs. Now that Prusa is non-free, they have lost both the price, the hackability, and the moral advantage. It's an utterly braindead move. If Prusa were smart they would be looking for ways to reduce production costs to get down to similar price points, investing in usability improvements, and doubling down on the free software approach. Let's face it, Prusa got complacent and someone at their lunch. You can monetize free software without breaking the social contract. I'm quite fine with your licensing approach with FSL, but it's not free software nor open source, and it does not align with the social contract, and that's all well and good so long as you can acknowledge that -- and live with the consequences, such as heavily disincentivizing third-party contributions. But you can make money with genuinely free software, social contract and everything, if you're smarter about it than barking up the VC tree and promising infinite growth and monopolization using a tool (open source) which is not suited for that purpose by design -- that was Sentry's mistake. Honestly, I'm glad that FSL is working out for you, but by no means does it justify some call to action to water down FOSS nor is it indicative of some fundamental problem with FOSS.
- sverhagen 3y ago
  Just wondering aloud, here, could it be that the open source company comes from a place of feigned or real enlightenment that makes it hard to compete on hardware cost, as the lowest-possible hardware cost may require unethical practices in sourcing or production? Even something like "manufactured in the USA", if that were something you're into, I have to imagine, might make it hard to compete on hardware cost, compared to China.
  - drewdevault 3y ago
    Yes, quite likely. This is not really a matter of FOSS or not, but it is something that Prusa absolutely needed to have foreseen and made a viable business plan to address. Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that. That could have taken many forms. They might have invested in a much stronger brand, aiming to make Prusa (needs a better name tbh) synonymous with 3D printing, and developing a product line which covers a wider range of needs, from entry-level highly-usable stuff up to hackable mid-tier things and possibly high-end workshop printers as well, all of which should have had a shared brand identity. China can't really compete on reputation, so that's where to focus. Moreover, they could have invested more in services surrounding the product, such as the aforementioned cloud printing services, perhaps a thingiverse-equivalent with a models marketplace and a small margin off of that, etc. Auto-detect when your filament is running low and have a subscription service to ship you a new one -- maybe the cloud printer notices when you don't have enough in stock for a model you want and suggests you order more. Just making a new model every 2 or 3 years and hoping China wouldn't notice was a very stupid strategy, and the free or non-free nature of their firmware has nothing to do with that. This is such a common failure mode in open source companies -- they think that the code is 90% of the battle for the market. It's not, it's more like 5% at best and because it's open source the rest of the market can make use of it. This can be very powerful if you're smart about it, but "write the code and the rest will work out" is not that.
randomlinuxuser 3y ago
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 on the someone part, here is the thing, the people capable of doing that is pretty small, I ask myself, for the time it would take to deal with that, I could earn more money in that time that I would save 'fixing' the drivers instead of just buying a new one from another brand or the second hand market. I know people love the romantic idea of free software, open source, etc, I just want my shit to work well, which usually is open source stuff because in most cases it has a zero monetary cost and people use it, so it gets bug fixes from their own users that are trying to make their thing work. I'm equally happy when the software is propietary but works well, case in point the nvidia drivers, it just work well for my use case, the amd drivers are open, well, I can't use their gpus without ending with a headache every few days, doesn't matter if is open source or not, it needs to work well. Back to my point, even for the power users, how many people will actually fix the drivers/firmware of some hardware they bought? We are in a position in life that is cheaper to just buy new hardware and use that time to learn new things that will pay more in the long term and I personally find we, the linux community are out of touch most of the time with what most people care about. Also, I find amusing when people get the pikachu face when some big corporation uses OSS and makes profit off of it, isn't that the whole point of the OSS? When I use it on my pc I'm also making profit for myself, the corporations are just doing the same but at scale, and if your goal is to make profit, who wouldn't use all the tools available? They don't have to like OSS, don't have to share the values of the OSS, don't have to 'give back', but OSS allows anyone to use it, so why wouldn't they? Do you want to be a company that is 100% OSS? That's cool, just don't make the pikachu face when another company enters the market and use what have build and shared.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  > Also, I find amusing when people get the pikachu face when some big corporation uses OSS and makes profit off of it, isn't that the whole point of the OSS? When I use it on my pc I'm also making profit for myself, the corporations are just doing the same but at scale, and if your goal is to make profit, who wouldn't use all the tools available? They don't have to like OSS, don't have to share the values of the OSS, don't have to 'give back' That is the point of Open Source, but it is not the point of Free Software. Specifically -- and I know this was addressed in the article -- this is why AGPL should be what programmers are using. It doesn't discriminate, but it does make sure that any entities that use Free Software contribute back to the commons. This bears repeating again and again; this is why copyleft exists. > The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term. Source: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
remram 3y ago
We should come up with a name for this new generation of licenses. They are not "open source" or "free software", and using those words would be both confusing and immediately polarizing. But having nothing more specific than "source available" seems very insufficient, since most of them turn open source quickly or only deny rights that do not usually matter to the end-user. (licenses in that family: BUSL, FSL, Common Clause) Anyone has suggestions?
- mkl 3y ago
  I agree. How about "eventually open source"? Commons Clause is not in that group, as it's not time-limited.
  - remram 3y ago
    I like that, eventually-open source software (EOSS) (or deferred open source maybe? or delayed open source?).
- James_K 3y ago
  It's pointless to call this anything other than source available. This license is just a no-compete license with extra steps. I see little practical difference between "you can't compete with us" and "you can't compete with us for as long as we're developing the software". Maybe we should call this a "you can have the scraps" license because the project only becomes open source when the developers stop caring about it.
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    > It's pointless to call this anything other than source available. I obviously strongly disagree with this. An FSL licensed project turns into full, undeniable open source after two years. > Maybe we should call this a "you can have the scraps" license because the project only becomes open source when the developers stop caring about it. Two years isn’t a lifetime. If there is value left the community has full rights to do something with it. No legal worries can stand in that way. You can even rebirth a new company from that if you so desire.
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
Here we go again. Open Source, as currently defined is hard to monetize, so lets go ahead and call Open Source something which makes it easy. Note though Easy Monetization was never goal of Open Source, so why not instead leave Open Source alone and focus on defining something different, which is focused on being easy to monetize.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  Yea open source developers who want to get paid or make a living from their work can suck it, damn fools what did they expect!
  - PhilipRoman 3y ago
    My impression is that many of these "open source developers" overestimate the value of their code. There are many amazing projects for which I would pay considerable price, but the long tail of 99% of projects just aren't worth anything in my opinion. It is an interesting exercise though - to imagine how much I would pay for my window manager, gcc or even Vim. Maybe easier transactions of tiny sums is the real solution? Even if every user paid something trivial like 10 cents a month, it would be a huge revenue stream for popular projects which lack maintenance. Of course, adding monetary incentives opens a whole new can of worms, so maybe the current situation is the best we can do after all. I suspect that many good qualities of open source software come from lack of money involved - there is no telemetry, no dark patterns to keep you using it, no attempts at vendor lock-in.
    - Qwertious 3y ago
      >Maybe easier transactions of tiny sums is the real solution? Even if every user paid something trivial like 10 cents a month, it would be a huge revenue stream for popular projects which lack maintenance. This is exactly what the Free Software world needs, IMO. More specifically, it needs to be trivially easy to use and built into the distro - i.e. you have a utility that keeps track of what you desktop apps etc you use, asks priorities+budget then generates a breakdown of how much money to send each project. Then it lets you one-click pay, instead of having to individually go to all the websites and donate to each. Free Software can't be gratis, if we ever want it to be sustainable and prioritize the user.
antirez 3y ago
I happen to be in a special situation here. One of my softwares, Redis, has a very permissive license that was used by many vendors to sell it. At the same time, I'm a lot into 3D printing. So I guess this gives me some perspective on both of the sides of the matter, and what I think, TLDR, is: Bambulab effect on the 3D printing ecosystem is going to be very positive. A few considerations: 1. Prusa is blaming the Bambulab OSS situation, but the reality is that they struggle a lot in innovation, recently. I'm a Prusa Mini and MK4 owner, so I'm kinda of a fan of them, but still... They had struggled to move raise the bar, happy enough to innovate very slowly, with their huge delays with the Prusa XL, and exploiting the fact that other companies were just doing terrible copies. Bambulab before anything else saw that from the POV of technology there was too much left on the table. 2. Prusa itself based its work for PrusaSlicer on an existing open source slicer (written by an Italian guy, btw). While they continue to release PrusaSlicer as a free software, as the license requires to do, what they did renaming the software "Prusa Slicer" is a form of ownership appropriation. PrusaSlicer is a great software that can be used with many non-Prusa printers, my point is just that different ethical perspectives may lead to different conclusions. One could argue that Bambulab created their own slicer instead of just contributing to PrusaSlicer because the naming and the setup of the project makes it hard to do so. 3. Bambulab is also being cloned. The fact that their hardware is not open source does not mean people can't copy the design. The general ideas that make Bambulab printers great can't be patented or copyrighted. See the Creality K1... it resembles Bambulab printers a lot. 4. After Bambulab showed the 3D printing community that it was possible to build better printers, the whole 3D printing landscape became immediately much, much better. They raised the bar. Maybe Prusa will struggle and even fail in the next years (that's my prediction: they will fail, but slowly, since the management is too lacking), but the 3D printing world will be overall much better. In just two years, the average 250$ FDM printer jumped from terrible to totally ok, and this is some kind of value that Bambulab provided, regardless of licensing. 5. One thing that is killing Prusa is in some way they don't use OSS software enough! The future is Klipper, but still they continue with their not-invented-here syndrome to develop their Marlin twist. 6. Finally: using open source does not make you ethically required to open source your stuff. Open source licenses have terms: you just need to follow those terms. If you open source stuff, you are great, but failing to do so does not make you terrible. Remember that in the 3D printing ecosystem there isn't any cloud-companies situation like in the SAAS scenario, where there is a monopoly that allows only a few to exploit OSS value.
milkglass 3y ago
We should hold these parties accountable and make it simpler for everyday users to understand what open source means. In my personal encounters there are usually tons of confusion between FOSS, OSS and source available. My gut feel is that there's some degree of exploitation of the mix ups and most turn a blind eye to the underlying issues.
James_K 3y ago
It's funny how they lied about being open source twice and got the exact same reaction from it both times, but still haven't learnt their lesson. All they need to do to avoid backlash is call it source available (like it is) but instead they chose to mislead people for no real benefit to themselves.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  It’s very clear they seek the goodwill and engagement associated with open source projects without the costs.
- thayne 3y ago
  Well, I also understand not wanting to call it source available, because that is used to describe software where the source code is available, but the license restricts basically any usage of the source. I think we really need one or more labels for licenses somewhere in between open source and source available.
moffkalast 3y ago
> So let's discuss Prusa: The Bambu A1 competes with Prusa's MK4 model but is signficantly cheaper, faster and does more. For the price of one Prusa MK4 with shipping I could buy three Bambu A1 printers or two Bambu A2 printers plus the AMS addon which adds multi-color printing. I would argue that was always inevitable, Prusas are laughably overpriced and it's not like they're open source in the sense that you can build your own. They took the RepRap idea and commercialized it with an insane markup, benefiting from open source much more than Bambu probably did. For the longest time their PrusaPrinters model hosting site only supported .gcode files for their printers which was just a large fuck you to anyone with any other printer. Hence why Thingiverse ran circles around them with a half broken site. There is a lot more community value in providing hackable low cost hardware like Creality did with the Ender, becase then people that have time but not money can you know... buy it. And then develop open source software or make models for it with that time.
dmezzetti 3y ago
My perspective as an open source developer of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai https://github.com/neuml/txtai). When you get started in open source, it's a great way for a small team to get the word out. Conversely, when starting as proprietary software or SaaS, you're looking at advertising, websites, sales calls and so forth. If an open source company is lucky enough to be successful, the next phase is having users and perhaps even funding. When the team grows and/or others put their own money or career into the company, they want an outcome. It becomes hard to ignore that there are thousands of people using the software and inevitably it becomes an exercise on how to claw back from the group of "free" users. There is also the fear that a big company will undercut the open source company by offering the software as part of a cloud service. This is my opinion on how we got here with confusing licensing changes. Most don't have the means to accept little to no income from their work. But there shouldn't be a "fixed pot" mentality. In order to be a successful open source company, one has to see the "free" users as beneficial. Think of it as a big wide open world and that while some will never pay, if you add value in other ways on top of your open source offerings, there will be significant income opportunities. Could be consulting projects, hosted/cloud/SaaS versions or specialized components. One should also look at operations. There will be a new wave of companies, especially in the AI space, that are lean and using automation to build great things with a very limited amount of resources. Perhaps they don't even need funding and can build a profitable company without it. In those cases, they won't have those internal pressures and hence likely to be more competitive. Something to watch in 2024.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
I'm going to go with hard agree. Firstly finding the point of leverage (was distribution, now is?) Secondly looking at Game theory, the Tit for Tat approach is simple and consistently useful and well understood - so some ability to "hit back" is very useful. This of course depends on common legal frameworks which is part of the problem but ...
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
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 :)
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  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.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    > Why should someone start developing open source if there is no way to make a living from it long term ? If you cannot answer this question for yourself you definitely should not start or participate in an open source project. Is there someone saying you should? GP isn’t.
  - fipar 3y ago
    If it adds any context to this, Peter is one of the founders of Percona, a company built entirely around open source software and associated services. That doesn’t mean you should agree with him, but when he says “ those crying how horrible Open Source is simply should not gone with Open Source to begin with” it does have a different meaning if you know where he comes from.
  - codexb 3y ago
    That’s the point. OSS is generally not a good business model. And that’s okay. Not all software is easily monetized or particularly valuable. The value of standardizing on an interface and outsourcing the maintenance and security to others provides more value than the software itself.
Closi 3y ago
The FSL licence is interesting - certainly something I will consider for my current project! 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.
cma256 3y ago
Some commenters here should watch the talk "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki. Else you're gonna get Jeff'd.
Apreche 3y ago
company:open source::sand castle:water 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.
nojvek 3y ago
Why is Bamboo able to make 3D printers at 1/3 of the price? Most consumers are price sensitive instead of closed/open source sensitive. If Meka was cheaper, they would win.
edrxty 3y ago
Why is everyone worked up about the software? The hardware is where all the time and effort is and Prusa just hasn't been doing much there. They could be using ball bearing rails or more rigid structure but instead they're just lightly iterating on their existing system of low precision plastic parts.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Becoming an adult is hard. It can be even harder if you live a sheltered, privileged life. Such as the life of the computer programmer. But to found a successful business, you need to be an adult. Or be sheltered by one (or more). If you grow up programming, you are privileged: you are intelligent enough to create something complex, useful, and are probably competent enough to get a job whose starting salary is likely twice that of the average person. As an intelligent person, you may believe in a world run by logic and merit. The code either works or doesn't, has bugs or doesn't, looks clean or doesn't. You write good code, you get paid lots of money. On top of all this, as you write code, you learn that there is a collection of people on the internet who have certain values and principles, and that you are actually using their work, for free, basically out of nothing but good will. This is inspirational, so you decide you will dedicate your life to the same. However, making something for free and giving it away means you can't pay for Mountain Dew. So you decide to make a company, so you can make and give away the code, and still make money. There's a problem, though. So far you are still thinking like a privileged programmer. But [capitalist] business requires a different mindset. The values and principles of business are not those of the noble engineer. Business values profit, and its principles are based on solving a problem for a customer. But more than anything, business demands the will to compete, at any cost. This is dog-eat-dog. There's no room for generosity, unless you're already winning, and the generosity is ensuring you'll keep winning. An "Open Source Company" is, by definition, nonsense. It's trying to combine two completely ideologically separate things, having both cakes, and eating them too. Sure, you can have a business that also makes open source. But your business can't be dependent on that open source to make a profit. If it does, then eventually you will have to come out from your shelter and get wet, or you will lose the business, and possibly the code too. Most of the people in the world don't care about the values and principles of open source. They care about solving the many problems they have every day, so they can feed and shelter their families and still have some leisure time. Most people don't care about your software license. They just want to use a product that makes their life easier. And that's what a business is supposed to do. Open Source is a distraction from that aim. If you really want to solve someone's problem, do that first. Later, once you are very rich and successful, and have many different aspects of the business that generate profit, then you can release your code for free, without it becoming a distraction. The people who value open source code may not like that your code is closed. But they will respect your honesty, and a product that solves a problem well. And you get to make something you like making, and solve problems, and feed and shelter your family.
hannob 3y ago
One of these again... If you call yourself an "Open Source Company" and you are not an Open Source Company, then yeah, people will criticize you for it. No, that's not a sign that the world is evil to you or that Open Source does not work or anything else. It's just that you lied to people, and you're not getting applause for that. Deal with it. Ultimately, all of these stories come down to this: There's a company that really would like to get the positive image of Open Source, but on the other hand, really would like to have a business model that's incompatible with Open Source. So they want both, they can't have that, then they try to have both, and then they complain that they can't have it.
alberth 3y ago
FYI - this is written by the creator of Flask, Twig, Sphinx, and more.
jongjong 3y ago
It's yet another example of consumers being forced to choose the lower price, lower value product because they have no surplus due to the artificially extractive design of the monetary system.

233 points by zmk5 3y ago

>They offer a user friendly experience at a very attractive price point That's what most users care about. That it just works and it does that at an attractive price point. The rest is ideology and politics, which is fine if it's what you are into, but most people won't care.

AVincentInSpace 3y ago
Caring about what happens to the thing you bought five years down the road when the company that made it goes bankrupt is nor "ideology and politics"
- oefrha 3y ago
  I’ve got a shitty laserjet from HP that’s approaching 20 years old and still working more or less. It doesn’t have WiFi so I’m not sure it’s ever received an update to its closed firmware. Now, I know nothing about 3D printing, but I fail to see why a 3D printer needs firmware updates to remain functional five years down the road, if it’s working today and the hardware doesn’t break down. If I understand TFA correctly, I can buy a largely equivalent model with closed firmware at 1/3 the price, or a better one at 1/2 the price. Choosing the closed firmware one would be a no brainer for me. Edit: Rereading the passage, it seems even the 1/3 price model is better.
  - bmurphy1976 3y ago
    > Now, I know nothing about 3D printing, but I fail to see why a 3D printer needs firmware updates to remain functional five years down the road, if it’s working today and the hardware doesn’t break down. Most don't need updates to remain functional, but this is still a very immature and rapidly evolving industry. The quality difference in the last two years is significant and a lot of the advances are in firmware, not just hardware. The difference between old and new firmware could be a higher quality print in half the time.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  >Caring about what happens to the thing you bought five years down the road when the company that made it goes bankrupt is nor "ideology and politics" Au contraire - caring about what happens to the thing you bought five years down the road is ideology. And wanting anything done about it is politics.

sinistersnare 3y ago

I always appreciate Armin's posts. I think the key point is that the FSL is necessary when profit is required. The GPL is a philosophy of social distribution more than a way to build a capitalist enterprise. Using GPL software ensures that software stays socially distributed instead of privately; but that can lead to issues for private profit.

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pydry 3y ago

If you need to see why stuff like the BPL and FSL is needed you only need to compare the commit histories of ElasticSearch and its fork when Jeff Bezos bravely "stepped up for open source" with OpenSearch (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-tr...). It's not like Jeff couldnt invest to make better software than elastic. They have the money. Theyd just rather feast off Elastic's plate until Elastic is dead.

drewdevault 3y ago
Elastic's revenue was north of half a billion dollars when they changed their license. Amazon was most decidedly not killing them. It was motivated by greed, like it always is.
- pydry 3y ago
  Still posting losses. It's not generally considered a wise business move to wait until your corpse is already being feasted upon before changing direction. Long term they absolutely would have been killed - computing is being consolidated onto one of 4 platforms, all of which would squeeze out elastic using their market dominance as leverage.
  - drewdevault 3y ago
    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.
    - pydry 3y ago
      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?

quickthrower2 3y ago

It might be 3D but it is funny open source and printers coming up when closed source printer drivers help kick off RMS and GPL.

bruce511 3y ago

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 program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage. This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source. There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures. 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.

EMIRELADERO 3y ago
Even if they end up not succeeding, OSS companies are a good thing for another reason: they shift the Overton window. Some companies are getting boo'd on HN and elsewhere for changing their license from OSI-style to source-available, whereas 10 years ago there would be no source available to the public at all. This is, overall, a positive development.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  Well, there's no harm to them if they stop sharing their source X months after switching to source-available model. It'll even be a net benefit since CoPilot will not devour their code, strip its license out and spit (sorry, emit) to anyone who asks the right questions. An OSI approved license allows building upon that work, more importantly GPL prevents these improvements to go private. Source-available provides "for your eyes only" view to the code, and is just window dressing when compared to other models. I fail to see a net benefit, just a staggered backtrack.
chii 3y ago
> decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge. That is what i associate with any open source company.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

The tragedy with any form of software development is that it becomes a commodity very quickly. That's why open source works so well for commodity software. The challenge is that while everybody needs commodity software, they aren't necessarily willing to pay for it. People pay for other things like managed services, support, etc. But not for software directly. Take operating systems as an example. Unless you have very specific needs, Linux is probably good enough. That's true across most of the industry. Most device manufacturers at this point default to using Linux. Why bother building your own OS when the commodity option does the job. It doesn't make any sense to want to compete with free and OSS. Apple and MS seem to continue to resist this notion but they are increasingly exceptions. So, open source companies are a bit of a contradiction in terms. You invent something, and then immediately turn it into a cheap commodity by releasing it for free. And then you expect to get money for that. Investors get attracted by rapid growth. And giving something for free can produce some rapid growth. So, they've repeated fallen into the trap of investing in what proved to be worthless commodities. Some outlasted their IPO at least, which makes for happy investors. But those quickly turn into niche products. Because they are at that point commodity software providers competing with perfectly good OSS ones. Most new closed source database products out there only have a short while before their differentiating features are absorbed by open source ones. Twenty years ago there were lots of new database products. Most of those were OSS. Several of those then transitioned to closed source. But at this point postgresql does most of what used to make those products interesting. And if it doesn't, just wait five years. The finance model for OSS is very simple. You need OSS to produce closed source software. It's not optional. You can't compete by doing everything in house. So, most OSS software projects are financed by those companies using them the most. Those projects don't fix themselves. So, there are a lot of companies spending money on the commodity stuff they've built their business on. For example, Oracle keeps on pooring money into Java. Even though it is open source. They make money from it elsewhere. Same with IBM. MS is a big OSS contributor. Google too. Every big software company out there. None of them are driven by idealistic motives. This is economically necessary for them to do.

jampekka 3y ago
The true tragedy is the economic system that makes this a tragedy.

goodmachine 3y ago

Great post! The FSL is interesting because it correctly assumes the existence of parasites, ie 'harmful free-riders'. There are ofc too many projects doing what is in effect free R&D for larger entities... these free riders having zero interest in the health or longevity of open technical ecosystems, so game theory is the right lens, I think. I'd be very interested to learn of any other proposed structures along the lines of the FSL: particularly if anyone here has opinions on/ direct experience with them! --- Earlier incarnation/s of this approach are mentioned on the FSL page. Open Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model BUSL https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ FSL https://fsl.software/ https://fsl.software/

drewdevault 3y ago

Sorry, Armin, but this is such nonsense. Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutting them on hardware costs. Now that Prusa is non-free, they have lost both the price, the hackability, and the moral advantage. It's an utterly braindead move. If Prusa were smart they would be looking for ways to reduce production costs to get down to similar price points, investing in usability improvements, and doubling down on the free software approach. Let's face it, Prusa got complacent and someone at their lunch. You can monetize free software without breaking the social contract. I'm quite fine with your licensing approach with FSL, but it's not free software nor open source, and it does not align with the social contract, and that's all well and good so long as you can acknowledge that -- and live with the consequences, such as heavily disincentivizing third-party contributions. But you can make money with genuinely free software, social contract and everything, if you're smarter about it than barking up the VC tree and promising infinite growth and monopolization using a tool (open source) which is not suited for that purpose by design -- that was Sentry's mistake. Honestly, I'm glad that FSL is working out for you, but by no means does it justify some call to action to water down FOSS nor is it indicative of some fundamental problem with FOSS.

sverhagen 3y ago
Just wondering aloud, here, could it be that the open source company comes from a place of feigned or real enlightenment that makes it hard to compete on hardware cost, as the lowest-possible hardware cost may require unethical practices in sourcing or production? Even something like "manufactured in the USA", if that were something you're into, I have to imagine, might make it hard to compete on hardware cost, compared to China.
- drewdevault 3y ago
  Yes, quite likely. This is not really a matter of FOSS or not, but it is something that Prusa absolutely needed to have foreseen and made a viable business plan to address. Chinese manufacturing was always a huge vulnerability in their business model and they definitely should have planned for that. That could have taken many forms. They might have invested in a much stronger brand, aiming to make Prusa (needs a better name tbh) synonymous with 3D printing, and developing a product line which covers a wider range of needs, from entry-level highly-usable stuff up to hackable mid-tier things and possibly high-end workshop printers as well, all of which should have had a shared brand identity. China can't really compete on reputation, so that's where to focus. Moreover, they could have invested more in services surrounding the product, such as the aforementioned cloud printing services, perhaps a thingiverse-equivalent with a models marketplace and a small margin off of that, etc. Auto-detect when your filament is running low and have a subscription service to ship you a new one -- maybe the cloud printer notices when you don't have enough in stock for a model you want and suggests you order more. Just making a new model every 2 or 3 years and hoping China wouldn't notice was a very stupid strategy, and the free or non-free nature of their firmware has nothing to do with that. This is such a common failure mode in open source companies -- they think that the code is 90% of the battle for the market. It's not, it's more like 5% at best and because it's open source the rest of the market can make use of it. This can be very powerful if you're smart about it, but "write the code and the rest will work out" is not that.

randomlinuxuser 3y ago

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 on the someone part, here is the thing, the people capable of doing that is pretty small, I ask myself, for the time it would take to deal with that, I could earn more money in that time that I would save 'fixing' the drivers instead of just buying a new one from another brand or the second hand market. I know people love the romantic idea of free software, open source, etc, I just want my shit to work well, which usually is open source stuff because in most cases it has a zero monetary cost and people use it, so it gets bug fixes from their own users that are trying to make their thing work. I'm equally happy when the software is propietary but works well, case in point the nvidia drivers, it just work well for my use case, the amd drivers are open, well, I can't use their gpus without ending with a headache every few days, doesn't matter if is open source or not, it needs to work well. Back to my point, even for the power users, how many people will actually fix the drivers/firmware of some hardware they bought? We are in a position in life that is cheaper to just buy new hardware and use that time to learn new things that will pay more in the long term and I personally find we, the linux community are out of touch most of the time with what most people care about. Also, I find amusing when people get the pikachu face when some big corporation uses OSS and makes profit off of it, isn't that the whole point of the OSS? When I use it on my pc I'm also making profit for myself, the corporations are just doing the same but at scale, and if your goal is to make profit, who wouldn't use all the tools available? They don't have to like OSS, don't have to share the values of the OSS, don't have to 'give back', but OSS allows anyone to use it, so why wouldn't they? Do you want to be a company that is 100% OSS? That's cool, just don't make the pikachu face when another company enters the market and use what have build and shared.

CaptainFever 3y ago
> Also, I find amusing when people get the pikachu face when some big corporation uses OSS and makes profit off of it, isn't that the whole point of the OSS? When I use it on my pc I'm also making profit for myself, the corporations are just doing the same but at scale, and if your goal is to make profit, who wouldn't use all the tools available? They don't have to like OSS, don't have to share the values of the OSS, don't have to 'give back' That is the point of Open Source, but it is not the point of Free Software. Specifically -- and I know this was addressed in the article -- this is why AGPL should be what programmers are using. It doesn't discriminate, but it does make sure that any entities that use Free Software contribute back to the commons. This bears repeating again and again; this is why copyleft exists. > The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term. Source: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

remram 3y ago

We should come up with a name for this new generation of licenses. They are not "open source" or "free software", and using those words would be both confusing and immediately polarizing. But having nothing more specific than "source available" seems very insufficient, since most of them turn open source quickly or only deny rights that do not usually matter to the end-user. (licenses in that family: BUSL, FSL, Common Clause) Anyone has suggestions?

mkl 3y ago
I agree. How about "eventually open source"? Commons Clause is not in that group, as it's not time-limited.
- remram 3y ago
  I like that, eventually-open source software (EOSS) (or deferred open source maybe? or delayed open source?).
James_K 3y ago
It's pointless to call this anything other than source available. This license is just a no-compete license with extra steps. I see little practical difference between "you can't compete with us" and "you can't compete with us for as long as we're developing the software". Maybe we should call this a "you can have the scraps" license because the project only becomes open source when the developers stop caring about it.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  > It's pointless to call this anything other than source available. I obviously strongly disagree with this. An FSL licensed project turns into full, undeniable open source after two years. > Maybe we should call this a "you can have the scraps" license because the project only becomes open source when the developers stop caring about it. Two years isn’t a lifetime. If there is value left the community has full rights to do something with it. No legal worries can stand in that way. You can even rebirth a new company from that if you so desire.

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

Here we go again. Open Source, as currently defined is hard to monetize, so lets go ahead and call Open Source something which makes it easy. Note though Easy Monetization was never goal of Open Source, so why not instead leave Open Source alone and focus on defining something different, which is focused on being easy to monetize.

sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
Yea open source developers who want to get paid or make a living from their work can suck it, damn fools what did they expect!
- PhilipRoman 3y ago
  My impression is that many of these "open source developers" overestimate the value of their code. There are many amazing projects for which I would pay considerable price, but the long tail of 99% of projects just aren't worth anything in my opinion. It is an interesting exercise though - to imagine how much I would pay for my window manager, gcc or even Vim. Maybe easier transactions of tiny sums is the real solution? Even if every user paid something trivial like 10 cents a month, it would be a huge revenue stream for popular projects which lack maintenance. Of course, adding monetary incentives opens a whole new can of worms, so maybe the current situation is the best we can do after all. I suspect that many good qualities of open source software come from lack of money involved - there is no telemetry, no dark patterns to keep you using it, no attempts at vendor lock-in.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    >Maybe easier transactions of tiny sums is the real solution? Even if every user paid something trivial like 10 cents a month, it would be a huge revenue stream for popular projects which lack maintenance. This is exactly what the Free Software world needs, IMO. More specifically, it needs to be trivially easy to use and built into the distro - i.e. you have a utility that keeps track of what you desktop apps etc you use, asks priorities+budget then generates a breakdown of how much money to send each project. Then it lets you one-click pay, instead of having to individually go to all the websites and donate to each. Free Software can't be gratis, if we ever want it to be sustainable and prioritize the user.

antirez 3y ago

I happen to be in a special situation here. One of my softwares, Redis, has a very permissive license that was used by many vendors to sell it. At the same time, I'm a lot into 3D printing. So I guess this gives me some perspective on both of the sides of the matter, and what I think, TLDR, is: Bambulab effect on the 3D printing ecosystem is going to be very positive. A few considerations: 1. Prusa is blaming the Bambulab OSS situation, but the reality is that they struggle a lot in innovation, recently. I'm a Prusa Mini and MK4 owner, so I'm kinda of a fan of them, but still... They had struggled to move raise the bar, happy enough to innovate very slowly, with their huge delays with the Prusa XL, and exploiting the fact that other companies were just doing terrible copies. Bambulab before anything else saw that from the POV of technology there was too much left on the table. 2. Prusa itself based its work for PrusaSlicer on an existing open source slicer (written by an Italian guy, btw). While they continue to release PrusaSlicer as a free software, as the license requires to do, what they did renaming the software "Prusa Slicer" is a form of ownership appropriation. PrusaSlicer is a great software that can be used with many non-Prusa printers, my point is just that different ethical perspectives may lead to different conclusions. One could argue that Bambulab created their own slicer instead of just contributing to PrusaSlicer because the naming and the setup of the project makes it hard to do so. 3. Bambulab is also being cloned. The fact that their hardware is not open source does not mean people can't copy the design. The general ideas that make Bambulab printers great can't be patented or copyrighted. See the Creality K1... it resembles Bambulab printers a lot. 4. After Bambulab showed the 3D printing community that it was possible to build better printers, the whole 3D printing landscape became immediately much, much better. They raised the bar. Maybe Prusa will struggle and even fail in the next years (that's my prediction: they will fail, but slowly, since the management is too lacking), but the 3D printing world will be overall much better. In just two years, the average 250$ FDM printer jumped from terrible to totally ok, and this is some kind of value that Bambulab provided, regardless of licensing. 5. One thing that is killing Prusa is in some way they don't use OSS software enough! The future is Klipper, but still they continue with their not-invented-here syndrome to develop their Marlin twist. 6. Finally: using open source does not make you ethically required to open source your stuff. Open source licenses have terms: you just need to follow those terms. If you open source stuff, you are great, but failing to do so does not make you terrible. Remember that in the 3D printing ecosystem there isn't any cloud-companies situation like in the SAAS scenario, where there is a monopoly that allows only a few to exploit OSS value.

milkglass 3y ago

We should hold these parties accountable and make it simpler for everyday users to understand what open source means. In my personal encounters there are usually tons of confusion between FOSS, OSS and source available. My gut feel is that there's some degree of exploitation of the mix ups and most turn a blind eye to the underlying issues.

James_K 3y ago

It's funny how they lied about being open source twice and got the exact same reaction from it both times, but still haven't learnt their lesson. All they need to do to avoid backlash is call it source available (like it is) but instead they chose to mislead people for no real benefit to themselves.

jeremyjh 3y ago
It’s very clear they seek the goodwill and engagement associated with open source projects without the costs.
thayne 3y ago
Well, I also understand not wanting to call it source available, because that is used to describe software where the source code is available, but the license restricts basically any usage of the source. I think we really need one or more labels for licenses somewhere in between open source and source available.

moffkalast 3y ago

> So let's discuss Prusa: The Bambu A1 competes with Prusa's MK4 model but is signficantly cheaper, faster and does more. For the price of one Prusa MK4 with shipping I could buy three Bambu A1 printers or two Bambu A2 printers plus the AMS addon which adds multi-color printing. I would argue that was always inevitable, Prusas are laughably overpriced and it's not like they're open source in the sense that you can build your own. They took the RepRap idea and commercialized it with an insane markup, benefiting from open source much more than Bambu probably did. For the longest time their PrusaPrinters model hosting site only supported .gcode files for their printers which was just a large fuck you to anyone with any other printer. Hence why Thingiverse ran circles around them with a half broken site. There is a lot more community value in providing hackable low cost hardware like Creality did with the Ender, becase then people that have time but not money can you know... buy it. And then develop open source software or make models for it with that time.

dmezzetti 3y ago

My perspective as an open source developer of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai https://github.com/neuml/txtai). When you get started in open source, it's a great way for a small team to get the word out. Conversely, when starting as proprietary software or SaaS, you're looking at advertising, websites, sales calls and so forth. If an open source company is lucky enough to be successful, the next phase is having users and perhaps even funding. When the team grows and/or others put their own money or career into the company, they want an outcome. It becomes hard to ignore that there are thousands of people using the software and inevitably it becomes an exercise on how to claw back from the group of "free" users. There is also the fear that a big company will undercut the open source company by offering the software as part of a cloud service. This is my opinion on how we got here with confusing licensing changes. Most don't have the means to accept little to no income from their work. But there shouldn't be a "fixed pot" mentality. In order to be a successful open source company, one has to see the "free" users as beneficial. Think of it as a big wide open world and that while some will never pay, if you add value in other ways on top of your open source offerings, there will be significant income opportunities. Could be consulting projects, hosted/cloud/SaaS versions or specialized components. One should also look at operations. There will be a new wave of companies, especially in the AI space, that are lean and using automation to build great things with a very limited amount of resources. Perhaps they don't even need funding and can build a profitable company without it. In those cases, they won't have those internal pressures and hence likely to be more competitive. Something to watch in 2024.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

I'm going to go with hard agree. Firstly finding the point of leverage (was distribution, now is?) Secondly looking at Game theory, the Tit for Tat approach is simple and consistently useful and well understood - so some ability to "hit back" is very useful. This of course depends on common legal frameworks which is part of the problem but ...

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

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 :)

sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
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.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  > Why should someone start developing open source if there is no way to make a living from it long term ? If you cannot answer this question for yourself you definitely should not start or participate in an open source project. Is there someone saying you should? GP isn’t.
- fipar 3y ago
  If it adds any context to this, Peter is one of the founders of Percona, a company built entirely around open source software and associated services. That doesn’t mean you should agree with him, but when he says “ those crying how horrible Open Source is simply should not gone with Open Source to begin with” it does have a different meaning if you know where he comes from.
- codexb 3y ago
  That’s the point. OSS is generally not a good business model. And that’s okay. Not all software is easily monetized or particularly valuable. The value of standardizing on an interface and outsourcing the maintenance and security to others provides more value than the software itself.

Closi 3y ago

The FSL licence is interesting - certainly something I will consider for my current project! 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.

cma256 3y ago

Some commenters here should watch the talk "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki. Else you're gonna get Jeff'd.

Apreche 3y ago

company:open source::sand castle:water 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.

nojvek 3y ago

Why is Bamboo able to make 3D printers at 1/3 of the price? Most consumers are price sensitive instead of closed/open source sensitive. If Meka was cheaper, they would win.

edrxty 3y ago

Why is everyone worked up about the software? The hardware is where all the time and effort is and Prusa just hasn't been doing much there. They could be using ball bearing rails or more rigid structure but instead they're just lightly iterating on their existing system of low precision plastic parts.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Becoming an adult is hard. It can be even harder if you live a sheltered, privileged life. Such as the life of the computer programmer. But to found a successful business, you need to be an adult. Or be sheltered by one (or more). If you grow up programming, you are privileged: you are intelligent enough to create something complex, useful, and are probably competent enough to get a job whose starting salary is likely twice that of the average person. As an intelligent person, you may believe in a world run by logic and merit. The code either works or doesn't, has bugs or doesn't, looks clean or doesn't. You write good code, you get paid lots of money. On top of all this, as you write code, you learn that there is a collection of people on the internet who have certain values and principles, and that you are actually using their work, for free, basically out of nothing but good will. This is inspirational, so you decide you will dedicate your life to the same. However, making something for free and giving it away means you can't pay for Mountain Dew. So you decide to make a company, so you can make and give away the code, and still make money. There's a problem, though. So far you are still thinking like a privileged programmer. But [capitalist] business requires a different mindset. The values and principles of business are not those of the noble engineer. Business values profit, and its principles are based on solving a problem for a customer. But more than anything, business demands the will to compete, at any cost. This is dog-eat-dog. There's no room for generosity, unless you're already winning, and the generosity is ensuring you'll keep winning. An "Open Source Company" is, by definition, nonsense. It's trying to combine two completely ideologically separate things, having both cakes, and eating them too. Sure, you can have a business that also makes open source. But your business can't be dependent on that open source to make a profit. If it does, then eventually you will have to come out from your shelter and get wet, or you will lose the business, and possibly the code too. Most of the people in the world don't care about the values and principles of open source. They care about solving the many problems they have every day, so they can feed and shelter their families and still have some leisure time. Most people don't care about your software license. They just want to use a product that makes their life easier. And that's what a business is supposed to do. Open Source is a distraction from that aim. If you really want to solve someone's problem, do that first. Later, once you are very rich and successful, and have many different aspects of the business that generate profit, then you can release your code for free, without it becoming a distraction. The people who value open source code may not like that your code is closed. But they will respect your honesty, and a product that solves a problem well. And you get to make something you like making, and solve problems, and feed and shelter your family.

hannob 3y ago

One of these again... If you call yourself an "Open Source Company" and you are not an Open Source Company, then yeah, people will criticize you for it. No, that's not a sign that the world is evil to you or that Open Source does not work or anything else. It's just that you lied to people, and you're not getting applause for that. Deal with it. Ultimately, all of these stories come down to this: There's a company that really would like to get the positive image of Open Source, but on the other hand, really would like to have a business model that's incompatible with Open Source. So they want both, they can't have that, then they try to have both, and then they complain that they can't have it.

alberth 3y ago

FYI - this is written by the creator of Flask, Twig, Sphinx, and more.

jongjong 3y ago

It's yet another example of consumers being forced to choose the lower price, lower value product because they have no surplus due to the artificially extractive design of the monetary system.