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Ask Slashdot: Can SaaS Be Both Open Source and Economically Viable?
An anonymous reader writes: The CTO behind Lucidchart, an online diagramming app, recently cited the open source rbush project as an invaluable tool for helping implement an "in-memory spatial index" that "increased spatial search performance by a factor of over 1,000 for large documents." My question is this: what risks does a SaaS company like Lucidchart face in making most of their own code public, like Google's recent move with Chrome for Android, and what benefits might be gained by doing so? Wouldn't sharing the code just generate more users and interest? Even if competitors did copy it, they'd always be a step behind the latest developments.
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Capitalism is not viable. Workers revolution is our only hope. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat can open the door to the communist future. Otherwise we are condemned to barbarism by the death agony of capitalism.
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The GNU Affero General Public License version 3 was designed to preserve user freedom and flexibility even when software runs on a leased server. It ensures that users can obtain and improve the software that they are using even when they are currently running it on someone else's computer. That way, if a particular service goes out of business, its customers can spin up an instance on their own servers with little interruption.
If you open your source, and leverage the community so they feel they have a voice, it can lead to better code, and wide adoption. If you lock down submissions so you can have a paid tier, then welcome to fork town.
Software has zero intrinsic value. It doesn't generate a single cent (unless you've written a BitCoin miner, I guess).
Customers, on the other hand, can generate lots of value if they use your software. Customers and the potential for more customers are usually the reason small software firms get acquired for Rockefeller money by the Google's and IBM's of the world (the other reasons are usually acquiring patents or the talent of the development team itself.) The software itself is rarely the target.
Open-sourcing the software increases the odds of someone using their software, either because it's "free", or because having the code in hand keeps them out of trouble if the company were to fold. And even if they're using it for free, it increases the odds that they would be willing to use a paid version at a later date, which is valuable.
And companies pay for reliability, both for necessity and so they have someone to pass the blame to if something fails. Even if someone got a copy of their code and decided to try their own business, are you going to trust them over the original creators when it comes to your job security?
Google's Chrome would be a good example. Google's business is not selling browsers. Their business is selling advertising. Many of the services they offer to attract eyeballs (and data) for their business require a good browser. So they don't lose any revenue by giving their browser away and letting other people build browsers based on the code, in fact the more modern browsers out there that're all compatible the better for Google. In that situation it makes sense to open-source their Chrome code. For any business, if the code's utility code that's necessary for the business but not a significant part of the parts that separate your offering from everyone else's it'd make sense to open-source it. You don't lose anything, you gain brownie points, and you may be able to use the bug fixes and enhancements others make without having to spend your own resources on them.
You don't, however, see Google open-sourcing the details of their analytics algorithms, or the exact code that drives PageRank, or the other things that set them apart from other search engines. Those things they need to keep secret because if they got out Google would lose a competitive advantage. Open-sourcing code like that would cost a business revenue, so it shouldn't be open-sourced.
Where can I download the source for HTTP? I have been looking all over for it!
Its simple, you use somthing like the Affero license so no one can make changes that you can't access. Since anyone can try, whatever good ideas other people have you can re-incorporate, so you can potentially have a far bigger unpaid developer base. If your product is known to attract hacker types as customers, they can act as force multipliers, easily. As compared to a closed program, you'll have more eyes on the code. Its also your code, and you know it better than anyone else.
Then you simply focus on having the best quality of service. You can copy software, you can't copy quality of service.
Combine these two, its not as easy as you think to compete against someone else with their own software.
You also have your brand name and reputation. which is built on that quality of service. Despite the fact that CentOS is given away for free, people pay good money for RHEL subscriptions, and RH is an economicly viable company.
The support is where the money is. The actual product is a loss leader.
Where can I download the source for HTTP?
One well-known HTTP server is Apache HTTP Server. You can find source code and Windows binaries at Apache's web site. Apache also offers HttpComponents, which implements the client side of an HTTP connection.
Once the novelty of free and open source has worn off the only advantages I can see would be user goodwill and perhaps some modest community contributions. Disadvantages include enabling competitors, devaluing software production, and risk of community backlash should one change models or they disapprove of the license choice. My guess is such companies hope to overcome any competitors by executing well and retaining a first-mover position in the market. They are probably unaware of the macro effects of FOSS on labor, and oblivious to potential community issues.
Even if someone got a copy of their code and decided to try their own business, are you going to trust them over the original creators when it comes to your job security?
MariaDB is a fork of Oracle's MySQL. I guess people are trusting MariaDB in part because Oracle has done an excrement job of security, especially with its Java virtual machine. (Excrement is the opposite of excellent.)
They provide support and hosting both of which you can do yourself. Some schools host it themselves for legal data reasons and some do it if they are in a geo location that Instructure does not provide support in. They explicitly that their business model is providing better support than you or someone else can. SO far they are doing pretty well and because you can host your own copy it is much easier to both test and build integrations. It is also helpful when trying to debug something.
Oh really?
yes, but once your software becomes open source, your service can be replaced by that oss part and a off the shelf server. Usually, thats cheaper than your price. If its not cheaper, then you don't make money with your service, because your service will use that off the shelf server too. If you open source, you basically give away the additional value of your service for free.
You can do what facebook and google do of course, and only publish parts of the technology you developed: google published protobuf, facebook a php compiler.
Yah, let me write the code, install it, host it, attract customers, maybe charge for it, give away the source code, watch my market share erode, then try to pay for tech support, or try to add value added features or "in service" purchases. Sounds like fun! Or you could do all of the above and not give your source code away. Hmm.. let me think about that.
I would think that open-source SaaS products would be, if anything, MORE viable than open-sourcing a traditional, locally-hosted application. The code only gets written once, so the provider isn't really producing a product afterwards. This makes it hard both to keep rivals from releasing the same product, or to charge for the product in the first place. With SaaS, you're providing maintenance, hosting, and reliability to your customer continually. Any competitor would have to do the same thing, keeping the bar to entry high.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
A few reasons why that's wrong: economies of scale, specialisation, capacity utilisation.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Amazon has a monopoly on its ecommerce software and AWS
Amazon Marketplace, yes. AWS, not so much. AWS is just "cloud" in its original sense of rapid provisioning of server leases. True, Amazon pioneered the "cloud" category as it was trying to find a year-round use for server capacity that it uses for Amazon Marketplace during the American toy buying season every December. But there are plenty of other big scalable hosting providers by now, such as Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine.