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Why Some Open-Source Companies Are Considering a More Closed Approach (geekwire.com)
There's no question that the concept of open-source software has revolutionized the enterprise software world, which spent billions of dollars fighting the mere idea for several years before accepting that a new future had arrived. But more than a few people are starting to wonder if the very nature of open-source software -- the idea that it can be used by pretty much anyone for pretty much anything -- is causing its developers big problems in the era of distributed cloud computing services. From a report: Two prominent open-source software companies have made the decision to alter the licenses under which some of their software is distributed, with the expressed intent of making it harder -- or impossible -- for cloud computing providers to offer a service based around that software.
Two companies do not a make a movement. But as the cloud world packs its bags for Las Vegas and Amazon Web Services' re:Invent 2018 conference next week, underscoring that company's ability to set the agenda for the upcoming year, the intersection between open-source projects and cloud computing services is on many people's minds. "The way that I would think of it, the role that open source plays in creating commercial opportunities has changed," said Abby Kearns, executive director of the open-source Cloud Foundry Foundation. "We're going to see a lot more of this conversation happening than less. I would put it in a very blunt way: for many years we were suckers, and let them take what we developed and make tons of money on this."
Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal doesn't mince words. His company, known for its open-source in-memory database (used by American Express, Home Depot, and Dreamworks among others), has been around for eight years, an eternity in the fast-changing world of modern enterprise software. [...] "Ninety-nine percent of the contributions to Redis were made by Redis Labs," Bengal said. There's a longstanding myth in the open-source world that projects are driven by a community of contributors, but in reality, paid developers contribute the bulk of the code in most modern open-source projects, as Puppet founder Luke Kanies explained in our story earlier this year.
Two companies do not a make a movement. But as the cloud world packs its bags for Las Vegas and Amazon Web Services' re:Invent 2018 conference next week, underscoring that company's ability to set the agenda for the upcoming year, the intersection between open-source projects and cloud computing services is on many people's minds. "The way that I would think of it, the role that open source plays in creating commercial opportunities has changed," said Abby Kearns, executive director of the open-source Cloud Foundry Foundation. "We're going to see a lot more of this conversation happening than less. I would put it in a very blunt way: for many years we were suckers, and let them take what we developed and make tons of money on this."
Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal doesn't mince words. His company, known for its open-source in-memory database (used by American Express, Home Depot, and Dreamworks among others), has been around for eight years, an eternity in the fast-changing world of modern enterprise software. [...] "Ninety-nine percent of the contributions to Redis were made by Redis Labs," Bengal said. There's a longstanding myth in the open-source world that projects are driven by a community of contributors, but in reality, paid developers contribute the bulk of the code in most modern open-source projects, as Puppet founder Luke Kanies explained in our story earlier this year.
They shouldn't forget that regardless of the % of paid vs non-paid developers on a project the reason why they have the market penetration they currently do is because their products are FOSS in the first place.
TLDR: they broke their own business models.
Cause: They made their product open source but were charging money for a hosted service. Other people start selling their own hosted service and they got unhappy that they didn't have a monopoly so they switched part of their code to "Commons Clause" which disallows others from offer it as part of a paid service.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You could summarize this as "open-source companies are realizing that they don't actually want to open-source their work."
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Broke the open source business model.
All these open source software developers relied on support and deployment revenue, rather than on selling their software licence as traditional companies did.
It worked because software, regardless of its source code availability, is complex and requires expertise to deploy and keep working. Free software wasn't free to deploy and keep working.
But by eventually having mature open source software that 'just works', you can install fresh new instances of it, free from any problems and following a copy-exactly recipe, replicated umpteen times in a virtualized environment. The expertise only needs to be at the time of creating the recipes, and that can be done by a few automation experts inside your company from time to time, not a full company earning money from it.
Amazon, Azure et al have their relatively small automation groups, doing deployment and customization recipes that are then repeated ad infinitum across their infrastructure, making good revenue for them. While the developers of the software saw not a single penny from it.
Open source tends to rely on a large group of occasional contributors and a a few somewhat-more frequent committers that review the contributions and perhaps contribute stuff themselves also. Few of those contribute as a full-time job. If you're unhealthily obsessed with the project and issue a commit for every comma and semicolon (like certain "top wikipedia editors" do), it's easy to have as many commits to your name as the next ten combined.
Now you have a company and a bunch of full-time contributors to your core product. Of course ninety-nine percent is going to be contributed by the people you pay to do exactly that full-time.
If that metric alone is your reason to go closed-source, you have great potential to excel in pointy-haired management. And it actually makes me glad I'm not using your product; if I were it would be reason enough to start looking for something else. Something with sane management.
From the outset what looked like a huge misguided free buffet at the expense of sweat equity (ideological slavery), I have witnessed the value of free, as in free beer, resource incentive to mine its treasury.
This moment, nexus, will pivot and change. And the value it takes forward can be golden, mixed regulated or outside the box equity. It really amounts to whether the BIG's recognize, value and instantiate vestments for the beer they've drank.
A lot of features that are free in Solr, but nowhere near as easy to use, are premium in ElasticSearch. Amazon cannot just take X-Pack and say "so long, suckers" to Elastic, and replicating X-Pack would be non-trivial in terms of costs. You can get Amazon-managed ElasticSearch, but it's going to be pretty basic compared to paying for either licenses or cloud functionality from Elastic. It's basically good only for people who don't even want to run basic security inside of ElasticSearch.
And you know what? I'm totally fine with that. There's no such thing as a free lunch. The open core has provided clients of mine plenty of value, and it's subsidized by keeping all of those features held back for paying customers.
I expect the Cloudera-HortonWorks merger will do the same for the Hadoop ecosystem. Ambari will be dropped in favor of Cloudera Manager, which is not free. So all of the companies that won't pay for licenses will have to either roll their own management system or pay up. That might actually mean that the combined company will be able to turn a profit and keep paying for a lot of open source contributions.
Traditional Open Source software could be profitable from the following methods:
1. Distributions. We take the Open Source software, configure it and put it on a nice piece of physical media, and sell it. This worked well until around the turn of the Century. Where broadband has allowed most people to download the content much faster then it is to wait for the media to be shipped to you, and at no cost.
2. Consulting/Support. Early Open Source software was often difficult to use (and some of it still is) Having experts at you beck and call for a modest fee to help you setup and use such products was quite valuable. However this requires the software to be sufficiently complex to use, if the software was too easy to use or configured with good defaults, then the average Joe will know enough to get it working.
3. Coding add ins. There is a fix you need, the community is not jumping on it, so you can pay for a developer to put in that code so you have it available. This is assuming you cannot find a replacement product or such missing feature is so necessary to not wait for.
The move to cloud services of Open Source software is really finding a new way to keep it profitable. By making the application and configurations a service vs an application. So you are paying for the infrastructure more then the software.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If they are closing off the source code then they are sending a message to the Universe that they are living in scarcity and the Universe will look upon them, smile, and say "So bit it!". Don't even ask what what Richard Stallman would say!
There's a longstanding myth in the open-source world that projects are driven by a community of contributors, but in reality, paid developers contribute the bulk of the code in most modern open-source projects
The same sort of argument was made many years ago when Nessus went closed source. The fact is, open source is not necessarily the right tool for every problem. This isn't some new phenomenon as far as I can tell.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Maybe if copyright worked as it was intended things could be different.
If software copyright lasted for 7 years - OK, maybe we could make it shorter because software - you could make your money and then the world at large would still get full access to your software at some point.
Granted, no idea how that would work with frequent software updates ... this is a /. comment, not anything that someone actually thought through carefully ;)
The gist of all this is that these companies were intending to monetize the services and / or hosting. Instead, AWS is monetizing the services and hosting. So, in effect, AWS is eating these companies lunches. I see how this is bad news for the companies developing these products, but it's the natural order of things. The open source Pandora's box has been opened, there's no stuffing the lid back on it now. First hardware got commoditized, then software got commoditized, and now services are getting commoditized. They need to find a way to move up the value chain (eg. consulting / education / customizations), or their air supply will eventually run out.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
What these companies are realizing is that it doesn't matter at all if you have a big slice or a small slice if the pie itself is worth ZERO. Anything multiplied by zero is zero. For years, these companies were willing to donate lots of code to the 'community' so that the pie would get nice and large. Then they would add all kinds of value to an 'enterprise' version and convince a small piece of the pie (e.g. 10%) to buy their very expensive solution. They gave away the milk as long as they could scrape the cream off the top and sell it.
Now they are discovering that with cloud services, other companies can come in and scrape away all that cream and leave them with nothing. Those other companies have contributed little or nothing to the actual development of the code so they have no costs to recoup. The open source companies are realizing that the open source model contributes to this whole freeloading situation and want to put a stop to it. I like free software as much as the next guy, but somebody has to pay the bills.
A tiny piece of software I released into the world once is almost BSD-licensed. Almost, because a separate clause prevents its usage by anyone possessing any item of clothing with a Che Guevara likeness on it.
To my surprise, someone once reached out to me — years ago — asking, if I can remove the requirement, because it makes it more difficult for them to include my software in their distro...
True story...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is one reason I don't like to contribute to FOSS projects that required transferring copyrights, I prefer my code to stay GPL thank you very much.
- Raynet --> .
IBM is one of the major contributors to open source, fear of IBM is just stupid.
All of the software that people speculate they wanted out of the deal are areas where they're already pushing out open source (mostly Apache 2 licensed, so usable by everybody, GPL/BSD/proprietary) and they're basing their profits on professional services to big users.
That's great for open source, great for smaller companies dedicated to open tools, great for business. The only people it sucks for are their competitors trying to sell lock-in that has less brand gravitas. LOL The world has sure changed!
I'm loving this new systemd world. SysV can burn in a fiery hell for all I care. No, I'm not going to explain the difference between a semaphore and a mutex; I'm hoping to forget that SysV ever existed! Use grpc, d-bus, or pass messages. No, you don't get to edit startup scripts on the fly, you have to check them into source control anyways, so even if they were plain-text, you can't do that. Talk to the BOFH and quit trying to fuck up the configuration by mashing the keyboard.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?