|
|
|
|
|
|
by coward8675309
2024 days ago
|
|
|
It's not clear to me that open-source-as-a-business-model was ever vibrant enough that it makes sense to say it has now died. Open-source-as-a-funding-model was surely a thing, but turning open source into a source of consistent and growing free cash flow has been much more rare. At my last start-up the first things to go out the window when we wanted to stop burning money were the commercial Aerospike and Nginx licenses. That was five years ago. The most durable model for commercially-funded open source is as a stratagem for commoditizing someone's complement. If you want to stick it to Apple, fund Android. If you want to stick it to Oracle, fund PostgreSQL. If you want to stick it to Microsoft, fund LibreOffice. If you want to stick it to Sun -- er, Oracle -- fund Linux. |
|
|
No doubt about that. If you give away the source for free that doesn't produce any cash-flow. If you sell services you sell services.
The value-add proposition of "open source companies" I think is they know the software so you can hire them to do things with it, and they can adapt their open source software if needed as they go along. So that is a service-model. Open Source licenses can help companies that do this.
Open Source is its own worst enemy. At some point an OS project becomes so GOOD that you don't need to be its developer to use it and adapt it or build Cloud-services around it. Further if they need the expertise of the original developers they can simply hire them. The ethos of open source doesn't forbid you from having an employer. An ethical OS-hacker should be happy getting a salary from whichever company lets him or her write Open Source software. That includes companies like Amazon and Microsoft and IBM who then sell the right to use that software on their Cloud.
If this is the correct ethical model then we should not blame Amazon or Google, they do contribute to copyleft Open Source projects. We should blame smaller companies like MongoDB etc. who do not offer "pure" Open Source licenses.
So I'm thinking it's not so much the Open Source Business Model that is in crisis. It is the Open Source Ethical Model, which needs to reflect upon itself in the time of Cloud.
Is it really more ethical to work for Amazon writing Open Source, than writing Non-Open-Source for a small company which wants to make sure it is not crushed by Amazon?