[tomohelix]

Just a question but is it ever profitable to base a company around an open source product the way SD is? Why would anyone pay money to use the company's model when some guys on Reddit is distributing a similar product, albeit with lower performance, for free, that can be run locally?

What would be the incentive for a person, not a company, to pay Stability AI company instead of downloading and doing a bit of setup to have their own uncensored model?

[dwallin]

None of these companies are really directly concerned about profitability. Right now the leaders in ML models are going to be defined by those who have the most capital available to train newer and better models. And the quickest way to get that capital is largely getting investors on board. From that perspective it’s quite rational to release something publicly in a way that is likely to raise the profile of your company. Especially in a world where your main competitors will be training their own models anyways.

[peterlk]

Investors make for spectacular customers for a few years. You can sell them dreams! Many companies struggle when they need to pivot away from this model

[kevin_thibedeau]

Patreon and Reddit have figured out the investor grift. First to series-Z is the winner.

[laurex]

What makes you call out those 2 in particular?

[niemandhier]

Research for the model was done by the CompVis at LMU Munich. Curating the data set was supported by Laion, a German non profit and Eluther, also a non profit.

I do not know the details, but based on the fact that some of the orgs involved in the project literally exists to democratise ai, I believe that many of the stake holders in that project were adamant about open sourcing it.

[jacooper]

So the model is mostly a German product? Where are the HN comments about how the EU is behind and that they can't innovate or compete?

In this case they were actually the first to the punch(along with openAI)!

[djpr]

The nuanced version I've heard in other tech industries (bio/agri-tech) is this: a) Europe organisations and gov't does all the deep research; b) US private companies turns it into products and reap the PR and money.

In fact, I know of a huge company that does all their research in the EU, where they can get gov't funding, but then the process to turn them into products is in the US (less regulation, larger market).

[niemandhier]

Other comments highlighted some aspects, but one thing that should not be underestimated is that German hacker culture has strong anarchistic tendencies and there just is no place to be creative in cs and make money, at least not in the same way as in the us.

So lots of highly talented people just do open source in their free time or work at universities.

[fulafel]

Here are some interesting bits on deep learning vs crediting prior research from a prominent Swiss DL research pioneer: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/scientific-integrity-turing...

> As mentioned earlier,[MIR](Sec. 21) when only consulting surveys from the Anglosphere, it is not always clear[DLC] that Deep Learning was first conceived outside of it. It started in 1965 in the Ukraine (back then the USSR) with the first nets of arbitrary depth that really learned.[DEEP1-2][R8] Soon afterwards, multilayer perceptrons learned internal representations through stochastic gradient descent in Japan.[GD1-2a] A few years later, modern backpropagation was published in Finland (1970).[BP1] The basic deep convolutional NN architecture (now widely used) was invented in the 1970s in Japan[CNN1] where NNs with convolutions were later (1987) also combined with "weight sharing" and backpropagation.[CNN1a]

[surgical_fire]

It's pretty amusing how a lot of people that really don't like the EU and speak against it here are not from EU.

[rtpg]

I think there's a lot of "open core" stuff like Sentry, Tailscale (I think?), or Gitlab. Where "enough" of the house is given away in theory for you to do it yourself (but why would you do that?)

Metabase is another company I knew where they do this, but I don't know how successful they are (their hosting costs start at "way too high considering how easy the thing is to spin up", which was great for me at $PREV_JOB I suppose but)

[hakfoo]

Perhaps the business case is for "we want the Open Source product, but we're in a compliance-oriented business and need to have someone selling us a support and maintenance contract behind it."

I'd suspect the moment you touch anything with external auditing, it looks better to say "we've got a fully paid up support contract from the vendor" than "we're running v1.23.456-ubuntu-patch-357-with-chives-and-salsa that we downloaded last week."

[beckingz]

I'm concerned about Metabase because of this. Amazing project, but the cloud offering doesn't seem to be enough.

[ralph84]

> Sentry, Tailscale, or Gitlab

None of which are profitable

[breck]

We should outlaw government spending on closed source, non public domain software. That would create a huge market for open source companies to thrive. Would be a win win for everyone (except the current closed vendors who provide government with crap software and get sucker taxpayers to foot the bill).

[shagie]

The issue is not "Microsoft Office vs Libre office" but rather "how much does it cost to necessary up to the support necessary for the government office in order to support Libre office?"

Things like "ok, we can't use one drive - need a different tool," "can't use Sharepoint, need to use a different tool," and so on.

The market is there. RHEL and similar are well established.

In order to make this a "we should do this" either government IT funding needs to be significantly increased (that is difficult in the current political climate in most places) or the support offerings and staff needed for the average user (using Windows, Sharepoint, Word, Excel, Teams, and Project) needs to be competitive with the pricing that Microsoft offers.

That should be "simple" - make a company that offers the same level of support as Microsoft does for a packaged suite of software that includes easy installations, appropriately locked down desktops, call center, and so on.

And if that can't be found at the same price that Microsoft offers - then we return to the "increase government funding."

Saying "we should outlaw government spending on closed source" misses a lot of the tools out there that are needed to keep things running. Is there a FOSS (with support contracts for the stack) alternative to Cerner or Epic? SAP? ArcGIS? And that's not even getting deep at all into the niche SaaS tools that some pieces use for specific problems.

The market is there and state and local governments would likely jump at the opportunity to switch if there's a company that can offer the same functional stack with the same support for the same price or cheaper built on top of FOSS. Otherwise... persuade those state and local governments to staff up to the necessary levels to be able to hire people able to customize and support the FOSS to fit their needs and be prepared to financially support that decision.

[marcosdumay]

> Cerner or Epic? SAP? ArcGIS?

Of those only ArcGIS isn't a basic CRUD, and yes, there are plenty of open source replacements for it. It's in fact way behind the open source tools.

There aren't for the others, because they are about paying a company so you can use its other customers data, or paying it to get overpriced consultants. None of them are about software.

[vonseel]

Epic/Cerner/SAP may be CRUD apps with clunky and outdated interfaces, but I wouldn't classify them as basic. Those applications are massive and have a ton of legacy code to connect different things. I'd suspect much of the rest of their staying power does lie in the company's scale and relationships, as well as their domain knowledge. It would cost massive amounts to build a viable competitor to any of them, and you'd need people who understood the problem space well enough to know what code to write. Doesn't matter if it's just a basic CRUD app built on top of a standard RDBMS, if you don't know what features are needed.

[vineyardmike]

I agree, but realistically that’s tough. Sometimes the government just needs a tool like everyone else. And something that works and is available today off the shelf is the best you’ll get.

Sure it’d be great for government acquisitions to subsidize open source, but at what cost?

[brigandish]

Perhaps a "you can pay for closed source but must prove you looked into using open source first" kind of thing? Much like the restraints on employment immigration so that companies must try and employ locally first.

[shagie]

Hypothetically, say an organization is looking for bug tracking and project management software that is cloud hosted.

This is for 200 users and it needs 24/7 support. The budget is $30k/y.

Ahh, you could spin up Redmine on AWS for much less...

Maybe, but I'm going to need to hire a Redmine consultant to help configure it for our needs, add maintaining and updates for that instance to the sysadmin and add it to the helpdesk support - and if we really want 24/7 support, our helpdesk is only 7-5 business hours (the support is for the 'it crashed' which means that the sysadmin gets it on pager duty... but if there's an issue that's application support, so wake up an application team person who isn't on pager duty...). And there's a bug in Redmine, so either get a developer to learn Ruby (this is a Java shop) or beg the core team to fix it...

You know, Jira is looking more attractive as these likely costs start adding up - and it's a fixed price... not going to have an AWSh.. surprise if a bitcoin miner exploits an issue on the base image that didn't get updated.

Local and state governments do look at open source first. The "no cost to start" is very attractive until they get to a "this is a hard problem, you're on your own" and the costs go way past what a commercial application costs.

For government, a predictable budget so that you can ask for next year is valuable. Unknown budgetary costs are were overruns happen. A budget line item of $26,500 per year is much better than a budget line of "$0 to $50,000."

[nonfamous]

RedHat is the exception that proves the rule: no. And even in RedHat’s case, the profits came from services, not software.

[seanpquig]

Databricks is a pretty good example of a huge company built around and open source project (Spark).

[Ologn]

Was it profitable for Cygnus? Red Hat? Android? MySQL?

[gumby]

> Was it profitable for Cygnus?

We were a bootstrap so were immediately profitable.

[tomohelix]

I only see something like SD to be attractive for personal uses, not corporate. That is why I mentioned a person, not a company, as a customer.

If your product is tested and guaranteed to certain standards, like MySQL and RedHat, then that is something a company may pay for. But a user doesn't really have that high standard so they can be satisfied with just the off brand, derived stuff floating around.

[7speter]

There was that post maybe two weeks ago about the blender artist who was afraid they were out of a job because apparently some ai can do his sort of work based on prompts. Stable diffusion most definitely has use in creative industries, at the very least, being able to render a representative first draft that actual creative humans can work off of.

[sublinear]

Not MariaDB

[orra]

> around an open source product the way SD is

The Stable Diffusion models are proprietary freeware, not open source.

I wonder if, then, Stability AI wanted to sell license exceptions—namely, the ability to use the software for amoral and (mildly) immoral uses.

[bick_nyers]

A closed source NSFW model that they sell API access to... PR and legal nightmare... could be very lucrative

[ilaksh]

I pay for stability.ai because the API works and is very inexpensive.