[rmbyrro]

I'm not saying it's bad or impossible, just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind. If you want to use it that way and it works for you, great.

The thing is that support services aren't scalable. Many software businesses want a scalable source of revenue, that's why they go for cloud services.

They don't want to compete with copy cats, though, because they want monopoly-level margins.

Then they complain that Open Source won't let them have those astounding margins.

This is not an issue with Open Source licenses.

[jraph]

> that's why they go for cloud services.

We also have this.

> just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind

Yep. Free software was designed with user rights in mind. Open source was then designed to sell the idea of free software to companies, removing the "user rights" parts, which sounded frightening to businesses, focusing on the development model, targeting developers and not users. Free software is defined with the famous 4 rules, open source is based on the open source manifesto, basically a copy of the Debian Free Software Guideline (from the Debian project, which, coincidentally, was closer to the Free Software Spirit at the time, probably still is). They are both about the same set of software and licenses, for the most part.

There's nothing in those texts / philosophies about doing business, for or against (only that free software was explicitly designed to allow selling software, because why not - and at the time, to distribute software, you probably had to copy it to floppy disks and give them, so you had some copy cost to absorb). It's indeed up to businesses to figure out the business model around FLOSS.

But that's true of many things, isn't it?

[rmbyrro]

Sure, just don't complain about Open Source licenses after you chose it for your business. And don't claim it to be open source when open source doesn't work for your business.

You choose open source or you don't. Either way is fine. Just take responsibility for your decision.

It's simple, really. I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business... It's not meant for that.

[jraph]

Ah, totally agree with this.

> I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business

Well, life is hard, things are not always easy, running am business is difficult and stressful, looking for ways to make open source profitable is noble, and also investors who "gave" an absurd amount of money want it back plus some more, of course.