[eclark]

Open source has a lot of issues:

- The anchoring principal. Once you have set the that the software is free, humans expect it to be free forever and all related things are judged off the initial impressions' price bucket. Humans will never want to pay for it later. It's judged worthless.

Open-core and closed-source addons and support models have misaligned principles. The community wants things to be easy to use and opinionated, while the OSS company wants to include as many customers as possible who need or want your help with their niche choices.

- Sustainability is awful. If you start an open source project you're either going to burn yourself and the community out, or require funding to do it as a day job. So, if you want the project not to stop early, you need money to pay for developers to make software better.

- Larger companies want something opinionated but rarely what's good for most of the community. So eventually when big tech/big industry is paying for developers to work on the project, there's a point where the large company will want their cake and the community is hostage. Do that enough times and the large company forks internally and the community fractures or withers out.

Source: I was at Cloudera while the Big Data craze took off. Then, I did open source for large tech.

[random3]

Hey Elliott, long time . I think the key issue is with the assumption that anything beyond the license will happen. Any assumption that there's another (moral?) contract is wrong. If the OSS is free, then the product can't be the OSS. Any unaligned incentives can put the community in conflict which is something that was common in the Apache ecosystem. So the problem is not with OSS itself, but the sustainability assumptions around some OSS efforts.

[eclark]

Hey Cosmin long time!

I agree the contract should be clear up front. Changing expectations later is a big problem. People want to give away the software for a while, using it as a loss leader to get attention while not being honest about their later need for money to fund the ongoing concern.

I tried to write a little bit about that in my post here: https://www.batteriesincl.com/posts/fairsource

I was starting Batteries Included and had been writing it in Elixir. I want to give back to the community, show how to use Phoenix/Live view, and be transparent about what users are running, etc. However, I also know that if this will work long-term, I can not give it away to everyone forever. So it's better to be honest about things as early as possible.

We paid a very smart lawyer to draft the best compromise we could as early as possible.

https://www.batteriesincl.com/LICENSE-1.0

This means we can develop in the open here: https://github.com/batteries-included/batteries-included while also giving it away long term and still being honest that this will require some long-term revenue stream. That revenue stream will come from the companies using it on larger installs.

[einpoklum]

> Humans will never want to pay for it later. It's judged worthless.

The latter sentence absolutely does not follow from the first. To illustrate with an example: Is Linux (the kernel, or any GNU/Linux distribution) worthless?

Plus, we should also remember that most people who use non-gratis software, don't pay for it; they just copy it. The most common examples are probably Microsoft Windows and Office.

[eclark]

Linux powers just about every major datacenter in there world. Every ML model was trained on Linux. However if you tried to make a company as powerful and successful as Microsoft you would fail.

Red Hat is the only company that has really made a living off of Linux. Even then, their contracts are orders of magnitudes less than the exact same customers will be paying Microsoft.

Linux is successful and remarkable and every company sees the value in having it around. So there's a shared mutual need. However, that doesn't mean that anyone can make it into more than barely scraping by as a going business.

[eclark]

To put this in terms of why.

When MS rolls up, they say we are charging for your usage of the MS database, Office, Outlook, Microsoft Windows 11, and the security promises. They are explicit that developing with and on Microsoft allows you access to the ecosystem. So the total bill is high, but part of that bill is a gateway into everyone else using Office, Outlook, Excel, Visual Studio, or SharePoint. The world runs on Excel and MS enterprise sales know that. They are negotiating a contract for one-of-a-kind software and access to the world of MS.

Redhat rolls up saying we want to charge you. They don't get to say that if you don't pay, the company will lose access to the software or the ecosystem. They don't get to say they are gatekeepers to other Linux users. Redhat can't claim to be giving the database or the development environment; everyone thinks they are free. If you stop paying Redhat, you probably can find an almost package for package compatible alternative in a rolling release (source: watched that happen multiple times CentOS, et al). So instead Redhat sells a contract for service, support, and indemnity. Those are great products and Red Hat will continue for a long time. They will just have very different staying power when contracts are renewed. They will have very different revenue growth.

It's not how I want it to be, just how I see it.

Source: Worked at MS and have friends who are former Redhat.

[AstralStorm]

Unfortunate other fact is because RedHat is a bigger brand, its developers hold undue sway in the community and have a tendency to offload work onto others, while also resisting suggestions and particular contributions.

Happens every time they mess with a critical system and change a standard.

[einpoklum]

RedHat can be said to have foisted GNOME and systemd upon us. They don't have control, but their sway has been enough to put us in this pair of holes and we're far from getting out of them.

[simne]

> Humans will never want to pay for it later. It's judged worthless.

I see classic business issue, people usually resistant to price grow and classic example to begin with free product, then ask to pay even small amount.

And unfortunately, world is constantly changing, and in large number of cases, inputs become more expensive (for example with inflation) and business have to somehow compensate costs and in many cases this just means raise price (or change something free to paid).

So most businesses constantly deal with this issue.

Have you talked about this with business analyst?