Comment by plurgid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plurgid | Hacker News Reader

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Right all this talk of "what it takes to be a success in OSS" ... programma please!

"Success" in the OSS world is putting code out that others can use. Either they find it useful, or they don't. If they don't that's not failure. That's ... someone else put out something better, or that your user community is small or just not out there.

OSS is not a business model. It's a SHARING model.

God it's just like the music scene these days. Did you get into it for the Art? Cool you're gonna be ok. Did you get into it wanting to be a rock star? Might as well buy a lottery ticket. Your chances are better.

OSS success is providing something of use to a community that contributes back to it.

Yeah, maybe you can find a way to make a nickel off that, but that's not what it's FOR. It's not a marketplace, it's a public library.

This celebrity/glamor seeking is so apparent on github. Every single project's readme.md reads like marketing copy these days.

Just like the music scene again. Reminds me of the 90's when the record labels still had money and steamrolled the alternative scene looking for a cash grab.

> It's not a marketplace, it's a public library.

That’s the problem: we all take this particular public library for granted, but there isn’t a sustainable model for paying the librarians. Then a librarian tries a creative way to continue serving us without starving, and we tell them “you’re just doing it for fun, if you wanted to make money you shouldn’t have been a librarian!”. This is an ignorant response, because it places on the librarian’s shoulders the responsibility for solving a problem that concerns all of us - because we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.

Nope. OSS was here long before redhat and everyone else, and it will be here long after.

Because, in your analogy, the librarians are all volunteers. That’s how we got here. If the pain of not having a problem solved is great enough the volunteers will fix it. Or they won’t. If you feel like the pain level is high enough. Hey maybe YOU should try volunteering to solve it.

This is what makes OSS powerful. It is a community service. If you aren’t happy with the service p become a member of the community and contribute.

All open-source contributors are certainly not volunteers! Open-source contributors come in all shapes and sizes, and how much they get paid for it has no incidence on the quality or authenticity of their work. It does, however, have a huge impact on who can contribute, and how much.

Since we as a society rely on open-source enormously, it seems to make sense to try and allow as many people as possible to contribute as much as possible. And that requires giving up on antiquated notions that “only unpaid open-source is real open-source!”. Wouldn’t you agree?

> Since we as a society rely on open-source enormously, it seems to make sense to try and allow as many people as possible to contribute as much as possible.

We already do, anyone can do it and we shouldn't restrict that; that's the point.

> And that requires giving up on antiquated notions that “only unpaid open-source is real open-source!”. Wouldn’t you agree?

Not GP, but I most certainly don't, nor is it antiquated. For that matter, calling volunteer work "antiquated" is... A bit cynical, to say the least.

I also don't see how this follows from what you said before, could you walk me through your reasoning?

> For that matter, calling volunteer work "antiquated" is... A bit cynical, to say the least.

I emphatically did not say that volunteer work is antiquated! I myself do plenty of it - but I also acknowledge that I’m privileged to be able to afford it. What is antiquated is the notion that only unpaid work is authentic open-source work. It’s important to realize that providing unpaid labor is a luxury. If you exclude or devalue paid work, you exclude and devalue the people who cannot afford to do open-source work for free. As it turnd out, that’s the majority of people.

"The top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report are Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD, Renesas, and Mellanox."

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2017/10/2017-linux-kern...

No, it's not a community service, not really. It's a happy byproduct of some very powerful companies.

Hmm that report is confusing. I thought the fact it said sponsoring meant money donated to the linux foundation. But page 14 of that report seems to imply it’s changes contributed to the kernel. Not money.

They're paying for full time devs to work on the kernel. That counts as sponsoring on my book.

> But page 14 of that report seems to imply it’s changes contributed to the kernel. Not money.

Instead of paying LF to hire devs, they hire devs who write code that is contributed to Linux.

There’s a sustainable model for librarians who don’t want to be paid.

OSS is diverse and there are many, obviously, who don’t mind not being paid directly.

But what’s confusing is that there are proprietary licenses. Anyone who doesn’t like volunteering time to OSS can write commercial software and charge for it. That’s the model that works for them.

But the talk of a 40 year old model not being sustainable is pretty funny. It’s more sustainable because it takes so much volunteer time.

> But the talk of a 40 year old model not being sustainable is pretty funny.

It’s not the open-source model I called unsustainable, but a particular response to new forms of open-source monetization.

At any rate, the current model - of open-source as a mainstream R&D model, and as the critical infrastructure for the largest businesses in the world, primarily funded by corporate sponsorship and venture capital... that model is definitely not 40 years old.

You could argue that the model originated at the Linux hype of 1999, when Red Hat was the hottest IPO and IBM was spray-painting penguins on the sidewalks of San Francisco... Or you could argue it really started in 2004 when the Google IPO showed how much more scalable and profitable a business can be when you don’t pay software licenses.

In any case, the current model for open-source is really not that old, and it’s too early to tell how sustainable it really is.

Or you could argue that it originated with Unix coming out of Bell Labs and being passed around universities on reels of tape, with new extensions contributed along the way.

When Stallman thought seriously about open source in the 1980s, it wasn't because he was the only one to ever imagine a culture of sharing around software and information. I think he was reacting to a sense that an existing culture was being erased by growing commercial interests.

One could also argue it originated with gentleman-scholars circulating letters about their new physical science discoveries during the renaissance and feeding into the subsequent industrial revolution. But, I expect it is an emergent property of humanity which is probably exhibited throughout history and pre-history.

It's essentially the same idea of commons and culture applied to yet another domain of knowledge and technology. Was it sustainable for the first farmer to teach his techniques to another? For one chef to teach another how to prepare his dishes? Open source software can be sustainable as long as there are needs and resources available to produce and execute software that does something different or better than could be done without the software (or at a lower cost than other available options). The subsequent sale of additional copies need not be a motivating factor at all.

> Or you could argue that it originated with Unix coming out of Bell Labs and being passed around universities on reels of tape, with new extensions contributed along the way.

That was not motivated at all by the open source movement. The only reason AT&T Bell Labs didn't charge a significant amount for UNIX is because they were under a consent decree which precluded them from entering other industries at the time, see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...

It doesn't actually matter why Bell Labs allowed it to happen. The cultural evolution of Unix development involved many other participants who could not have cared less about Bell Labs' interests. The later developments reflected another phase of culture where certain people started to think about the implications and work the system to their own ends.

> That’s the problem: we all take this particular public library for granted, but there isn’t a sustainable model for paying the librarians.

I don't think the fact that RedisLabs doesn't have a sustainable revenue model indicates that open source infrastructure in general doesn't.

It's true that there are a number of relatively new venture-funded OSS infra firms that were built on a step 1, build software, step 2 ..., step 3 profit model. But I don't think that's an OSS problem so much as a startup culture problem, as the same problem is rampant in startups in other spaces.

> Then a librarian tries a creative way to continue serving us without starving

It's not particularly creative or novel; the basic outline has been tried since the 80s at least.

> This is an ignorant response, because it places on the librarian’s shoulders the responsibility for solving a problem that concerns all of us - because we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.

I don't understand this. It seems the argument is "I can't keep giving away software for free unless you pay for it". Then it isn't free software, right? Nothing wrong with that, most of us write proprietary software and sell it. If it's worth more to the people who buy it than what it cost, everyone still benefits.

We use open source software to do our work more effectively. There are all sorts of OSS projects, many entirely run by unpaid volunteers. Many people, myself included, sometimes contribute code to the OSS projects, to benefit myself and anyone else who happens to use it. I don't expect anything else.

But you can't feel entitled for people to pay you for work that we all agreed was volunteer. It's not worth it to do OSS anymore? It's ok to stop doing it. There are enough of us that are rewarded by just being able to contribute, we'll have our own projects. So, it's ok for Redislabs to make their code proprietary and make money off it, if they can. There's nothing wrong with that. But the rhetoric that boils down to "people have been stealing from us by using our code and not paying for it", "it's not fair that they are using our code and making money and not giving us any" is wrong. You gave the code away for free. That was the understanding before you wrote the code, and after it was written. That was one of the reasons people were even using the code. It's not an injustice.

When someone gives you a nice gift, they deserve your gratitude. But if they turn around and say "you never paid me for that", then it wasn't really a gift was it?

Redis remains open-source. RedisLabs is using a “hybrid” license for its enterprise add-one, with some properties of open-source but not all. So you can use the source, modify it for yourself or for others. But if you want to make money from it, you have to fork.

The goal for RedisLabs is to make more money from the enterprise add-ons they’re developing. A lot of that money (perhaps most of it) goes right back into maintaining Redis, which remains open-source.

So it absolutely is a matter of funding more open-source gifts, and not taking back gifts.

That makes sense, and like I said, I don't have a problem with what they are doing. It's what they said and how it was presented and how it has been defended. Like evil BigCorp has been stealing from them.

Just a "Hey what we are doing now isn't working, for our business model we need to make more money and we need to make some of our code around Redis proprietary so we can sell it. Don't worry, Redis itself will remain open source, free to use for everyone."

Instead it was "today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings". It was open source, they could do that. If you want to make them pay in the future, that's fine. But they aren't the bad guys for using OSS.

Anyway, I hope it works out well for RedisLabs, but I also hope that the licensing of OSS software is simple and open.

> we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.

This way of thinking is, in my opinion, destructively pessimistic. Everything is not always a zero sum gain. We can all benefit more than we contribute and it can still be sustainable. For example, 10 people can spend 10% of their time on a project, and get something out of it that is worth 50% of their time. They took the equivalent of 1 persons work and made it worth 5 people's work. I think most popular OSS projects are orders of magnitude more effective than that at creating benefit. Thousands of people contributing code, a few times a year, makes a project that supports all their careers and provides software that benefits society as a whole.

I get that the problem is the undue burden on the relatively few people who organize this work for really big projects. I've noticed that some of these people are employed by large corporations who encourage their OSS work, because the result, and the thousands of contributions from others they harness are very valuable to these organizations.

I wouldn't be surprised if the large corporations that were listed as the ones using Redis software without paying for it would be willing to sponsor a few employees to represent their interests in the OSS projects. That works for the individual engineers, but that doesn't exactly work for RedisLabs to make $$. So I still don't see RediLabs as a beleaguered crusader trying to save OSS.

What if I want to open source my code so that people can use it, but also I want to make money from it?

Why is that nothing something we should reconcile? Why is that not "sharing"?

Then find a way to make money of it? These are not exclusive.

Making software open source doesn't mean you can't make money from it. Depending on the details of what you build, who uses it, how you license it, etc., it may be harder to make money from it than if you made it proprietary. But that certainly isn't something you can just take as a given. You also can't take it as a given that the project would make money if it was closed source either. Maybe you made something nobody needs. Or they need it, but there are better alternatives out there (possibly some that are Open Source). Who's to say?

Somebody yesterday (maybe DannyBee, not sure) made a very insightful comment in saying that sometimes the value created by Open Source software is created exactly because it's Open Source.

Anyway, you can always charge for software even if the code is Open Source. You can stick it on the web and make it a SaaS app, or you can make the source available but charge to download binaries (ala JBoss back in the day), or you can make source and binaries freely available and sell subscriptions, etc. Aaah, wait, I know, you're asking "who would buy a subscription for something that's free to download?" Companies. Companies will, for things that are mission critical, because they typically need for their to be a contractual relationship (eg, somebody to sue) in place. Or you have a manager who needs to spend her budget or lose it, and she understands that you need to make a profit in order to stay alive and keep enhancing the software. Etc., etc, yadda, yadda, ad infinitum. My point is, it's not as simple as "Oh, I made this Open Source, so there's no way to profit from it".

I think you mean this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818407#17819123

Quote at the end:

The underlying issue they are trying to solve is that developers believe they should be able to extract some of the wealth they feel they created. In open source, that wealth is often only created because the software was free. Otherwise, people would have used something else that was free but worked well enough. Developers like to often argue this isn't true, but history shows it to be true basically always :) So saying you should be able to extract this wealth is probably wrong. Saying you should be able to get paid a reasonable amount of money is not.

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