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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Why does one have to make money with open source?

Making money is really a shorthand for sustainability. If developers aren't paid, their code can easily fall into disrepair which hurts all their users.

Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service?

They may not make any modifications and those modifications wouldn't contribute to sustainability anyway. Developers can't eat contributions, so if a project is going to have any full-time developers then money needs to enter the system somewhere.

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> If developers aren't paid, their code can easily fall into disrepair which hurts all their users.

I agree with you, but I also work in a place where we operate 35 year old medical software that hasn’t needed a change in more than two decades.

I know that’s unique and most of the stuff we build today will be out of rotation and obsolete in 5 years, but maybe we should have a conversation about the sustainability of modern software?

I work in the public sector by the way, we operate around 10 different open source projects where I work, and we generally want them build to need as few changes as possible because developers are expensive. We do build for the web, as so many others, but we’ve actually achieved a ton of sustainable by using old slow moving techs like Django rather than more modern stuff.

The simple truth is that we wouldn’t be able to afford open source software if we build it like most people build software these days.

If all their users are threatening to switch to some AWS managed service because it is better for them, then perhaps the software should fall into disrepair and the developers should get other jobs. There isn't anything wrong with this, it happens all the time.

It's probably true that Amazon is able to accomplish this only through strong-arm tactics, but it also seems unfortunate that Redis Labs feels the need to resort to similar strong-arm tactics in retaliation. It doesn't invite anything besides more pressure from Amazon and companies like it. Nobody wins in this in this scenario, especially not the customers who now have no refuge because both competitive offerings are trying to rope them into participating in a turf war.

It's a free-rider problem - if large cloud companies fork every successful open source infrastructure project, don't contribute back, and pull away a significant chunk of users, then there's a lot less incentive for other companies to invest in future open source development, because they'll have fewer users and get fewer code contributions.

Potentially that shifts things from a good equilibrium where everyone reaps the benefit of many people contributing to the same projects, to a bad equilibrium where every major cloud player develops closed-source products separately.

I don't think it affects all open-source projects, particularly not small ones or ones where some is scratching their own it. But it's hard to build certain types of complex production-quality infrastructure without full-time employed developers working on it.

What jobs? How can the developers get other jobs if no one is paying for their open source software in the first place?

I don't understand, there are still lots of companies that fund FOSS. Publishing FOSS doesn't mean you can't go out of business, it means customers get an additional layer of protection from you going out of business or deciding you don't want to be in a certain market anymore, as Redis Labs has clearly done here.

Sure, those companies make money, ergo why people want to be able to make money while working on FOSS.

> Making money is really a shorthand for sustainability. If developers aren't paid, their code can easily fall into disrepair which hurts all their users.

I agree, for many, though not all, developers and projects. Crucially, a lot of folks who can't currently afford to do free work for reputation or personal edification can't currently afford to release open source.

But I also think the money point emphasizes how unfortunate the term "sustainability" is. Typical software businesses don't seek sustainability. They seek profitability. Why should the developers they depend on settle for getting by?

"Profit" has a corporate, rent-seeking connotation to it. In my own side projects and writing, I've come to prefer "gainful", as in "gainful open software development".

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