Comment by ff317 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ff317 | Hacker News Reader

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No personal offense intended, but I really /hate/ this justification. "Open Source" should not be equated with "Hobby Projects". It should be possible to run large-scale important things on pure open source.

My employer (Wikimedia, which is a non-profit) has been running all our server infra on pure open source for many years, for very principled reasons. We even publish all of our internal infrastructure config in public git repos as well. We're an open-source-only shop that's doing very non-hobby work. We have thousands of servers, we run our own CDN on multiple continents, we have somewhere around a billion unique users per month, and our average global rate of inbound HTTP requests is around 135K/second.

However, it keeps getting harder to stick to our open source principles every year as more projects shift towards open-core models with this kind of "Anyone who needs feature X is surely a big corporation making billions who doesn't mind running closed source software" type of thinking. It's not just bad for us, it's bad for the whole larger open source and Internet ecosystems if all the important bits for running at scale are locked up and hidden away in closed-source software.

This is a rather weird point to make, considering the way Wikipedia has handled the collection and usage of funds. Investing in its technical infrastructure would be a less controversial usage of their money than what they are doing currently.

What are they currently doing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36029115

As a theoretical exercise, I'm not sure that's strictly true. If you're reliant on donations, then income is never guaranteed. If you suddenly fall short of targets, maybe you have to lay some staff off. But stopping your license fees means you then have to pay someone to switch to an alternative.

Avoiding recurring payments you can't easily stop makes reasonable financial sense to me. Particularly for a business that doesn't sell anything.

Let’s say you need a feature in nginx. You can either pay for an nginx plus license, or fork the oss nginx and develop the feature in-house.

Many people assume that developing it in-house is a one-time cost. However, in my experience, code is not an asset but a liability for which you will have to pay interest in the form of maintenance. More specifically, in this case there will most likely need to be adjustments made to the in-house extension as the oss nginx version it was built on top is being updated over the years.

My point here is that you should probably treat in-house code as a recurring cost, because in practice it usually is.

The question then becomes which recurring cost is higher: The license or the in-house maintenance?

As a theoretical exercise, you could also choose to "lavish" funds on the developers of the OSS platform instead of a recurring license fee for use, accomplishing a more outreach oriented use of funds than paying non-profit "employees" north of market with remarkable packages. If funds get tight, you can simply stop laving on the OSS, while enjoying ongoing use. Such a license can definitely be arranged -- I've done it at scale.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I am so glad that wikimedia is pushing to stay truly open source.

Accepting these "sprinkles on top" licenses is highly foolish. I do hope that the true free and open source licensed software prevails in the server space. As many as possible must continue to hold out and push forward with new better and better scalable fully open source software.

> My employer (Wikimedia, which is a non-profit) has been running all our server infra on pure open source for many years, for very principled reasons

Curious how deep does it go? Do you only use firmware in server which has open source code. Do you require all drivers to be open source?

> It should be possible to run large-scale important things on pure open source.

It is definitely possible. With enough developer time, you could create copy of any software. Every paid or open core software runs on the philosophy that it is cheaper to pay them rather than to build them.

Which brings to the core issue, developer time is not free or cheap. The fact is that software quality and reliability is dependent on the money that the software has means paid software quality in general should be higher. While wikimedia could get enough money through donation, no one donates to open source projects that could be counted in full time developer salary, likely not even wikipedia(correct me if wrong).

You are very much the exception that proves the rule. What other non-profit needs anything close to that kind of capacity?

The NFL was a non-profit from 1942 till 2015.

nginx opensource is more than enough to have a very capable solution. All bells and whistles that are fenced off are more or less for people who don't want to bother engineering their infrastructure properly. Or can't do that for a reason. The only thing that may really be needed is name resolution inside an upstream. But you can work around it in many cases. If there is something you need in OSS - consider asking in a mailing list. Best case - you'll have a workaround (an unlikely outcome: feature will be moved to OSS). Worst case - you lose nothing, don't you? It's quite difficult to get a decent feedback on a thing like a webserver. You can't add a pop-up window or email your users. You have to rely on an active feedback. A vague comment somewhere in the internet doesn't count as such.

You are correct, but you are an outlier. The vast majority of organizations who are serving the quantity of requests trust Wikimedia is serving, are commercial entities.

DevExpress is closed source, but they give sources to customers under a promise that they won't leak. Maybe nginx can do something like that? Or openresty has a module for your needs?

This is called “source available”,l and is not the same thing as “open source”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

In case they worry there's something horrible hidden there.

Have you tried contacting nginx and explain the usecase/problem as you did here? A lot of software companies have different or free licenses for cases like yours.

In Wikimedia's case it's more likely a matter of principle than cost. They have plenty of money despite what the donation popups make it seem. They want open source because it's open, not because it's cheap.

AFAICT nginx has a true open-source edition, which anybody can fork. Was there enough interest in the community in developing SCH features in the open-source code base?

Most large projects make money. Wikipedia is one of them (they have more than sufficient funds). If you are a company that writes open source software you have to earn money somehow. I think aiming paid features at customers that make money (i.e. large enterprises) is logical.

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