What are examples of successful(profitable) open source companies?
Pure open source software companies are relatively few in number but companies that contribute to open source and profit from that open source in that they have a lot more people working on the code and taking care of bug spotting and bug fixing is considerable.
One nice example of that is Basecamp.
Open source companies that are successful are acquired at a relatively high rate so they don't usually last as such independently.
Acquisitions aren't success though. It's just "failing upwards" for the founders. Successful companies are self sustaining.
Companies are utterly un-important, they are simply vehicles.
Companies exist as an attempt to get all the money in the world, and most fail that goal. Apple is pretty close. Refusal to acknowledge failure as failure is pathological insanity. Getting paid to fail (or to "soft land" and save face on an outright failure) doesn't mean the fail didn't happen.
Well, that's what I said, companies are vehicles.
> It's difficult to retire on "product dividends.
But you can retire on corporate dividends. And when a companies shares are acquired you either get money or shares in the acquiring company.
> Companies exist as an attempt to get all the money in the world
How do you square that with 'it is hard to retire on product dividends'? Companies pay out dividends to their shareholders.
Companies clearly do not exist to 'get all the money in the world' because then the economy would grind to a halt.
> and most fail that goal.
All companies fail that goal. They fail every time they buy new resources, pay out salaries, rent offices, pay out dividends and so on.
In fact, the worst thing for a company is to have a whole pile of cash and nothing to do with it, that's money that is not currently working for the company in a meaningful way. That's why companies tend to manage their liquid reserves very carefully.
> Apple is pretty close.
Close to getting all the money in the world? No, not even remotely close. And even all that money that Apple has is indirectly owned by the shareholders of Apple. Either Apple will have to spend it or they will have to pay out. Having it sit there does them no good.
> Refusal to acknowledge failure as failure is pathological insanity.
Are you calling me insane in a roundabout way?
> Getting paid to fail (or to "soft land" and save face on an outright failure) doesn't mean the fail didn't happen.
Oh, that happens. But it's pretty rare. But better than chapter 11 if that's the alternative.
It takes one to know one.
But it's pretty rare.
Pretty rare? That's back to the beginning, because every acquisition means the bought company has explicitly failed to become "real" in a make-more-than-we-spend (and continually grow the "make more") sense.
But better than chapter 11 if that's the alternative.
I'd rather see 20-somethings lose everything and learn tough, introspective, life changing lessons, than see them running around with their "soft landing" $10 million paydays just because they had the right connections.
I think we're done here.
Either the founders/investors/employees succeed, or their product succeeds, but the company can never succeed absent of one/both of the above.
Maybe you care more about the company. You certainly shouldn't project your personal beliefs onto others. Many founders would love to see their pet idea continue without the tedium of running a company. Many founders and employees would be similarly happy to trade in the company letterhead for a bigger paycheck. It's only "selling out" if one was more in love with the idea of the company than with the idea of the product, and frankly I can see few reasons other than ego for that to be the case.
But it's a blatant, raw, undeniable failure when a company lets itself get acquired no matter how much money changes hands.
(this is one of the topics that induce harsh West Coast Cognitive Dissonance because it goes against what the billionaire priests of finance tell you to believe about your life)
You mean that when Intel acquired Altera that was a failure, and when Microsoft acquired Mojang that was a failure too? And Google with Android and so on. All 'blatant, raw, undeniable failures' according to you.
The 'end' is but a moment and it's very well possible to have a success even if it ends in one way or another. Success is a measure of the total net effect a company had. if the net effect was negative then a company can be classed a failure, if the net effect was positive then the company was a success.
Selling out is to sell a company with the specific intent to shut it down, that's different.
Let's take Mojang as an example. Mojang was run for many years by the same people. Maybe they simply got tired of it and wanted to move on to other things. Having a significant chunk of money in the bank is generally considered to be a good thing and from what I see minecraft is still working just fine. I find it hard to square that deal with the meaning of the word 'failure'. That's just trying to be too clever for my taste I prefer a simpler and more direct interpretation of words, this cleverness is really rather tiresome.
It looks as if the whole thing is constructed in such a way that it a negative association is attached to the success of others in a way that says more about the user of the words than about the people and events that it is supposed to describe.
Also...Zimbra...holy crap. Not a good product.
Varnish maybe?
Ansible (now RedHat!), Salt, Puppet likely
Citrix via Xen should be doing alright
I've been involved in Open Source based businesses for almost two decades now, and I still don't grasp how to build a billion dollar business on entirely open source software (though I've made a decent living at it most of that time). But, I stubbornly keep trying.
Get you software installed on every machine in every DoD HPC facility, and probably a lot of DoE too.
But, clearly that's not what's in play here. It's difficult to be an open source startup because it's easy to get a big ego and start doing software wrong. You don't get people to use your software by saying "LOOK! We have VCs. Trust us. Buy our support contracts!"
You get people to use your software by making good features, growing by word of mouth, then you're entrenched and can start milking the support cow. Your word-of-mouth features don't even have to work (coughmongocough), they just have to be easy to brag about so developers get ego boosts by telling others "hey, look, i found this thing and you should think I'm cool because I'm telling you about it."
Another really important point: open source companies aren't proven. The current crop of open source startup VC funded happy towns are all experiments. It's very possible you can't create sustainable open source software companies (support contracts aren't zero margin software products, and nobody buys software anymore because lol "it's free!!!"). There's no natural "supernormal profit" engine if you make a good, clean, understandable open source product. In fact, it's actually the opposite: open source companies get big when the product is garbage (or too complex) because then everybody needs support to CYA against higher management.
(I've been thinking about writing a few articles about all this in January. Stay tuned.)
Open source would definitely be eating the world... though quite a few companies wouldn't be very happy in the process.
That is the end goal, right? Your margin is my opportunity. The problem in the middle is: open source software is considered free-as-in-never-pay-me free.
I have multibillion dollar companies using some of my open source software. They've never paid me anything. They ask for bug fixes and feature improvements that would take me six months (or more) of full time work. They don't offer to pay (or then even balk at the thought), they just keep saying "you should support us for free because it's open source."
Part of the "we won't/can't pay" is due to programmers being very low status people in organizations. Programmers don't have budgets to buy anything because "lol free open source" and "it's just code, do whatever." If programmers could allocate resources towards getting features/fixes they need from external projects, the software world could be more... synergistic.
If you ever do business with corporations, you will get used to the fact, that they will for the moon and expect it for free. It is your task to tell them, what you expect to be paid and stick to it. They won't volunteer any money they don't have to, and will use any excuse that will make it possible (the procurement bonuses depend on money saved). It's up to you to not accept that excuse.
Except, the company endpoint is a low status programmer.
Imagine how quickly the average programmer would get laughed out of the room if they went to their manager and asked for $100,000 to pay an external contractor to implement a feature they need. Oh, also the feature will be open source and other companies will be able to use it after it's written too.
The world doesn't operate on that level yet outside of maybe seven companies in the world.
And if management refuses to allocate a budget for donating back to open source projects (either in developer time or in money) then developers should tell their coworkers that the company they work for is not an open-source friendly company. They're not doing their part to give back to the community of developers who are working so hard in their spare time to make what they do possible. I think the last thing companies want is to build a wall between management and their developer teams like that.
When the default position of management is to fight progress (or hoard private profits enabled by using public goods), playing the role of docile puppies and kittens won't enact change.
Those corporations who do not have good hearts and do not make good choices within their leadership will ultimately lose to those that do. Darwinism in full effect.
EDIT: In fact one of my ideas for a while now is to have a standardized disclosure that corporations could use to publicize to the world how they give back to the open source community (specifically and generally). This public disclosure would be primarily used as a recruiting tool. Eventually if it became big enough, the assumption would be that those who are not disclosing are probably not contributing. Huge implications as a recruiting tool IMO.
And it's not a lot to ask. It's not like you're asking for even $1000's of dollars. Khan Academy I think set the bar when they announced a while back they would allocate $5/mo/developer to allow each developer to donate to open source projects as they saw fit. If a company with a large team of developers can't afford something as simple as that then they have bigger problems.
There have been other models for open-source software companies, such as the "sell some defaults to advertisers or sponsors".
If someone could manage to work out the details, I think the open-source ecosystem would respond favorably to a bitcoin approach to revenue share (which would make it explicitly not "open source", but I think people are willing to forgive this violation). The hard part is figuring out how to negotiate with thousands of separate tiny "open-source" components, without project leaders making demands too ridiculous.
At the same time, we don't really want a race-to-the-bottom of poorly-maintained software projects just because someone figured reimplementation could net him a bunch of revenue if he prices everything lower... presumably this cuts into long-term software maintenance, which is something that a good system would ideally incentivize both from the perspective of library authors but also from the perspective of software purchasers, who don't want to suffer from bitrot.
(Another approach could be "performance targets" where bonds are created by library authors, but funded by company purchasers, who would be buying up some amount of technical debt in exchange for rights to deploy and use the software in their production environments. These bonds would then pay out to the library author team based on milestones, like long-term maintenance, or fixing scaling bugs, or something... But similar problems remain regarding how to handle the negotiation between thousands of tiny library authors vs companies that don't have 1000s of hours to waste on software negotiation..... Also lots of questions about "rebundling"- we can't have negotiations with all 100k library authors between themselves and some company just to strike a deal for the company to use an Ubuntu-like software system. Answer is probably something like "have an array of default ready-to-go contracts that any new business can use, and then have terms for renegotiation after a certain period of time or certain amount of revenue accumulation by the downstream company"..)
Yeah, it's the "nobody is ever going to pay for bash, vim, top, netcat, ..." problem.
Apple has found a good middle ground though. Pay developers millions of dollars internally (infinitely growing stock) then they release what they work on as open source code. It solves the (reasonable) compensation problem for individuals while letting new software spread purposefully throughout the world.
We're just missing a middle ground where you can write open source software while not being owned by the most valuable company in the world.
What do they release as open source code, apart from TextEdit? I am really surprised by your comparison since it seems to me that the two (bash, vim, top, netcat… and Apple's open source code) do not compare at all.
(competition-free platforms are never a good thing, no matter how many times you pray to your zero-to-one god)
What are examples of successful (profitable) proprietary software companies?