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Comment by super3 | Hacker News Reader

What really should happen is that the large cloud companies (really just Google, Amazon, and Azure) should be providing a portion of the revenue generated to the open source projects. The open source companies would make more features and drive more usage. Everybody wins. It makes no sense that the large cloud providers make billions off OSS, and don't give something more sustainable back. Classic tragedy of the commons.

Disclaimer: My company Storj is building a distributed Amazon S3 competitor and we are actually partnered with MongoDB. We share revenue with MongoDB for any customers they bring us.

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Your 3 examples have a LOT of swes that work full time on open source/cncf projects not to mention they're platinum members of CNCF/Linux Foundation, etc. So I think that's a bit disingenuous. They're not funnelling billions into those tunnels but a huge majority of contributors are Redhat, Google, Coreos, Huawei, Alibaba, Intel and various other big names that definitely use open source tech and provide a huge benefit to us that are consuming it. K8s is moving so fast it's hard to even follow.

Kubernetes was donated to CNCF and there are a lot of Google SWEs working on "removing Google" from the actual project to make it more cloud native.

I really have a hard time picturing the success of CNCF/etc without the big names.

From a global perspective it looks pretty fair that some company uses a lot of open source software and also contributes a lot. But it doesn't get anyone paid. If you're toiling away unpaid on Redis or MongoDB or whatever, the fact that Google gave the world k8s does not help you.

> the fact that Google gave the world k8s does not help you.

so google should give everything away AND also need to pay to every open source project, besides that smaller player don't?

sorry the world does not work like that. open source means giving and taking, not only taking. google might not be an angel, however restricting them to pay - OPEN SOURCE, non restrictive work - is just silly.

> Toiling away unpaid

I’d hazard a guess that even the most prolific open source individual contributors use more open source software written by others than they contribute to.

Nobody individually, could really ‘pull their weight’ with respect to contributing back to the community. I doubt most corporations could feasibly contribute back more software than they use, even if they tried.

How much of the money donated to organizations like CNCF or the Linux Foundation goes to the individual contributors who build these products?

They do help in some respects: I don't think Kubernetes would be as successful were it not for the big conferences put on by the CNCF. And, of course, lots of companies actually are contributing code back to Kubernetes particularly (and Linux, and some other projects). But there are also a lot of popular open source projects which are used by lots of big companies but don't get either code or money from them.

Isn't this the point of licensing?

The author or company building the software requires money in exchange for using their software. The revenue acquired through the license is then use to pay for additional development.

Revenue sharing seems to imply some kindness / goodwill agreement.

I reckon they’re doing what people from some parts call a commission

Paying for a license won’t get you customers but paying for referrals will

I'm looking forward to trialing the Storj product. Did you use something like http://outwork.com to setup the deal? How does a partnership like that formulate?

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