Comment by mehrdada | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mehrdada | Hacker News Reader

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Why does it blow your mind? Various obvious and sane reasons for this, including cost. I bet many of those companies you have in mind “buy” Windows and macOS, and if they are sufficiently big, most certainly buy Oracle or SAP for their corporate operations, finances, and accounting. It’s usually only the production side of sufficiently large internet-scale companies that is biased towards building. Most of the time you can easily explain it with “it’s cheaper than the contract with supplier”. Often, it is strategic ownership over your fate and not being locked into the vendor that comes into play as well. The vendor positioning in the market and its leverage may also change over time and pose a risk down the road (getting acquired, changing focus, abandoning the product, going out of business, etc.) Many times it is just that their problem is so unique to their scale that the generic solution does not technically work for them or the pricing model is not designed to be a fit.

In the particular case of nginx, I can tell you their reputation is not great in adapting to the users’ needs.

I think the point was a financially successful company not contributing to an open source project even after making a bunch of money just seems un-ethical? Maybe I'm old-school but I still think we should be supporting each other in this type of situation especially if one of us strikes it big? Sure - move away from Nginx but maybe throw some $ their way for the service they provided even if you don't legally have to ...

I did not infer that from the OP’s comment, but in any case, I don’t know the specifics of their arrangement or whether they had been a commercial customer or not. Last time I checked Nginx had been doing fine selling itself for half a billion.

But more abstractly, I don’t actually agree with that sentiment. I see more of a responsibility to give back in the form of patches and collaboration than throwing $ at the problem. I see the nginx approach of open source simply as a business tactic no different from Windows Home/Pro customer segmentation except Home is free for tactical reasons to kill off other competition. It is a calculated business move; if your business model sucks-—which it obviously did not in nginx case—-does not imply others are acting less than ethically or they should pay you out of pity. (That said it might be strategically important for them to keep your head above water and survive for their own benefit as their vendor, but that’d be a different angle.)

I suppose the difference between free software vs open source is also relevant to this discussion, and I could relate to your sentiment when facing the former much more than the latter.

All fine and dandy, except that those patches and collaboration don't pay bills.

> patches and collaboration don't pay bills.

implying that just because your open source project is being used, that it is entitled to fund the bills of the project maintainers.

I think patches and contributions are a form of bill paying.

Get that “implying” crap out of here, this isn’t 2008 4chan.

Something should pay for the bills and if the oss project creates lots of real value then I would prefer to live in a world where some of that value goes to pay the bills. The alternative world simply discourages oss since devs would have to work other jobs. There is qualitative difference when you have a dedicated core team vs just everyone contributing patches.

Patches and contributions take a non-negligible amount of time and resources to review, test and integrate, as well as adding to the ongoing maintenance burden. They might be welcome, but they are absolutely not cost-free and I wouldn't consider them a "form of bill paying", the benefit (if any) is far too indirect and it doesn't directly help the bottom-line in any way.

When supermarkets and landlords start accepting them, then yes.

Could it be that OSS is simply not a sustainable business model for the long haul and it was simply successful in a period of history when vast money was made quickly by landgrab expansion of technology to consolidate/provide many basic services and the code itself wasn’t the competitive differentiator? I don’t know but that’s a possibility too. I question why one would be concerned in keeping OSS alive, as a business, assuming it cannot survive on its own feet. There’s no inherent reason OSS should somehow forcefully live. It’s already changing its character via AGPL and Mongo license-style things in the face of AWS cloud simply deploying and milking cash.

(The above is assuming the concern that it is funding that’s a problem today; I don’t quite see it that way [for instance, I strongly suspect Nginx to have made more money than DBX so far, so who are we to say who’s been more successful; market cap ain’t everything], but that’s a hypothetical to think about.)

Moreover, supporting a project does not equate supporting its existing maintainers. It could mean taking some partial ownership including the review side and having some developers on your own payroll. Seems like that’s how the big project are done most of the time. The Open Core model we are focusing on is a niche and arguably more akin to fremium products than free software as a thing with communal ownership.

The serendipity was GPL getting uptake thanks to Linux and GCC.

Linux via the ongoing lawsuit with BSD back then, and GCC because UNIX vendors started charging for their compilers, with GCC being the only alternative available.

However everyone needs to pay their bills, therefore the push for non-copyleft licenses, thus in a couple of years GPL based software will either be gone, or under dual licenses.

You already see this happening with BSD/MIT based alternatives to Linux on the IoT space, NuttX, RTOS, Azure RTOS, Zephyr, Google's Fuchsia, ARM's mbed, Arduino, ...

>> "There’s no inherent reason OSS should somehow forcefully live"

What on earth does this tirade even mean? Every business lives 'forcefully' and fights for survival. Sometimes it comes with values, i.e. we dont use child labour in DRK to mine thallium, fairtrade, organic, etc. OSS is one of those values.

Is there a business that lives 'effortlessly'?

FOSS doesn't have anything to do with values, or do you refuse FOSS software tainted by corporation's contributions that don't share your values?

Because then it is going to be a very thin selection available.

FOSS software absolutely has value in an of itself, and I will take it even if it comes from satan himself.

As chirchill once said: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."

> OSS is simply not a sustainable business model

OSS is not a business model, but more closely matches charity and non-profits, and run on donations and altruism of their users.

i find it annoying that people here keep saying that a company _should_ pay for their open source software usage just because they have money to do so. They don't have an obligation. They could donate - and some do - but it is in no way required of them, regardless of how much value they derive from using said OSS.

Open-core projects, which has a somewhat useless core and a paid for 'enterprise' version is not, under my eyes, a proper OSS project, but instead is a way to market their proprietary product.

Often big companies employ people directly to work on open source projects that they use heavily. That does pay the bills.

Big companies like Dropbox....

For what’s it worth, many companies have a hard time justifying “unnecessary” expenses to their boards or shareholders. Depending on company structure, their hands may be somewhat tied.

Not all companies, of course; and to be clear, I think such a company structure is a problem itself and agree with you.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a board or shareholders who think 'support contract for essential component of our infrastructure' is 'unnecessary'.

To clarify, I meant that it can be hard to convince the board to donate money to an OSS project when there is no "need."

Just to be clear: the product I was sell was not OSS and the product they were building was not OSS. That's why it blew my mind.

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