Comment by eins1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eins1234 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't really want to get into the moral rabbit-hole of who's right and wrong as that's clearly super controversial and subjective.

But I did want to add my personal anecdote to serve as a canary-in-the-mine on what effect the status quo could perceivably have on the proliferation of open source software over the long term:

I think we can all agree on the basic premise that having more open source software is a good thing for society.

For the longest time I dreamed of creating my own open source tools and products and simultaneously monetizing it to create a comfortable life for myself and maybe even eventually turning it into something bigger, and leave my mark on the world.

However, as the years past and events like ElasticSearch v Amazon unfolded, I became more and more disillusioned on the realistic prospects of such an outcome.

Today, I'm in the process of building something that would probably see more success in terms of adoption and do more good in the world if it's released as open source software, but at this point I've basically made up my mind to release it as proprietary software to have a realistic shot of monetizing it to achieve financial independence and eventually build a company around it.

Basically I've weighed the tradeoffs and chose to put my own ability to capture the value of what I created over trying to maximize the value my software could create if open sourced.

This was not a easy decision for me to make, but I suspect I'm not alone in having thought about these tradeoffs and reaching these same conclusions. And as more and more people witness the struggles of companies trying to build viable businesses on top of open source software, more and more people could make the same decision, and thus society would be robbed of all the value that having these pieces of software as open source could have created.

I think the chilling effect these kinds of case studies have on the proliferation of new open source software, and the loss incurred by society as a whole as a result, is at the core of what we should be trying to figure out a solution for, not some philosophical discussion around who's in the right or wrong.

(reposting from a comment in a previous submission that got buried)

It's frustrating to me, watching this culture we've built where developers feel they need to be ashamed of making money from their work. There is absolutely no reason for you to feel the need to justify building a business off of your software product, but I can completely understand why you do.

Our "group" spends so much time and effort indoctrinating its members on this idea that profiting from your skills is a bad thing, and that the only true way to be a developer is to give your work away for free as Open Source. Even silly things like negotiating for a market rate salary from your employer are frowned upon as caring only for money.

But that's all backwards. There are good reasons to release your work product as Open Source, and those all share the quality that they give you or your business some tangible benefit. So it's simple: do the benefits of open sourcing your thing outweigh the downside? If yes, go for it. If no, don't. But don't spend even a second worrying about whether it's the "right" thing to do for silly moral reasons.

If there was one thing I could change about our industry, it would be to remove the 5 year Open Source Indoctrination brainwashing session you need to go through at University before entering it. Because we'd spend a lot less time being taken advantage of later in life.

The OP is isn't ashamed but more frustrated because he wanted to do good for the world and is disappointed by the fact that he may not be able to now because gree corporations like Amazon will take all the hard earned work of contributors and profit from it, thus breaking the spirit of open source. At least that's how I interpreted his comment..

Yeah, I think the fundamental problem we're seeing here is how difficult it is for creators of open source projects to effectively capture the value they create in the world, especially at the higher end of the scale of _extremely_ popular projects that gain widespread adoption and create a mind-blowing amount of value, like Elasticsearch.

I would argue that by releasing a project as open source, we create more value in society than by releasing as proprietary.

An ideal society imo should distribute rewards relative value created in order to incentivize and maximize value creation.

Our society does a pretty good job of rewarding and incentivizing value creation for proprietary projects, but seems to do a horrible job of incentivizing value creation through open source projects.

I think it's in society's best interest for open source creators to be rewarded every bit as handsomely for creating value in the world as creators of proprietary projects, if not more, so we can incentivize the creation of more open source projects.

> I would argue that by releasing a project as open source, we create more value in society than by releasing as proprietary.

> An ideal society imo should distribute rewards relative value created in order to incentivize and maximize value creation.

Isn't that exactly the point of capitalism and the reason why proprietorship is possible?

How is it contrary to the spirit of open source if greedy corporations like Amazon use their market forces to spread your work to a bigger audience?

That is exactly in the spirit of open source, which is what I believe the parent poster is saying.

Have you considered BSL [0]? The fresh versions are source-available, but older versions convert to open source (GPL, Apache or something) after a few years.

You can still build a business on your software -- as long as you keep developing, no competitor will be able to use up to date version. And people who want to rely on open source can do so, knowing that the software will get open-sourced eventually, no matter what the company decides.

[0] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/

It’s not a chilling effect. It’s how value is exchanged in a free market.

Open source makes sense when many companies benefit economically from sharing resources to develop common software/tooling.

Open sourcing code from inception can lead to adoption and create profits.

At some point that code may be more valuable to another company in some way and they profit from it.

I don’t see Linus Torvalds complaining about companies that profit from Linux but then again Elastic Search has shareholders to answer to and their trademark has been violated.

They're literally describing the chilling effect. It shows a lack of imagination if you think this "free market" is the only way to create valuable software.

PS. In a truly free market, there would be no enforcement of license violations except that which companies could muster themselves, i.e. Elastic would be able to hire mercenaries to loot and pillage AWS' data centres

It's an interesting anecdote.

I think a possible solution to that problem could be a universal basic income, itself funded on the likes of Amazon.

If you had the assurance that you'd always have something to live with, wouldn't you be more open to take the risk of going open-source and see if you can run a business of that ?

From https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-n-v-reports-stron...

> First Quarter Fiscal 2020 Financial Highlights

> Total revenue was $89.7 million, an increase of 58% year-over-year, or 62% on a constant currency basis.

I don't know. I've worked for a couple of companies who open source their software and they don't open source because they believe it's good for the world (they may or may not, but it isn't the driving motivation), they open source because it's a near requirement for building a profitable business. It's easier for a no-name company to convince enterprise clients to use your software when the code is open source - it's often a non-starter if your code is closed-source. It's easier to get developers and keep them happy. It's easier to get community contributions. It's easier to get your name out there (you lose a LOT if you have a software product without a GitHub).

As long as open-source is a near requirement for getting traction, I don't think there is much to worry about.

I think you’re right that OSS is a customer requirement in many domains today. But I think the consequence isn’t that companies will open source despite the AWS threat — it’s that tremendously valuable software will never be built in the first place.

I like FOSS and even just OSS and I have good arguments, largely borrowed from others, for why it's good and why we should often use it. It's not a panacea, though. I'm about to write some things that RMS would not endorse.

If the code is your original, differentiating product, go ahead and make it proprietary if it helps you. If there's some code that supports your product, that helps make your product possible, or that complements your product but doesn't really differentiate your work or create a bespoke advantage for your users, then seriously consider making that Open Source or Free Software.

For example, let's say you have a new, great music recommendation technique and that's why people would choose your music player or music web site or whatever. You could build that with an OS DB on the backend, on an OS operating system, using an Open Source language and Open Source libraries and still close the source for your recommendation engine. However, you could still offer a F/OSS client to an API for that for various languages. You could contribute to the projects underlying yours. You might write a whole new configurable data wrangling system that's not specific to your recommendation code but is really useful to populating your database, and you could release that as F/OSS for the community to use. You might make your own front-end toolkit for the browser, or your own websockets code on the backend, that can be used by any application. You'd be able to contribute that to the community as F/OSS without undercutting your main differentiator, too. I kind of think of this model akin to open core, but in this case it's a "Closed Core" with open everything else. Improve everything that's in common with others in a common space, and differentiate your offering in your own different, compartmentalized space. Just make sure the bindings between the parts are at the appropriate level so the licenses don't clash.

Does this mean some competitor could come along, tie all of your F/OSS together, and plug in a different core? Absolutely. If that core's not your true differentiator, though, your plans have probably already gone awry. Making it easy to plug other code in the place of your proprietary code surrounded by an open platform is almost as good for the community as making the whole thing open source, and lets you compete on what you've decided is going to be your competitive advantage.

don't you think the elastic founders achieved financial independence from elastic? think again?!

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