Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

If engineers are the most important resource, I think being a company known for open source might act as an inbound sales for attracting top talent, too (see: Google, RedHat, Mozilla).

For engineers, it makes sense to work for companies that do have FOSS projects because they can always point to their corpus of work when switching between jobs as proof of their worth. Most engineers who realise this don't ever want to go back to working full time on closed source projects.

That said, folks making arguments against open source companies conveniently ignore the examples of Cloudera, Linaro, Hortonworks. They also tend to forget how much central open source is in the current climate because someone or the other will attempt to commoditize your core (Firebase vs Supabase, GitHub vs GitLab, Oracle vs Postgres, Docker vs Mesos, Windows vs Linux, Intel/AMD vs ARM, S3 vs MinIO, Symbian/iOS vs Android, Plaid vs Moov.io) and because of the Interwebs, these FOSS solutions will be found and a community will develop around it. It is almost inevitable.

I'm not an investor, but one should definitely invest in FOSS companies with proven tech because they attract the most precious commodity of all, developer mindshare. I'm sure FOSS companies will discover newer ways to make their businesses work (like GitLab and HashiCorp with "buyer-based open core"), and blueprints from the past are already available (especially, in terms of what not to do; looking at you, Docker). Despite what they may say about BigTech stealing their thunder away... I think it is mostly down to FOSS companies digging themselves into a hole.

Source-available licensing is a compelling alternative, but I hope the community rejects it, because such licenses don't seek to truly benefit the overall software ecosystem rather only merely appear to do so, and that's why I hate those.

Required reading:

http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts...

https://www.gwern.net/Complement

https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-way-to-...

There's possibly "companies with FOSS products" that arne't "FOSS companies".

For instance, I know people that work for heroku that work on open source (and are primary maintainers in some case) on company time -- but heroku is obviously not a FOSS company.

Or, in a comment below jedberg says 'At Netflix our ethos was "if it's involved in infrastructure, open source it, if it's related to movies, keep it closed.' -- nobody would call netflix a "FOSS company".

In the original wave of open source, this was the position of most contributors to open source I think. Work on a thing on company time that helps the company achieve it's goals/business, but is not the main focus of the company.

This seems to be less and less the case. Because companies are more ruthlessly focused on the bottom line, and don't think they can afford to have anyone working on something they don't own or that might help a competitor? I dunno.

But this change has a lot to do with the current apparent sustainability problems in open source.

> This seems to be less and less the case. Because companies are more ruthlessly focused on the bottom line, and don't think they can afford to have anyone working on something they don't own or that might help a competitor? I dunno.

For one, if one's open source product is so good that BigTech wraps its software around it, then that's a cause for validation and celebration. For example, it is pointless for the Rust community to bemoan Google's use of Rust to improve ChromeOS' security; or for Dr. D. Richard Hipp to bemoan pretty much every company for building money making software around SQLite.

Besides, like Bryan Cantrill points out in the blog post I linked to from above, it is often trivial for BigTech to expend effort to re-implement the API surface (MongoDB -> DocumentDB) or even the rewrite whole software (MariaDB -> Aurora) if that's what they need to do to compete with anyone's FOSS / source-available offering.

> There's possibly "companies with FOSS products" that arne't "FOSS companies".

Of course, I am not saying FOSS is the one true way when just recently tech companies like Zoom and Snowflake have demonstrated the potential of proprietary tech; but just that FOSS will commodotize your core, may be half-heartedly, or even half as effectively, but it will happen and there are business opportunities to be built around it. In fact, FOSS is one of the last few avenues left to take on BigTech, as far as technology is concerned.

When I say FOSS, I don't mean the kind of throw-all-commits-over-the-wall, superficial-community-engagement FOSS Google does with Android and Chrome. Google can do so because they have got the money to keep funding "an open source loss leader". For any other upstart it'd be suicidal to keep such an iron-grip on their FOSSd codebase (like Elastic will find out in the coming years). The right approach for such upstarts is to create a Foundation around the tech (k8s) or donate to one (Cloudera / Hortonworks), and generally try to really rake in the benefits that being open-source brings.

> "the most precious commodity of all, developer mindshare"

Reading the above reminds me of a not too long ago news story, titled "An Influencer With 2 Million Followers Couldn't Sell 36 T-Shirts": https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a27623334/...

If we are cherrypicking examples, here's one from the time when Cisco reluctantly opensourced a router's firmware because GPL, "Linksys continues to earn millions of dollars per year selling an 11-year-old product without ever changing its specs or design... That product really is what made the company." https://thenewstack.io/the-open-source-lesson-of-the-linksys...

Yes, open source gives you developer mindshare, and cheaper hiring, but both of those mean squat if you can't monetize well (and most open source companies I've seen don't).

Let's face it, a tech company's most important resource is one of two things:

* its IP

* the data it's collected on its users

The first precludes open source within the company's core competencies. The second makes the company a place where talented, morally decent engineers wouldn't want to work.

Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion. How much is GitLab worth?

How much money has Microsoft made selling Windows vs Linus off Linux?

How much money does Apple make off iThings?

$6B, It’s not so far behind[1] and that before exiting, and I don’t know how much founders retain vs GitHub founders. But what if would be less, not everything has to be about market valuations.

[1]https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/gitlab-oversaw-a-195-milli...

I can't fathom that, at all. I think the market is broken.

Correct me if I'm wrong but GitHub was first, and has more users.

Given that GitHub is more popular, I'd suggest the only reason we know about gitlab is because its open source.

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