Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Same. I've very wary of investing or getting involved with any company that has an open source strategy. I worked for one (Sendmail) and it did not go well. We talked about how it's hard to compete when your number one competitor is your own software for $0. If you look at successful public companies with open source, they are all fairly small successes compared to their public closed source peers.

When I worked at reddit, we open sourced our code. It didn't gain us much. We got a few contributions, and we also got a few competitors. The biggest benefit was being able to show people the code when they suspected shenanigans.

At Netflix our ethos was "if it's involved in infrastructure, open source it, if it's related to movies, keep it closed." That actually worked pretty well. But the open source code was difficult to use unless you invested in the entire ecosystem. The main benefit was recruiting.

For my own company, I try to support open source by donating to the people who make it.

Same here. I run a small game company in San Francisco, and we constantly are donating to help fund projects like Blender and Godot because they're amazing projects that deserve funding to keep them afloat.

But would I invest in an open source company? Eh, that's a different story. I love them for what they are, it's amazing they exist, but I don't see them as an investment that pays you back dividends. Rather, I see them as a useful tool you can make money with and is worthy of your donations.

> "if it's involved in infrastructure, open source it, if it's related to movies, keep it closed."

In the first wave(s) of open source, I think most contributors were working on company time, but the open source was not the primary product of the company. It was something useful to the business of the company, without being the business of the company.

So what you describe seems to fit into that model.

That model seems to be less and less of open source contribution though. (I am not certain why). And I think that has a lot to do with current apparent crises in open source sustainability -- it was the model that worked, for a while, to produce and maintain lots of open source. I am not sure "open source companies" ever really have.

I don't think that model has gone away. That's largely the basis for how all those large companies (FAANG's included) contribute to open source, and some smaller companies as well. The model is IMHO fairly well explained by "sharing the maintenance burden of commodified infrastructure" in some cases, and in other cases by "commodify your complement".

Open sourcing the core value proposition of your company? Yeah, that's where all those OSS startups are struggling, and then get a lot of flak for shifting to proprietary licensing (e.g. Mongo, Elastic).

> The biggest benefit was being able to show people the code when they suspected shenanigans.

This is very interesting to me. How was that a benefit?

It helped shutting down rumors or runaway conspiracy theories. You know how reddit can get when they have an idea in their head, wrong or not.

Ah, so in general useful for helping customer service. I could see that being helpful for many developer focused services, but definitely for the reddit community I bet it assuaged some concerns.

Thanks!

In the nicest way possible, how does that work, this is the code but what is running could be different

I guess if there was some odd result in the upvote count or something they could show the code how it could lead to this exact same result naturally.

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