Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations

When top talent just accepts the big money contract regardless, corporations see little incentive to sponsor open source. Software development is the only industry that has large portions of infrastructure free and open for anyone to use, and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a generation or so ago.

It's up to us to carry that torch, or we will become like every other industry.

These were and always have been losing bets. Elastic has always bemoaned being open source, so everyone should have seen that coming. And CentOS died when they were bought by RHEL. Anyone who put their weight into these programs after those red flags went up were taking a risk.

And that's exactly why OSS is not cracking. Not even close. So CentOS and Elastic aren't open source anymore. Who cares. "But my workflow! How will I do xxx or yyy now?"

Do what you did before CentOS and Elastic. Find an open source alternative. If there aren't any and it's important enough make your own. The world will go on people.

Just like Gitlab jacking the price. They want you to assume that your choices are to either pay more or go without source control. It's up to you to be smart enough to say "I'll just find another source management solution that fits my budget."

Honest question: isn't this a fundamental contradiction? If you are building a thing that by definition is given freely to anyone who wants to use it, how does compensation for that work become part of the formula? You can't be monetarily compensated for it, because you chose to give it away. There are other forms of compensation but that seems clearly not what we're talking about here. The author goes on to ask how you can build a business around open source? But isn't the answer that you can't? If its really open source then the software itself is not a business.

That, to me, seems consistent with the original idea of open source: that it was the cool things you could build with code, not the code itself, that had value. None of the iconic success stories in tech over the last decade have sold code, have they? They've built things on FOSS code that never existed before, and most of them have contributed a lot of FOSS code back. But they haven't sold databases, reverse proxies, and key/value stores, right? I've paid six-figure annual licenses to Oracle. Is that the world we're trying to preserve here?

Elastic is just another app/database platform. Open source is a side issue with Amazon... the real problem is that ultimately, their ability to exist as a platform is ultimately in the hands of a few companies.

I do think this is the answer. Try to use LGPL, GPL or AGPL as appropriate.

I also agree with some people that there's an issue with framing the question as defending the right of developers to get paid for open source. This was never much of a thing by default. People have been trying to build FOSS companies, with varying success. But I would guess most end user-facing things, like GNU, Linux, VLC etc. were built by academics or hobbyists, or foundations. Commercial FOSS tries to sell infrastructure to enterprises. It's not things you and I would use if we weren't IT professionals.

(Linux is a peculiar beast here. The kernel is largely developed by big corps, but playing by the copyleft rules, because it's such a fundamental infrastructure. Big distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are the middle ground where they can be freely used by individual people, but are a side effect of Canonical and Red Hat's development processes.)

The correct framing of FOSS is benefit of the users and the society at large. We use .?GPL to ensure that the software that people use is inspectable, and modifiable if the vendor does something bad. Thus we serve people's, and our own, interests in the long term. We reduce the area where companies can damage the public for profit, when hiding behind closed source, unchangeable dark patterns, "hai we ban you there is no appeals" etc. etc. That the essential software can be had free of charge in practice is also a nice thing... to some extent.

The answer to the problem of compensating the developers was never much directly solved by FOSS. (Of course, you can try to use it to also get hired, to sell hosting or support.) This is a social/political/economic problem. Trying to solve it with licensing (a.k.a. copyright law hacking) is and understandable effort, but very likely a dead end.

EDIT: I see under the sibling comments that the OP is more specifically concerned about the fundamental and "invisible" projects like sudo. I can't add much on that, but I do think there's value in getting (some) signaling and (some) bargaining power by choosing copyleft. Especially if there would be solidarity and consensus among developers in doing this.

If the licensing terms let someone else monetize your investment to the detriment of your own revenues, that's a problem. Even if you would be satisfied with break-even, you have to pay your own developers.

Amazon may be "within their rights", but the pattern is unsustainable as-is.

FOSS developers should contribute to projects and not products. Non-copyleft licenses seem to just be code for corporations to build upon, providing them free labor while getting little in return. At least with the GPL, you are getting a promise that they will make available their sources. Consider carefully your expectations when you license your software.

An example where a project/product hybrid somewhat works is web browsers. Generally speaking, there are several competitors trying to achieve something similar, and there are some attempts (however nebulous) to create standards bodies. The Elastic Search community could have done something similar and formed a standards body around some sort of specification.

FOSS is all about idealism. It's hard to retain your idealism when someone is waiving $1+ billion dollars in your face with one hand and holding a loaded gun to your head with the other.

20 years ago, the bar for what you could sell was really low, because there just wasn't a lot of software available, full stop. If you had something that was even a little bit useful, somebody would probably want it. People who bought software from you once were also eager to pay you for updates, because annual improvements could be dramatic.

So what happened?

Features that were once unique selling points of one commercial application were copied by other vendors and by open-source implementations. Clever techniques were studied carefully and are now well understood. Smart people looking for a challenge would study every publicly available implementation of some algorithm and then come up with one that beat them all.

But why did the rate of software improvement seem to slow down? Don't we have more people working on software than ever before? Don't they have better building blocks than ever before?

Consider that everything that has ever been published as open source remains in the public commons forever. This body of work grows without bound. Both improvements and regressions continuously show up, but (eventually) the improvements are identified and the regressions are cast aside. So this pile of software theoretically improves without bound as well.

Yes, we have more people writing software than ever before, and yes, they have better building blocks than ever before. But they're not competing with other software developers and other companies -- they're competing with every piece of software ever written by anyone. So it shouldn't be surprising or controversial that the bar for marketable software is going to keep getting higher forever.

These licensing shenanigans and the steady march towards "Everything as a Service" is a result of companies pivoting from attempting to innovate to rent seeking.

That happens to the direct financial detriment of the companies that actually created these free tools, while (perhaps naively) hoping to be able to sell services based on them to enterprise customers themselves. And it's going to be a real pity and for the FOSS community when it happens.

Software may be eating the world, but managed software platforms are eating (free) software.

Today, they're doing many of the bad-for-the-world things that Microsoft did with Windows in the 90s.

>redhat killed cantos

Primarily a profit driven motive. Open source doesn't always mean free as in beer.

>elastic killed elasticsearch

For companies like amazon who are fundamentally incompatibl with truly open source yes, this is a killing blow. For everyone else its just a change in ToS.

In 2021 what's changing is many companies and devs are getting rightly upset about multinationals ripping off their code without so much as an attribution. These companies are saying that not only is your code not worth money, it isn't even worth the exposure on your resume.

My takeaway from all this isn't that "enterprise open source" is no longer a viable business model. It's that if you want to start an enterprise open source company, start with SSPL.

It works great as an open source license. People and businesses can use, modify, and redistribute the product for free. The only thing they can't do is package the product and sell/host it as a service.

This is extremely reasonable. AWS shouldn't be able to take the technology that your team built, without asking/paying/contributing, and quickly turn it into a $100m+ business.

Sure "true" open source champions will balk at the license. But at the end of the day, the technology only flourishes because of the business built around it (eg. Elastic around Elasticsearch). SSPL goes a long way to protect your business, and therefore the underlying technology, from big tech.

What would Elasticsearch be without Elastic? What would MongoDB be without MongoDB Inc?

In elastics case they were between a rock and a hard place. The world changed around that project and they got sherlocked. It happens. AWS has done it so many times its shocking they didnt anticipate it in the first place. Being venture backed sours the batch a lot faster.

The CentOS issue is unique. The maintainers gave control to the company that owned the licensed distribution of the software. Did they get a whole promise in return? Of course theyll cut support for it. Even in IBMs own portfolio its a conflict on a balance sheet alone. But its not the fault of enterprise open source. Open source works in this situation: there will be a fork just like centos was a fork of redhat.

Governments (imo) should be almost exclusive users of OSS - and if the code they want is not put there, seed it.

I am not fond of governments do it all for us, But it is hard to imagine how else to extract money from corporations resting their profits on the commons.

So, I would argue, CentOS doesn't have an organic raison d'etre. If had one, it would be very difficult to "kill" it.

Open source will never be able to give the huge returns that VC firms expect.

However, open source can provide the basis for what is often derided as a “lifestyle business” that provides a sometimes very good income to a small group of people that are passionate about a project. SQLite comes to mind as an example.

Elastic is definitely bringing enough revenue for the “lifestyle” business without changing their license, however it is not enough for VC.

Be very wary of open source backed by VC.

*Yes, I’ve read the OSI link AWS-fans always refer to.

Selenium and Appium are Apache 2 licensed. I started a SaaS service based on them. So has Amazon. The sky has not fallen. The licenses will not change. But apparently this story DOES NOT EXIST.

Don't. The very idea that you should have to "earn a living" is now bogus and should be thrown out.

I believe computers, software and technology in general should be used to bring about a post-historical Golden Age of peace and prosperity.[1] Programs especially are a kind of wealth that can be copied for effectively zero cost.

So I would say that the urge to "earn a living or build a company around open source" is misguided. If you want to write software and give it away for free, that's awesome! My advice is either be comfortable being really poor, or be wealthy already. If you want to go from being poor to being wealthy by giving away copies of software, I don't know what to tell you, to me that seems like an oxymoron. It just seems like a weird idea.

Instead, let's use the technology we already have to construct a new economy that provides a good quality of life for everyone automatically.

[1] Otherwise, what's the goddamned point!?

> So AWS was directly competing with Elastic, but *not taking the same responsibility for the open source project or investing in it as heavily as Elastic was*.

Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes. They chose to branch, and contribute it back. Several of the fixes and improvements are from AWS. Did the author want an IBM/CentOS takeover? Or, deny AWS to use Elastic but pretend to be FOSS?

Corporate Open Source doesn't give a shit about a user's problems. The corporation only exists to further its own interests, and it uses Open Source as a tool to do so. Its sole motivation is profit, and so it is unwilling to accept the changes that users want to make if they're not directly benefiting the corporation.

Community-driven Open Source is about the users. Sometimes the project leads are a little too dictatorial and micromanage the project, preventing user fixes for stupid reasons. But most of the time, if you have a useful thing to contribute or change, they will accept it, even if it doesn't benefit them personally.

I think the current trend with Corporate Open Source was natural given the selfish nature of corporations. It's only going to get worse from here. In 10 years, most Corporate "Open Source" projects will go one of two ways. In one, they're donated to Corporate-aligned "Foundations" and all the development is done by the corporation, but "management" is done by some generic board [of people in corporations]. In the other, it's just a thin API layer over a proprietary system, like kernel drivers.

I think the only real Open Source left will be the old school variety. The projects led by a random chick in her garage who just needs a tool that solves her problems. Nobody's going to pay her for it, and she's fine with that, because she just needs this damn code. And that will be how Open Source survives: the hobbyist who donates their work to the world, just because it's a good thing to do.

The only salvation I can see in all of this is a new form of Open Source that enables corporations to safely donate their work. Note that I said donate. They can't have any expectations of holding onto IP or copyright. But perhaps they can find some way to use it as a tax write-off? So the project is run by a chick in her garage, but she takes patches from corporations, or maybe even a small yearly "donation" just to keep managing the project. In this way you could actually have a thriving community, even if that community is made up of corporations.

RIP elasticsearch, I guess.

What's the question exactly? Sustainable FOSS development?

Earning nothing while working on a FOSS project that has no way to ever make a developer salary because it can't be used by the people with the money, due to the copyleft license does not seem to be the "right answer" either.

All things being equal, a piece of software will become more popular if it's open source. If it's open source and worse than the proprietary alternative, it will still pick up steam, while a proprietary competitor would be largely ignored. In fact, I would claim that a proprietary competitor will even be ignored if it's just as good, and even if it's a bit better: because there is a cost of adoption of new technologies, being a bit better isn't enough.

An example of something that wasn't open source but succeeded anyway is Splunk. As far as I know, they have never leveraged open source, but their selling point was so unique that they didn't need to. However, most ideas aren't that game changing. Most projects don't have the luxury of an idea that has an elevator pitch so attractive it will attract both investors and customers right away.

By 2007, Splunk had raised US$ 40M. The initial release of Elasticsearch was in 2010. How would ES have been received if they went to market with a proprietary product? I think the reason why it was open sourced from the start is quite obvious: noone would have cared otherwise, or they would have been overshadowed by an open source alternative. There was a demand for new, flashy, modern log monitoring among those that didn't want to buy Splunk, so it didn't have to be as good.

What seems to happen more frequently though is that cloud services pick up these open source alternatives, make money off them, and/or buy up the company holding the IP. They move in and "embrace, extend and extinguish", killing two birds with one stone: on the one hand they damage the primary free alternative, while at the same time improving it while owning the full rights to the improvements.

I don't have an answer to what to "do" about this but it seems like an increasing trend ever since the cloud industry started swallowing up most of what IT is about. In a way I suppose it's unavoidable, and maybe we need to see the beauty in the inherent resilience of open source: even when it's bought off and killed, they can never kill the previously freely licensed code. The "idea" if you will can live on, and must live on if we're going to avoid a complete dystopia in the long run. So turn the frustration of your favorite project being killed off into action: realize that no code comes for free, behind every open source success is usually an unsung and unpaid hero, and if you can't pick up the torch yourself, at least throw a few bucks to those who do. What else is there?

The same mechanism, which is that the benefits of the work accrue more forcefully to the user than to the worker, are the same.

I first saw this in action[1] when Ward Christensen found out that a company was selling "Xmodem" (software that let you easily transfer files over a modem while in a terminal session over that same modem) to the government for big $$. To understand the value here, prior to this invention you needed two connections to a computer to both have a human interaction with it and a second connection between the source of your files and the computer in order to transfer data to it. In UNIX and elsewhere you could type 'cat -> foo' but that forced all of your data through the terminal driver and if it happened to contain 0x04 (^D on UNIX) you would log out! So Ward's big idea was a "modal" connection where you could put the computer in "data transfer mode" and either send or get a file. It was really useful in dial up BBS days and even in the early days of computers things like "LapLink" did similar sorts of things. The key here was this capability had value and while Ward had invested time writing the software he felt the approval of his peers was sufficient payment for his work.

The deal here was that Ward had made his code "public domain", he literally disclaimed all rights to it, because he, like other enthusiasts, held the viewpoint that "We are all a big club and we share stuff all the time." But a vendor saw that the Government had a need for this capability, and like many such organizations was used to paying people to provide and support the capability. So the vendor took Ward's software, and sold a product to the US Government that provided this capability. Since Ward had disclaimed his rights, the vendor had no further obligation to Wayne and delightfully pocketed all the money that the Government paid them.

When this was discovered there was some outrage. After all it was Ward's work and he should have been compensated right? This turns out to be a really interesting question for surfacing how various people feel about both the "value" of digital goods (which can be copied for nearly zero marginal cost) and the "value" of implementation.

Stallman's response was that once Ward had created the software his "right" to any value was exhausted. The original GPL manifesto was about making it explicit that no one else had a right to any value from the work either. Even if people were willing to pay $1 each for a software work product, a person who provided them with that work product was forbidden from capturing that value. They were entitled to "reasonable copying costs, and any monies that might make supporting the software." Period.

When you constrain a market in that way, it inhibits the market mechanisms that incentivize the creation of new goods, and the ability to fund the creation of new goods with the sale of successful goods. It depends on finding an supply of workers who will work once and give away all downstream value for nothing. This is great for customers but it really impoverishes the people who are actually writing code. The communism corollary is that you provide the needs for all of the workers, food, shelter, etc. And transfer all the downstream value of their work to the state. Where, historically, bad actors at the nation state have plundered that value and lived like decadent kings. A good current analogy is Google. Google couldn't exist the way it exists if it had to pay for the value it extracts out of the work the Linux community puts into that ecosystem. Fortunately for Google, thanks to the FOSS rules, it doesn't have to! As long as it isn't selling Linux it gets all that value for free, and it pockets all the profits from the services it offers which are derived in part by the value of having a "free" operating system.

I believe that because you cannot connect the economic value of the work someone has done, to the worker(s) who did it, you create an opportunity to take that value for yourself. For me, that will be the bitter legacy of "free" software. If, for some reason, we were able to reverse the ability to take this value without compensation it would make being a software engineer a much better job. Seriously.

As a result "Enterprise Free Software company" is unlikely to ever be a 'thing.' While it can make money in the short term as you translate a moment in time to a change in value. Long term it is doomed. This becomes especially evident when the additional new work needed to be done on software goes to zero.

[1] And FWIW so did Stallman.

I would disagree with how you made that characterization. Licenses apply equally to everyone, and corporations are made of individuals.

If you meant end users vs. service providers, that's what Elastic did and to end users their new license looks more permissive than GPL 3.0. Yes it does have "a major restriction", but it doesn't force individual users and even those who redistribute Elastic software to release their modifications, whereas GPL 3.0 would have that effect.

To me - a user - the new Elasticsearch license is more permissive (because before some Elasticsearch add-ons were restricted) and I can live with that. Amazon - thanks to a more permissive license that Elasticsearch used to release under - can still do their thing. Good luck to them. If that license wasn't permissive they wouldn't be able to do this. And the Fedora community and other busybodies ... I don't care what they say :-)

Why pay for an editor when the good guy Microsoft gives it to you for free?

People have been delusional about FOSS for way too long.