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Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

Colin Percival's Tarsnap famously has such mechanic (though not a startup). It ensures you wouldn't fall into some kind of bus problem. However, it creates an incentive where the general public has an incentive to see the product fail. I word it like that because from my PoV the general public has a net benefit from F(L)OSS. I suppose that is why people prefer to keep such secret.

But hopefully not before it is too late. We should all think about situations where we are no longer around. Like having your keys/passwords at a notary.

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>I word it like that because from my PoV the general public has a net benefit from F(L)OSS.

I'm not so sure about that. An actively developed/supported project is often more useful than an abandoned open source one.

If you're prepared to pay market rate for someone to maintain something you should always be able to find someone willing to accept market rate (by definition). This separates the cost of maintenance from costs flowing from rent-seeking behavior.

Arguably industry is always willing to pay, in aggregate, the cost for free software to be maintained, but is not willing to pay, despite the optimism of those who sell it, for the marginal utility it gives them per-customer (which should be much higher). When asked to do so they will simply support free-as-in-beer or cheaper alternatives until one of those becomes the dominant player. This is why successful and heavily commercialized free software projects often seem to be only just clinging on to profitability (eg Docker).

>If you're prepared to pay market rate for someone to maintain something you should always be able to find someone willing to accept market rate (by definition).

Are you saying that if you can pay someone to develop their proprietary code for a price you can necessarily find someone to accept the same amount of money for the same work but open sourced? That doesn't seem true. Those are not equivalent offers.

Your comment sounds like you think open-source work would be _more_ expensive than closed-source work, or did I misunderstand? That would seem surprising to me.

I would assume some people (clearly a minority) would be willing to take a small pay cut when working on FLOSS.

E.G. could someone be paid slightly less at GitLab versus the same role at GitHub, if they believe in GitLab's principles

There are people who value open source and there are people who value assets. The point is that there isn't a single market rate for the two offers since they aren't the same thing.

No, I am saying that if a project is open sourced, and there is sufficient demand from people willing to pay for support, maintenance, etc, someone will come along to meet that demand.

If there isn't then the original commercial company was obviously never viable either.

Since an entity getting payment for maintenance can neither expect to collect a monopoly rent for the code, nor is required to pay one to anyone else, the cost of maintenance becomes the market price.

I think your view is too strongly assuming that everyone in the market is perfectly rational and perfectly replaceable with zero transaction costs..

Especially when you start talking about a single person company, it could be as simple as the founder being sentimentally attached to the company and continuing it despite making less than they could with other opportunities, but that doesn't mean that if the founder gets hit by a bus someone else will also be willing to take a sub-optimal gig. Or a company might currently be barely worth running with $20k a month in revenue, but if there is a period of turmoil and lost customers in the process of open-sourcing/founder getting hit by a bus/whatever that now the customer base would only bring in $10k a month, it's no longer profitable, and the market fails to find someone to run the company.

If the code is open sourced, there doesn't need to be a dedicated company behind supporting it. Assuming a compatible license, any party that wants to use can fork it and pay people to maintain it for their own needs without advertising that they "support" the code.

But just because something is open source doesn't mean it's easily maintainable by anyone. It's one thing to install and run it somewhere, but if it needs fixes or customization it quickly becomes necessary to learn and understand the architecture and organization of the code, the data models and structures, etc. and if it was previously the product of a "one man shop" then you're going to have to pay someone to do that learning.

Some products are viable as opensource projects but not as a commercial venture, and the overhead of a business entity might be enough to get out of viability.

> However, it creates an incentive where the general public has an incentive to see the product fail

That's not really the problem. The problem is that it lowers the company value: why should I, potential acquirer, shell out $$$ to get your IP, when I can just sit down and wait for it to come down the river?

Most of the value of a company is in the people, structure and brand.

And there's no guarantee the other acquirers will cooperate. "Why should I wait for the company to collapse and open source it's stuff forcing me to compete with other acquirers when I can buy them now and get a monopoly?"

Presumably if the technology is good, there is some competitive advantage in retaining sole control over it, or licensing it out.

This seems to make the company more valuable toward the end of life. If you don't buy out your competitor, your customers will have an Open Source alternative.

> However, it creates an incentive where the general public has an incentive to see the product fail.

Maybe Colin should make tarsnap free for bus drivers? ;)

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