Open Source is not a Business Model | Hacker News Reader

Open Source is not a Business Model

cra.mr

47 pointsBrajeshwar30 comments

If someone says their business has an "open source business model" I'm gonna somewhat cynically interpret their business plan as:

1) Build, co-opt or otherwise acquire an open source utility for X that's popular enough to be appearing in tutorials on 'how to do X'.

2) Present this utility as open and accessible etc. and pumped the branding and market recognition to cement it as the standard way to do the thing.

3) By some strange coincidence (variously genuine overwork, or strategic priorities, or callous manipulation) leave the official documentation in a state where it seems comprehensive until you try to actually use the software, at which point you realise key details are omitted. Oops.

4) Oh hey this free software is well supported by our very-reasonably-priced[1] consulting service which will sell you expert help by the hour.

[1] The reason is that money is nice.

Took me a while to catch up with all this (need to get out more, it seems...)

This is about "available source, but licensed such that some included use cases must pay while others don't".

I'm not sure it works. Originally tried by Sleepycat 25 years ago. Problem is that your project/product becomes incompatible with all other OSS. So everyone else will go out of their way to avoid using your thing.

And by then, the investors have divested and found the next thing to suck dry. This is a problem for the users, not the backers.

Fair Source also uses Delayed Open Source publication.

Delayed Open Source publication (DOSP) is a concept established by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). It is in keeping with OSI's public-benefit mandate to "persuade organizations and software authors to distribute source software freely they otherwise would not distribute." DOSP ensures that if a Fair Source company goes out of business, or develops its products in an undesired direction, the community or another company can pick up and move forward. Will this be meaningful in practice? Again, time will tell.

https://fair.io/about/ https://opensource.org/dosp

From 2016, a bit tangential, but a wonderful read by Nadia Eghbal- Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure.

https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

She also ended up writing a book called "Working In Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" that is a read I'd recommend anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of open source software communities.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54140556-working-in-p...

The model is simple: open source the software, and offer the service as a business.

As for which license to use, my current favorite is LGPL.

This doesn't work because competition and/or free usage become trivial.

This doesn't work always..

Nexedi and their product erp5 exist since like 2004 and are still going strong it seems, so it works. Maybe not at scale?

What this ends up being in practice is "give away everything that I am better at than AWS for free, and charge for the things that AWS is better at than me." It shouldn't be surprising that AWS comes in and eats your lunch on this arrangement.

I actually don't disagree, but for certain software tools, the world would be a better place with their usage maximized. This matters because it improves the standard for everyone. The goal here is first to maximize tool usage, and then to worry about putting a dollar in my wallet. I understand, however, if investors can require a more business-friendly license than LGPL.

open source is the costco hotdog

Open source is about giving and business model is about taking: it's basically a plan to take money from society.

> and business model is about taking

Commercial transactions can be win-win. I get money, you get a product that you desire. We both win.

And business can produce a positive net externality. For example; education and healthcare. Not only do both parties get something they wanted more than what they had, society as a whole prospers.

Sadly many generations have now been brought up on morally bankrupt ideas about business and markets. Today there's an almost exclusively degenerate focus on "making money" rather than "creating value".

But this applies to almost any human endeavour. If you rarefy it into some extreme and pure form, it becomes absurd, corrupt and self-defeating.

individual survival has a way to bringing that out in people.. real or imagined needs for survival, or a close second, competitive pack pecking order with losers really losing in serious ways

> real or imagined needs for survival

You're right, and I think the gap between real and imagined needs has become a chasm. People today live in a fantasy world, imagined needs, imagined harms and enemies, imagined opportunities...

It's not necessities but the self-created fantasies that dominate our thoughts. The ordinary, well fed, comfortable life is just not good enough any more. Simply having an ordinary, successful business that helps the world is not enough.

So people pay the price; living in abject existential fear of completely unreal things - of losing their imaginary gains, like getting banned from Facebook or Twitter, or losing at some online game like the "stock market". They lie awake worrying about a number in a computer that represents their wealth - not their actual wealth as capability, as a mind and body.

That is what makes us into selfish and insecure people who create negative externalities on the world we live in instead of making it better. Because it's impossible to get lasting satisfaction from these things. Too many "business people" I meet these days are utterly trapped in that unreality.

Unless you're product is air, water or food, chances are good that what one desire is just a manufactured impulse of society, that is mostly driven by advertisement mafia these days. It might be less awful than fear of eternal burn in hell propaganda by former wannabe world masters, to be fair.

Still unless we don't all get the same actual consideration in term of dignity, mutual respect, life insensitives and encouragements to continuously improve our cultural, social and economical consolidations and flourishing, buying the propaganda will remind acceptance of pretending to be blind on the ugly part of the deal, whatever side we fall into.

> Unless you're product is air, water or food, chances are good that what one desire is just a manufactured impulse of society

That does not matter. I desire going to the cinema with my kids, I desire riding a bike, I desire a car for my family. It's irrelevant that these feelings are instilled through marketing: they are genuine feelings. I internalized that this is something I desire and I will look for someone who provides me with that.

When I go to the cinema I leave happy, I do not think about that someone ripped me off. I could never have made that movie myself.

My new cinema company pumps aerosolized nicotine through the ventilation system to help induce desire.

I (and my investors) are glad we were able to provide your desires for your """genuine feelings""". And I get money. Win/win.

I buy plenty of things that aren't advertised to me. From the services of folks to do things I don't want to do, to the constructions of things that I don't know how to build, to simple things like medicines that keep me from being dead.

I also buy some times that are advertised to me, but they are _far_ smaller in value than the things from the previous group.

Not everything that falls under manufactured impulse of society is advertising, right, although one can suspect that advertisements often goes far beyond what is clearly branded as advertisements.

When you see a Mac in a movie, it's already blurring the lines though most people might agree that it is product placement and actually there's sometimes warning about this before the movie start so I guess there are some laws about it at least in some countries.

When a super cool badass character smokes in a way that is clearly visually esthetically refined, even if no mark is either mentioned, this is still invitation to buy cigarettes. And this is not a fictional case here, it's well known that the guy who wrote the book "propaganda" later worked for the smoke industry. It's also well known that cigarettes have bad effects on people health.

Sure, but one side can win more than the other, and one side's goal is to take more than it's worth. That is what profit is afterall, no?

Profit is taking more than you invested.

"How much it is worth" isn't on the previous sentence.

You make a profitable business by creating things that are worth more than the things you consume making them.

And to reinforce that point, the business' profitability can be increased by providing things that are worth more to the buyer than they price they pay.

There can be highly disbalanced and problematic transactions. If you life is on the line and I am the only one with the cure I have enormous leverage. That’s a type of market failure that hopefully we will see less off. But I don’t think it’s right to see every type of transaction with that view.

I like to think most businesses want to make money but also have happy customers.

not quite - in civilized societies there is a concept of public goods.. long topic. That said, "profit" and "taking" are indeed linked at a deep level

What is an uncivilized society, by the way?

"Liberating" and "exchanging" might be more neutral and no less accurate, but they are largely disjoint categories regardless.

Coming up with strategies to turn your "liberation" into some kind of "exchange" is naturally going to be a challenge, if possible at all.

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