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Comment by bcg1 | Hacker News Reader

Its an interesting story but not at all surprising. I wouldn't think that VC funding is a good model for core infrastructure programs, and author correctly identifies the two common routes at this point: control by large organizations or open source.

Hopefully most organizations have realized at this point that it is not a good idea to build your infrastructure around the big players. Just try to fire IBM and move off of WebSphere and see how easy that is.

That leaves open source and the author brings up a good point about the inequity of how much value they bring vs. how their contributors get paid. I wonder how many companies give back to infrastructure projects (money I mean, not code contributions, which are of course also important). Things like Google Summer of Code are great and beneficial, but what about giving actual cash to these ladies and gentlemen? Seems like someone might even be able to create a startup around that concept :)

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I worked at a company with an anonymous suggestion box. I put a suggestion that we should donate some money to some of the open source projects we used. For many of those projects even a few hundred dollars is a big help. I wasn't expecting anything but the VP, who was the one that read those things, thought it was a great idea and that year we donated several thousand dollars from our budget surplus to a couple of the prominent open source projects we used. It may not happen, but it doesn't hurt to suggest it in your company.

There seem to be a few initiatives happening in this space, some of which are being used to crowdfund/support open source teams. Once example would be https://gratipay.com/about/

thise initiatives tend to be winner takes all. i think i make like 3usd per week there

Docker, Meteor, ElasticSearch, NPM there is plenty of start-ups doing infrastructure stuff.

Market don't need fast PHP compiler look how low is adoption of HHVM. PHP is legacy codebase used for simple CMS. If someone need performance it will use Java, Node.js etc

HHVM is not a compiler that it used to be with Facebook, it compiles PHP and Hack into JIT bytecode now. PHP has opcache, which speeds it up quite nicely, and PHP7 has great performance improvements.

>PHP is legacy codebase used for simple CMS

Of course it is, honey...

> Docker, Meteor, ElasticSearch, NPM there is plenty of start-ups doing infrastructure stuff.

What you want to look at, though, are established companies with customers doing open source stuff, like Redhat.

They do exist, but it's not easy.

Oracle, Google, Microsoft, all of them do open source stuff.

"Do open source stuff" is very different from "being open source companies".

I actually do think that the 'sweet spot' is to use open source as infrastructure, and make money with something proprietary, but that's not something that makes purists happy.

Well, you wrote "doing open source stuff", not me :)

I agree that it doesn't make purists happy, but frankly, I don't find it particularly important. As long as proprietary software exists, whether companies are separated between open and closed or hybrid isn't particularly relevant, in my opinion.

Fair enough, it was a thrown-off comment.

The dichotomy is this in any event: it's easy enough to work on free infrastructure stuff if you make your money elsewhere, but it's difficult to work on free infrastructure stuff as your business.

>If someone need performance it will use Java

Thanks! I needed a laugh.

Go is a lot better choice these days. And Node.js now is slower than pypy 2.5.1 in many benchs :)

I think Nimrod is something we should be looking at.

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