https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Roku sells hardware, but the CEO has said in no uncertain terms that their core product is aggregating user data to sell to advertisers. That they don’t consider themselves a hardware company.

IBM was also big into open source to sell mainframes and services.

If Albert Einstein had a blog post about relativity, I would rather read that than someone’s interpretation....

Isn't GPL and AGPL Copyleft another form of mandated inconvenience for companies? Come to think of it, many laws are mandated inconvenience with the stated purpose of correcting for some masked externality.

So what is an "open source VC funded" company doing? Creating complements and selling those. It's just that there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS. It's not a law of nature that e.g. Redhat should be the best people to provide consultancy on RHEL.

The historical record indicates that there are indeed network effects at play with communities of experts. However, the historical record also indicates that such effects on pools of expertise aren't powerful enough to create monopolistic single factions which can lock out all competitors.

every company operating as an "OSS startup" has to know from the start that their software can't be charged for directly.

All money made from open source really comes down to the application of expertise to do things with software. The ultimate question is whether software expertise itself can be commoditized.

(EDIT: Another way to phrase it: Is software an ouroboros? It's a snake eating its own long tail. Software keeps eating itself, but it continues the process by creating sufficient change to allow itself to grow as an industry. As time goes on, there are more experts needed. This then begs the question, "What could possibly cause that to change?")

Producing, packing, and shipping a physical copy and marketing on broadcast television were major expenses of the pre-2000 world that they no longer have to the same extent (maybe they still buy TV ads but I haven't seen one in a decade at least, used to be all over the place). If you keep smaller part of $12 or a larger part of $0.99 your revenue could fall with profits staying the same.

Maybe the overall picture stays the same but this was very distracting for me from the argument made in the article. It made me wonder what else isn't quite right.

At the start of the decline, there wasn't really a good way to buy music in digital format at all. iTunes launched in its current form in 2003.

The decline between those years was essentially the industry losing $12 sales to $0 sales: either directly to piracy, or to competition for time and attention on the Internet.

Youtube blew even more of a hole in the industry in 2005, replacing purchases with streaming. This plays $0.0006 per stream.

(The corresponding profits graph is really hard to find, which suggests that the data may not be so publicly available?)

There are no guarantees that they will provide the best complements to their own product, but the common sense is that they will. From a marketing perspective, I think it makes complete sense, especially when selling to enterprise customers.

The best complement for server side software is often being able to do it reliably, globally, redundantly, managed, on demand, and cheaply. The only three companies that can do that reliably as far as most customers are concerned are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

The flip side of that which eventually comes home to roost though is that it means the two are easily confused . If I'm a customer and I can download X or buy X from you, and the two are virtually identical, you better have a damn good story as to what your value proposition over and above the project is.

Red Hat actually arguably only just got themselves out of this. Originally there was just Red Hat Linux, regardless of whether you paid them a cent. The split into Fedora (Core) - the free distribution - and RHEL - the enterprise distribution with paid support subscriptions - is a not insignificant part of why the company still exists today. This transition was not without controversy, and arguably created the space into which Canonical and Ubuntu emerged, but it was a necessary step to disambiguate the project and the thing people actually pay for with its own value prop and messaging around it.

It's somewhat surprising that so many of these companies proclaim they want to be the next Red Hat, but ignore the prior art for how that came to be.

Are you posting from the future? Because it isn't after that case yet; Google plans to appeal (given that they filed for an extension to the 25th of this month) the latest Federal Circuit decision to the US Supreme Court and, if that doesn't succeed and end the case in Google’s favor, the next step would be a third trial in the District Court, followed—however that turns out—by another appeal by one side or the other to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, possibly another petition for en banc rehearing after that appeal, and potentially another appeal to the Supreme Court.

Google did the same thing with Java. It’s up in the air how that will turn out.

Probably true for the average punter, but we shouldn’t overlook the other players, like Alibaba, DigitalOcean, IBM, Vultr, Oracle, Linode and more.

A serious CTO whose neck is on the line is not going to go with a small player.

To paraphrase an old saying.

“No one ever got fired for buying AWS”

For an MS shop, the same could be said for Azure.

But going with AWS because ‘no-one ever got fired’ for it, or picking Azure because you play squash with a guy from Microsoft’s sales team is just lazy. Not that I’m saying it doesn’t happen.

Forbes and Gartner might ignore the other players, doesn’t mean we can’t be better informed.

If someone had bought a mainframe IBM system in 1980 to run their COBOL system over their competitor, 40 years later, they could still buy a compatible system from IBM. It’s competitors - not so much.

On the other hand, idealism has its place, but when things hit the fan because of your choice of vendors, it’s a lot easier to justify a buying decision by saying the vendor was in the second quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Square.

sometimes it's okay though.

but AWS monoculture is not a bright future.

Elastic Cache - hosted Redis and Memcached

Aurora - compatible with MySQL and Postgres

RDS - hosted versions of Mysql, MariaDB, Sql Server, and Oracle.

Redshift - yes it uses a proprietary/columnar store engine but it is compatible with Postgres.

Etc.

But the bigger point is that you’re always locked into your infrastructure, do you think your CTO is going to move from their million dollar Oracle infrastructure because you used the Repository Pattern?

I'm not advocating simply ignoring AWS's strengths because let's say Lambda/EBS/ELB/etc. is proprietary, but this is a very real, very simple risk. As AWS can, it will raise prices.

And sure, maybe it doesn't matter because you can always just fall back to using whatever you use on simple VMs, and AWS will always have some competition in the simple VM hosting space and VM prices will therefore will be low.

However, I'm on the opinion that institutional inertia will "kick in" (to use a rather bad figure of speech for something that is about as agile as a drum of molasses) and will simply let AWS rent-seek.

Congratulations, you now have the worse of all worlds. You’re spending more than baremetal, you’re spending just as much on maintenance and management instead of letting someone else do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and your developers are moving slower than they would have if they took advantage of your cloud vendors offerings.

Win????

Or, well, you can, but then don't forget to set your billing limit to infinity as well. Because AWS wants to make money.

Anyway, I'm not saying RDS/Aurora/etc. is bad, but eventually the heavy lifting will be available for anyone ( https://github.com/beekhof/rss-operator and similar projects ), and it's not like AWS likes to pay when they don't perform according to their SLA.

While you can’t fire all of your ops you can reduce the headcount by a combination of managed services/servers, automation, outsourcing to managed service providers, and an auto healing fault tolerant infrastructure

AWS's version will likely always lag on features, whether it's their Elasticsearch service or this new DocumentDB thing. So to continue the music industry analogy from the original article, sure Taylor Swift may or may not be able run the most reliable streaming service but she'll still get business if Spotify/Pandora only has covers of her songs.

IIRC this strategy was tested by Jay-Z with little success. Taylor Swift also came back to Spotify...

I thought commodity means something that can be produced by many different companies without substantial differences in cost, quality, functionality etc.

Open source software usually is siganificant in their complexity and utility. Also they have strong gluing effect to customers' own code.

To say they are commodity in the sense that they are free of charge, seems not the right way of thinking them as commodity.

i.e. debian and ubuntu may not be interchangable commodities but ubuntu 16.04 from a torrent vs given from a friend vs downloaded from a mirror are interchangeable.

The services around opensource software such as troubleshooting or being able to spin up a server without having to supply anything but a password (and cash) are what makes a specific version differentiable, not who supplied the bits of that version. Since opensource is free and anyone can distribute it any 1 version is a commodity.