Some companies are getting boo'd on HN and elsewhere for changing their license from OSI-style to source-available, whereas 10 years ago there would be no source available to the public at all. This is, overall, a positive development.
It'll even be a net benefit since CoPilot will not devour their code, strip its license out and spit (sorry, emit) to anyone who asks the right questions.
An OSI approved license allows building upon that work, more importantly GPL prevents these improvements to go private.
Source-available provides "for your eyes only" view to the code, and is just window dressing when compared to other models.
I fail to see a net benefit, just a staggered backtrack.
these companies decided that they can leverage the marketing that is "open source" in order to gain mind share and traction, after which they start looking to charge.
That is what i associate with any open source company.
It is hard to be open licensed but find other players in the space who just want to commercialize other’s contributions without giving back. And I have not seen any practical proposals for how to deal with this without changing license terms away from the OSI definition.
Proposal: SaaS. Offer your product as a paid hosted service. Sure, other players can take your shiny awesome product, and launch a competing service. Compete with them! As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.
> As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.
That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS. It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers. The time advantage does not appear to matter there.
Sure, but that's the thing! If you want to call your product open source, you have to be OK with users taking your product, and running it themselves, and giving nothing back. They are not "freeloaders", they are normal users of your open source code.
> It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers.
Compete with them!
PS and BTW you do get something back even from your free users: free marketing and user training.
The issue for me is that there is no term for what we do with the FSL. It’s much closer to open source than source available as it literally upgrades to open source after two years.
On the user definition: open source doesn’t draw a line between an end user and a competitor. That’s part of the challenge here.
> Compete with them!
Personally I rather compete in a level playing field.
You may also be one step behind when it comes to infrastructure related bugs or support if you want to focus on providing the best product. Competitors who host your product have a much smaller scope to worry about which may lead them to have a better infrastructure and support structure that customers flock to. E.g. Elastic vs AWS
Except infrastructure and support may also be the only revenue stream for the original developers too.
Some may say that’s exactly how it should be in the free market and I agree (since you chose the OSS license model over something else like FSL), but it does highlight how the original developers may feel this is an unfair situation.
What do you think about WordPress, XWiki, Nextcloud, Passbolt, Univention, LinPhone, Element, Igalia for instance?
I don't know the internals of each of these, but I believe they all manage to make money from open source by keeping the free software / open source spirit.
If you already did base your list on bootstrappedness, consider this post strong agreement: because that's what I'm trying to say. Yes, there are companies that can be considered "true to the idea of open source" (sqlite! Even though technically neither a company nor open source), but there's a clear cutoff.
I agree with this, though excluding companies burning investors money is already raising the bar higher than for closed source ones. Most companies are not bootstrapped and never leave the pretend zone. Of course not a fan.
XWiki and Nextcloud [1] are definitely bootstrapped. Element is definitely not.
Automattic (behind WordPress) has raised funds, also bought back private stock [3], not clear what it means. They also seem to make money from closed source software.
I would expect any of these company, except maybe Element, to actually make money from their open source activity.
When I'm making those lists, I also don't consider open core and/or obviously VC-founded companies, like Mattermost and GitLab.
Side question, in which ways SQLite is not open source for you? It seems pretty much open source, I'm fine with open source software not accepting outside contributions. They still guarantee the important user freedoms of free software.
[1] https://nextcloud.com/about/
[2] https://www.igalia.com/about/history
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic
> Fully employee-funded and pursuing an organic-growth strategy, Nextcloud already turned profitable by the end of 2016
I would suggest the contrary: if you want to build a company and believe open source is the right way to do it, please do try! We don't have enough open source companies, we need more successful examples of this.
It's hard and there are traps one needs to not fall into. I personally think VC money is one of the biggest traps, it's absolutely critical you keep control of where and how the companies is going. If you don't have investors to feed, you may make enough money to pay the employees with a good strategy. You can even manage without open core, which incentivizes pushing the useful features outside the open core.
This is not very convincing as a reply to the risks pointed out in the previous post. The choice of the word "try" seemingly recognizes the risk of failure, but you seem to ignore the serious consequences of such a failure for founder and employees. I mean, this is not a game.
It's already hard to build a successful business. Odds are already thin for you to succeed. Why choose a model that worsens it?
Open Source was not created as a funding source to for-profit ventures. That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source.
You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does:
- develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees.
- sell support and consulting on this product
- sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this product, with support
Totally withing the free software / open source spirit. The world gets great open source software for free (not open core: truly and completely open source), and the business behind it is sustainable as well. We also donate to some open source projects that we use, chosen by employees.
At some point, if you want open source to take over, you need it to grow and strive, and having it supported by business is a great way of getting this. The world probably cannot be run only by side projects.
Not saying that all open source companies behave this well, but it's not an impossible outcome.
1. Open source product
2. ???
3. Profit!
Open source isn’t a magical bandaid though it may get you some early traction, the same you can get by having a free plan.
If you develop it appropriately and plan it out, it CAN be successful. But you have to think it out and choose an appropriate license, etc.
Most successful open source companies would have been successful as closed-source; and you rarely can take a closed-source product and make it successful by going open source.
I'm with you on this. You need to carefully plan. I also strongly believe you should not go with VC money. That excludes "burning money and we'll figure it out later". Your open source project will therefore probably start as a side project and/or with government help dedicated to business creators.
> Most successful open source companies would have been successful as closed-source
I believe this too. Now, there are more and more things that require open source products. Open source companies, including the one I work at, have received funds from openDesk [1] to develop a complete suit of open source tools. More and more research labs, universities and public institutions require open source. So there's a dedicated market that's growing.
You may succeed as a closed source company, probably more easily than as an open source company. But the story is not that clear cut, and it also depends on what you want to build and whether you really want to build that awesome product as closed source.
The thing is that support services aren't scalable. Many software businesses want a scalable source of revenue, that's why they go for cloud services.
They don't want to compete with copy cats, though, because they want monopoly-level margins.
Then they complain that Open Source won't let them have those astounding margins.
This is not an issue with Open Source licenses.
We also have this.
> just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind
Yep. Free software was designed with user rights in mind. Open source was then designed to sell the idea of free software to companies, removing the "user rights" parts, which sounded frightening to businesses, focusing on the development model, targeting developers and not users. Free software is defined with the famous 4 rules, open source is based on the open source manifesto, basically a copy of the Debian Free Software Guideline (from the Debian project, which, coincidentally, was closer to the Free Software Spirit at the time, probably still is). They are both about the same set of software and licenses, for the most part.
There's nothing in those texts / philosophies about doing business, for or against (only that free software was explicitly designed to allow selling software, because why not - and at the time, to distribute software, you probably had to copy it to floppy disks and give them, so you had some copy cost to absorb). It's indeed up to businesses to figure out the business model around FLOSS.
But that's true of many things, isn't it?
You choose open source or you don't. Either way is fine. Just take responsibility for your decision.
It's simple, really. I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business... It's not meant for that.
> I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business
Well, life is hard, things are not always easy, running am business is difficult and stressful, looking for ways to make open source profitable is noble, and also investors who "gave" an absurd amount of money want it back plus some more, of course.
Income is mostly from support and consulting. These two things still pretty much rely on the actively developed product, so a big part of the company is dedicated to this. I'd say we are both a software and service company. I believe this is one nice way of developing open source software.
No insult taken :-)
Deliberately incurring a high fixed overhead (product development) in a well-understood business model where profitability is highly dependent on minimizing fixed costs is creating the conditions for failure. To make this work you can no longer survive by being merely average at executing the revenue side, you have to be exceptional at the revenue side and most people are not exceptional.
Success in this model requires two separate miracles instead of one. Good startup opportunities are single miracle companies, and you focus all of your attention on creating that miracle. Companies that require two miracles to be successful are poor investments because you now have to solve two hard problems that split focus.
The problem you have is that the barrier to entry for a competitor is zero. Equally the costs for a competitor are always lower than yours.
As long as you are small and niche, it's OK. But if you "prove the market" you basically allow company-B to do what you do, literally exactly what you do, but without the development overhead. Indeed company-B will likely be founded by an ex-employee of your company.
Let's say you charge $100 for support. $50 goes to the support tech, $50 to the development team. Sooner or later a support technician figures out he can charge $75 per hour, and keep it all.
Equally because you currently charge only for services, not licenses, the day support stops coming in is the day the company closes. There's no reoccurring income, so the developers are the first to go.
Clearly the model -does- work, especially when the project is new and things are moving fast. But it's hard to grow.
Naturally there needs to be some incentive to keep the support staff in-house. Hence various non-Open-Source tweaks to the license to try and take other companies from taking over your turf.
If someone can out-compete you by simply cranking the infrastructure handle on your source-code, doesn't that indicate that you're not using your built-in advantage of owning the feature backlog well enough?
Or, put another way, if the entire value of your business is in your source code, and the only thing I need to be able to compete is your code and some commodity infrastructure, then don't give away your source code?
But sure, if you dont want your staff to become your competitors then don't put tour code under a license that puts that carrot in front of them.
If you're stewarding the project, you have the sole authority over over which features land when. You can prioritise and drag (or even reject) PRs to suit your business case and your customers. Everyone else has to accept features when you choose to release them, or fork.
This is a massive competitive advantage, if used effectively.
The market is proven (and we have closed source competitors). The project is 20. It grows slowly but does grow. It also doesn't need to grow too much. Not every company wants to become very big. In the end, the company is (increasingly) profitable, employees get paid and customers are happy.
> Naturally there needs to be some incentive to keep the support staff in-house
The company, while not paying incredible salaries, pays decently and offers awesome working conditions. They perfectly know that we could get paid more elsewhere so it compensates by making it enjoyable to work at. And it works, many people have been there for a long time. Some of the first ones are still here.
More critically, the support team heavily relies on the product team for specific questions, and also supports custom projects built on top of the product, so it's not like they can just leave and create a competitive support business. The expertise in the finest details is with the product team and the infra team.
At some point the incentives become misaligned, though, we've seen this happen over and over.
Someone proposes and sends a PR making huge quality of life improvements, it's shot down because it would reduce consulting revenue (the rejection reason is officially not this or not even stated at all).
Someone proposes and sends a PR implementing advanced functionality that the core company sells as part of a paid extension, the PR is rejected (for obvious but not mentioned reasons).
A cloud provider starts offering a service based on the software, the license is changed to non open source.
Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.
Of course I would indeed expect a contribution that:
- tries to disable our licensing mechanism in our paid extensions
- tries to copy our paid extension code to our product or to a community extension
To be rejected upstream. But isn't it fair game? They can still fork the code and go start something on their own, it's one of the important features of open source. One can start a new extension repository and convince users to add it to their config, or even fork the product and provide this by default. But this is work, they'll have to maintain this, and will probably depend on us, in the end.
Most likely, we would welcome significant contributions and QoL improvements, we are only so many people for that much work to do, improvements would allow us to focus on something else. If someone outside the company is willing to maintain some feature that we currently offer for a price, it probably actually grow / improve the ecosystem and it would probably be welcomed, letting us focus on other things our customers want. People maintaining extensions or feature for our product would likely be friends. Of course you can't just dump some code and go away, that's not sustainable.
> Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.
That may be true. My company reached 60 people this year. Nextcloud is around 100. But not everyone wants to become too big. There are a lot of advantages in staying small-ish. For the CEO, a big company is also not the same fun as a 50 people company.
for good software consulting revenue is not a function of how many bugs/bad UX there are- you consult on setup, integration,maintenance,etc. If the software improves the need for this does not disappear.
If you communicate clearly what the proprietary parts of the software are, it also shouldnt be an issue. If someone wants to implement and especially maintain and test them themselves without paying, they are free to fork and do that.
It works because companies are actually willing to pay a few bucks for some convenience and support.
Presumably jraph's goal in writing their comment is to convince us that starting an Open Source company is a good idea -- but they haven't succeeded, for the reasons mentioned. If they want to convince more people, then they should come up with counterarguments to the top level post's arguments (and if they don't want to convince more people, that's fine too).
No, I haven't succeeded because I haven't tried yet. However, I am surrounded by open source companies that succeeded.
The comment I responded to obviously reasons theoretically, and confuses some things. I will answer two aspects of it:
> Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage
That's not true. You can't just take some open source program developed by someone else and make money out of it. Let's say I develop open source product P. I offer support and consulting. Let's say you want to compete with me on P. You initially lack the expertise and the notoriety. If Alice and Bob want to get support or consulting for product P, they'd better turn to P experts, which is the company that builds P, me. For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing. But while you are spending time on this, I am too. You will also fatally need to contribute improvements to the product you are selling to make your customers happy. Actually, if you start contributing, it's a win for both of us and our companies can even be friends.
I'm not making this up. That's actually where I work.
> This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source
So we just countered this. I'm not saying there's no risk. but that's not "by construction".
> There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures.
And now we are confusing development methods, not "open source vs not open source". You don't need to be organized in "bazaar" to build free software. Look how, for instance, SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy. They are profitable. They have a "first mover advantage".
> These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.
Well, they can.
But my biggest argument is that you don't need to believe me. Many "actually open source" companies have succeeded. So, what gives?
I don't need to actually build an open source company to prove my point. Others have been doing well. Maybe me in the future, that's not completely excluded. Thing is, being employed also has advantages.
>For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing.
I agree with this, and that the makers of P likely enjoy a big (and genuine) advantage in being considered the authority in all matters P. But for a competitor (me, in your example), spending time with your existing, working code is much less time and effort than writing brand new code, and that difference in my effort levels is the disadvantage, for you, of going Open Source vs. closed-source.
>SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy
I wasn't aware that SQLite was a profitable enterprise. I have to admit that this is a very strong example for your case, given the competition in this area from other FOSS software (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
There's also possibly a small % of users who end up knowing enough to end up doing "mostly supporting others". They can end up becoming competitors as well.
So yes, this model can work, as its currently doing for you (and others). But it certainly is a lot harder to build, and keep such a business going.
Being an employee of such a business is great. You still get a paycheck every month, so the model is irrelevant. Owning such a business though is precarious - basically the staff can walk anytime, and effectively take all the customers with them.
I suppose something like the ownCloud / Nextcloud breakup could happen.
You need a big enough set of employees with all the skills required (product & customer relations) such that these employees will be collectively more efficient than who remains to be willing to leave at the same time and still want to work on the same thing, and an important set of customers to be willing to switch to the new business.
Given how we like each others and how nice it is to work there, I believe the company would need to fuck things up big time for this to happen. What caused this at ownCloud is a political change (from true FLOSS to open core, maybe other things) and it took a co-founder + a big bunch of core contributors to leave.
I would say, if this is the biggest risk, the company is probably okay :-)
I agree with you on the fact that it is probably hard to achieve this though.
And still, ownCloud is still alive. I don't know how relevant they are and why people would choose them over Nextcloud, I'm somewhat amazed they are still there.
And licensing one's product seems to amplify that risk.
> based on a few opinions of HN comments
What if someone does do that? As a HN commenter I can't bypass the possibility that somebody takes my comment at face value without conducting proper research and analysis.
HN comments (and really all content on the Internet in general) should be written responsibly. I am not saying that GP didn't write their comment responsibly.
> nor it's their responsibility to outline the full extent of risks involved
But then you can't raise complaints when somebody does outline the full extent of risks involved.
Someone not conducting proper research is doomed to fail at building a company anyway.
You should be careful in writing HN comments but you should not feel responsible for a business failing. Someone reading should also read comments from anyone, one's writing does not go unchecked for long on HN.
indeed
> just try
I did say "please" try, the nuance is quite important :-)
You know, I think the views differ because we have two problems:
1. How can I create a profitable company
2. How can I make my open source work sustainable
If you only target 1, open source might not be the more immediately easy solution.
I'm aiming at 2, and 1 is one way to do it: given I want to live from open source work (because of my convictions), can I do it by building a company?
The answer is: it might be harder, but yes.
If you don't care about open source, my comments here are just mostly annoying.
Of course there are successful examples of just about every model under the sun. If you can find a model, and a business which allows externalities like Open Source then that's fantastic.
And yo be clear I'm not saying companies fail because they are Open Source. Mostly they'll fail for the same reasons every other model folks- they don't generate enough cash to pay the bills.
Indeed Open Source can be an attractive start. There's at least a chance of free labor. There's some marketing milage.
The problem is not the start. The problem is when the money starts flowing. When you're "surviving" no-one is really incentived to muscle in. When you start "thriving" then suddenly your space looks really interesting to others.
You need to believe in what you do when you start a company.
I also suggest based on the fact that I do work for such a company, which has been successful. Next year is its 20th anniversary. It's an amazing place to work at. You can create amazing work environments out of open source. And while it's quite rare, it's also far from being the only one.
Another commenter says that I seem to ignore the consequences of a failure. I don't. However, I'm surrounded by open source companies and they all seem to be great places to work at. Join us!
When you believe in open source, being able to work in agreement with these values is amazing. I can't imagine how stronger that must be for the one would indeed founded a whole business like this.
It's time people stopped spreading this belief that open source and sustainable business cannot go together.
If you are willing to work from home, you could join one from France or Germany where many of them are established, the time difference is small. You get to work in an international setting which is also relatively small size.
When I was looking for a job, I actually listed open source software I may enjoy working on and find who was behind. I ended up running into my current company at an open source event, so you might also want to go to one of these.
1. Solo developer (or small group), funded via e.g. Patreon
2. Non-profit funded by sponsorships and donations
3. For-profit but the software is free; the company charges for support and/or cloud services
4. Open collective, where donations fund bounties that are paid out to people who contribute patches
In other words, I think the only models that can really work are models where you genuinely don't care about other companies taking your code and using it for their own purposes. (This shouldn't be surprising - that's literally the whole point of open source!)
When I see companies trying something other than these four business models (usually because they desire more money than being a non-profit can offer) I inevitably see companies that might as well just not be open-source companies, because their licensing has to be restrictive for them to compete.
- developing features or bug fixes in the open source product or an extension that are needed now by the customer
- developing a custom project (not in the open, or actually sometimes in the open) on top of your open source product for the customer
- supporting the customer for some integration with your open source product.
You can also try to sell paid extensions (that are still open source). That would be the case for XWiki Pro apps, or many WordPress extensions.
There's another way to do it, is develop your open source and sell your developer expertise for unrelated customer projects. I've worked somewhere working like this, but don't really believe it works well because you are not actually spending time in your project when you are doing this, and you are not incentivized to develop your own product when you do this. You are basically a consulting company. But you can still decide to do a bit of this.
Consulting and support can work for solo developers, but that might push quite some pressure and make it difficult to disconnect depending on the way you do this.
For instance, Facebook can open source React because it's something they need, but it would not be a viable product on its own. Releasing it as open source doesn't give them any disadvantage. Similarly, a GPU manufacturer can open source their drivers because this won't prevent them from selling their hardware (and in theory should allow them to sell more hardware).
In theory, I'd expect a printer manufacturer to be able to open source their software, because their product is the printer not the software. In fact, I don't get why open sourcing 3D printer software should be a disadvantage, and the article doesn't explain this.
I agree with your broader point, but GPU manufacturers can't, because then we'll see just how much is done in software which makes their cards better than their competitors, which means their competitors can adopt those software techniques in their drivers. Also the manufacturer may not have the rights to the code in the driver's to release them as open source.
So they invest resources in building the software.
Another hardware company comes along. Their product I'd also hardware. The software they get with no investment at all.
The second company has a strategic advantage. Far fewer software development staff. No carried software investment to cover. Hence lower costs. Hence cheaper product.
In theory company 2 sells nothing because the buying public understand the models, and are prepared to pay a lot more for the same or lessor product.
In practice the buying public doesn't know about Open Source, and the tiny fraction that do, don't care enough to matter. Hence the success of iPhone and the lack of traction for the latest "OSS Phone".
Meta does OS well for their scale. React, Llama, PyTorch come to mind.
For MS: Typescript, vscode, .net come to mind.
This is not open source. (but this does not take out the essence of your comment)
The huge caveat with this is that we often get nice open source developer tools out of these companies, but never good software targeted to end users. So others still need to work to provide open source software to actual users.
1. Open source is about the code belonging to the community
2. Open source projects can not survive without funding - as you develop
3. So, both (open source and company) can be compatible if and only if funding belong to the community. In other world, if the open source company is decentralised and democratic. And that is what we need to fight for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be...
> and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.
So depending on whether your source is free as in beer or free as in speech, dictates what business strategy you might have.
Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.
A lot of the same could be said for FB.
But I feel that it's incorrect to dismiss Google as being a bad search engine. DDG and Brave both provide !bangs for google and many other search engines that a significant part of their userbase use regularly. I myself use google often when I'm searching for something extremely specific, something that Google may give me 2-3 relevant search results for. Other search engines would often not give me anything relevant at all.
There is absolutely nothing here about open sourcing the bits of code that make them the real money. The business logic implementations, that's what I'd be interested in seeing. That's what we're talking about.
Most of these companies open source because they're great strategies for recruitment anyway. Ie, they get something out of open sourcing these periphery services.
The key is - they are Not relying on having some form of monopoly in regards to such software for their success
Companies also hold their cards close tending to not share their insights, information, and plans.
I disagree with that part. You have the people who know and understand the code, that's worth a tremendous amount. This also applies for new features, who else is gonna be as proficient as your people at building on top of it? Also a lot of enterprise contracts are all about assured support, who is placed better than you to provide it? You have the people that have the best understanding of the code.
Yes, today a bunch of highly skilled, highly trained people happen to work for you.
Tomorrow those same people get hired by your customers, strike out on their own, or join the competition.
All the points you raise are true. But the company doesn't "own" the people, it can only exploit them for as long as they hang around.
I don't think this is true in general, but maybe indeed in many cases. And a non profit organisation would be a better fit(tax reductible donations!), but those are not exactly easy to set up and a project in itself.
You could have said "company" and "made in EU" and it wouldn't have been more or less true.
Open source itself is not necessarily a problem but one over many factors that have there pros and cons. And for one struggling company doing open source there are hundred or thousands of struggling companies not doing anything opensource or benefiting from opensource without contributing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
The issue at hand is more about deciding how OTHER people/companies may or may not use your source-code to suit their own needs. If you decide Open Source, someone else can easily decide: actually, Company (and free labor to boot).
But to your point, in the long term, Open Source is a better prospect (for the people not the companies). Think of all the problems with crappy IoT devices and bad security practices. Many devices _could_ have decades of life left in them, only to be bricked because the companies want to sell newer crap instead (for the companies not the people). And on-and-on.
I think the whole idea of a new licensing model is a good starting point—like a forced NDA to keep a head-start. However, the same problem holds: nothing will prevent someone from stealing the source code either way—one license or otherwise—if it is freely available. But if there is a large community of contributors, the value prospect for everyone is huge.
And, to top it off: now with AI—how can we prevent an AI from rewriting the sources in a way that appears "nothing like the original"?
The business model fails for reasons other than it just being open source:
1. trying to sell open source as a product rather than as a way to sell something else - services, hardware, whatever. 2. being the main developer - and therefore losing the benefit of sharing development costs. How is it a bazaar if there is only one organization developing it?
Successful tech companies don't sell themselves, particularly to has-beens like IBM.
For many tech companies (and especially their investors), selling out and realising a return is the very definition of success.
https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...
Correct. As well as SaaS business models which make that even easier and less dependent on sometimes difficult to enforce rules to make the product scarce.
I genuinely don't understand what the point of bringing up copyright here is. Apart from a tiny handful of materials, even physical products rely on legal protections against counterfeits and knockoffs to be scarce. Why do we talk about software as if it's the first and only thing to be artificially scarce?
The value is not in "a copy of windows" it's that all copies of windows come from one supplier.
Yes there can be competing products, that achieve the same goals, or there may be scarcity there too.
Of course, even when achieving the same goals, some products are more desirable than others. There's no scarcity of OS options, but some would seem to be more popular.
I think the ideal situation would be where you are paid for the development itself, rather than selling the resuling software. Maybe with a pool that interested parties can invest in for initial development, new features or continued maintenance, like kickstarter or bug bounties. But that probably wouldn't have the high margins that the software industry has become accustomed to.
The interested parties in this case are users. They pay a small subscription each month. That subscription pays for development, support, hosting, and so on.
Its the very definition of sustainable because it doesn't rely on "new sales" to fund existing customers. The overall cost is spread very thinly across the ones who are benefiting.
Google releases Android source code. While people would like even more of it released, I can and have compiled LineageOS and put it on an Android device.
I could even go more in and get a Pinephone (I do not have one, but have a Pine watch). From another open source company.
Google released Angular and more OSS. Facebook released React.
Red Hat built a giant OSS business before being swallowed up by IBM - b2b companies to get swallowed up by big b2b companies.
On a smaller scale, Health Market Science released a generic database Java library I used. They needed to write some generic software to use, then open sourced it if anyone found it useful. Doing so did not threaten their business, LexisNexis acquired HMS.
Open source is released within and without companies. Lots of successful companies release open source. Most of what I use is open source - from my System76 laptop and desktop, to my Android and LineageOS phones, to my Pinetime watch. I suppose for people who don't program it the appeal level is different, but I do program.
Then it's good that "bazaar" vs. "cathedral" is completely orthogonal to "free software/open source" vs. "non-free".
Open Source. Company.
These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.
Over and over we see the same story playing out. Companies need to make revenues to sustain the employees. Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage.
This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source. There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures.
My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small.