>> (By the way, all new software without accompanying support & guidance is doomed to fail. And if that software comes from a dominant player, you’ll just have to deal with that by the way.)
There's a temptation to conflate the software license with the software business. This is natural, but places software as the primary value in the chain.
From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part.
I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. And a big part of that effectiveness is that staff can run it. And when it all goes wrong there's someone to call. I'm buying a -relationship-, not software.
Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc.
In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it.
>Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc.
>In truth the license doesn't matter.
It's funny to bring that up in the context of Red Hat who have started to circumvent the GPL by terminating their relationship with anyone who tries to actually make use of the rights granted by it. "The license doesn't matter" because they've found a loophole in it, but it clearly does matter in that they had to do so in the first place and weren't able to adhere to its spirit due to business concerns.
> From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part.
This is only because true most of the time businesses use a lot of publicly funded work without paying for it. If software development were entirely private, I'm sure businesses would find excuses that actually no it has to cost 100x what it would cost otherwise.
Everything you say about maintainability and stability is true. But writing software that can be operated as a service in the first place is substantially harder. It's just not as easy for a company to capture.
Is there a single example of multiple vendors selling support for the same open-source piece of software, where I can just hire a different vendor if I no longer like my current one, without changing anything major in my operations?
You could say that Canonical and IBM RedHat compete on offering Linux support, but the reality is that it's not that much harder to switch from RHEL to Ubuntu than switching to any other OS, so I don't think this counts.
>> If it was an open source software, you will have the option to go to a competing vendor.
You miss the point. Enterprises don't go looking for another vendor. Vendors come to them with a sales offering.
If I'm running SQL Server the I pretty much know where I stand with Microsoft, and there are endless MS approved support people.
With PostgreSQL some vendor has to come to me and convince me to switch. PostgreSQL is really well supported, and it's at least an option. 99% of Open Source though has 1 or 0 support entities, and 0 sales people.
Sure, with PostgreSQL I can do my own research. I might even have skills to do it myself. But now I have to explain my choices all the way up the ladder.
Am I going to use an OSS accounting system with no sales people? With no support people? Or am I gonna pay $99 a year or whatever for QuickBooks?
That's the main point. No one buys software, they buy solutions. Accounting is a good example. I use a SaaS solution, but it doesn't matter because I could also take all my invoices to an accountant, and the effect would be the same.
Also, mixing open licenses into business doesn't usually make sense.
I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source.
Large Corps arent exactly well known to handle the Explore part of the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff.
On the flip side lot of open source devs are going to get 100x more productive in the Exploit part than the avg coder monkey at large corp.
Nothing is obvious and predictable about where that story goes in an ever growing ever changing system.
Large corps will keep funding whoever gets the job done. While AI might replace lot of Large Corps activity which is basically on the Exploit side of the Tradeoff.
Years ago I tried to build a certification / service team out of independent software vendors and open source systems - ie you could buy 1 years of support for Apache httpd from any certified vendor (ie they knew enough about httpd)
It’s hard but I still think that’s the way to support OSS
Software license may not consciously matter to end users, but they do have a huge impact on everything else. That is, the end user would not have the software, or would have vastly different software, if the licenses were different. They just don't know and don't care about the licensing details and effects, like so many other technical aspects.
License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyone used them for free, then they were acquired by giant companies who charge for their use.
> "Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist."
The rise of the Internet and the dot-com boom happened largely without OSS, on proprietary UNIXes, proprietary web server engines, and proprietary database engines.
FAANG and other high tech businesses can easily afford very expensive servers and datacenters to house them thanks to the very very fat profit margins. They can also easily afford the cost of an OS license and other software tools.
So if Adobe open-sources all of their software tomorrow, that would not impact their business?
> In truth the license doesn't matter.
Come on. What matters is the way the business extracts value from you, and the license is part of that. Especially when the software you produce is so great that nobody needs to be called, because it just works.
I think the OP framing is about the enterprise / government framing, so Adobe maybe isn't the best example.
Still, the licence doesn't matter - while probably being a bit of an overstatement - is somewhat true. If my enterprise relies on an Adobe service, it's primarily about my relationship with them, not the product license.
... But of course, product price and therefore revenue will decline if competitors can sell my product too or customers can download and use it for free.
Weird question. There is no 100% effective software, there is no way to measure effectiveness (what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness") and it all depends on the budget.
If it fits your budget, and a commercial product has a good sales team (vs a cheaper opensource one with zero marketing), the commercial product is gonna get chosen even if it costs infinitely more. That's basically IBM and Oracle's play book.
> In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it.
The license matters indirectly: if it's open source, you know that as a fall-back other suppliers might be able to step up and take over, if your original guys fail or get too insufferable.
Moreover, if you have an issue with OSS software and have competent people in your own IT team, they could attempt to fix the problem and get results faster than going through the whole incident-report-blame-the-victim-finally-have-them-confirm-your-repro-wait-for-next-version-release-which-hopefully-includes-the-fix ordeal.
Then if you contribute the fix back to the project, the community of users benefits as well, with possible free publicity for your organization to boot.
Nice explanation, except IBM has been one of the largest Linux contributors since forever, they saw it as a means to reduce Aix development costs.
Linux only took off during the dotcom days as IBM, Oracle and Compaq started adopting it into commercial workloads, back in 2000.
Visual Studio Code isn't in the same ballpark as Visual Studio. It was already an Azure project, as the Monaco editor, and it was a way to kill Atom.
ARM is only successful on mobile devices and Apple hardware.
If you mean ARM on server, the most successful company, Ampere, is largely owned by Oracle, and there are some ongoing discussions about a full acquisition.
Linux took off when PCs were finally able to run operating systems with virtual memory. All of a sudden devs did not need to pay for licences for C/C++ compilers and other dev tools, but most importantly they no longer had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Unix workstations or servers. It coincided with the commercialisation of the Internet (it started as a non-commercial project funded by DARPA).
Don't confuse "giving software away for free because people have been conditioned to expect software that costs nothing" with "open source". And I have no idea why ARM is on that list: sure, they broke the Intel monoculture, but they certainly aren't free or open in any sense of the word.
How has Microsoft ditched VS for VSCode? VS is lightyears ahead in features and performance.
The two are not even remotely comparable. VSCode is a text editor that wants to be an IDE, but if you work with C++ or .NET you're shooting yourself in the foot if you use VSCode.
VSCode is not a serious alternative to VS or other IDE's like JetBrains Rider.
Exactly. Even if you do C++ development using VSCode on Windows, likely you are still relying on MSVC compiler for the Intellisense (and of course compiling). And people who mainly write JavaScript/Java/Python/Go etc have never used Visual Studio for development and never will be. VSCode didn't replace VS, they replaced Notepad++/Sublime Text/Atom/Eclipse etc, plus Intellij based IDEs for some people.
I mean, technically true, but from context we can infer they were referring to vscode, which is open source. Visual Studio Code is vscode + ms stuff, but at it's core the project is MIT, and has been recently forked by a lot of teams (cursor, void, that fruit scandal, etc).
ARM isn't open source. Companies like MS and Google use OSS that complement themselves but the core money makers are closed source and closely guarded.
Open source won those battles but the war doesn't end. The next fight is AI and thanks to a leak we have open source (weights and inference) models now.
Without that leak we would not have the ecosystem evolving around Llama.
I work in the health sector at a company with nearly 1,000 employees. In our IT department, we rely on a wide range of proprietary software and spend substantial amounts on Oracle, MS SQL, and other licenses. I’ve been trying to convince management that PostgreSQL could be a solid alternative for many of our use cases, but it’s consistently dismissed as “not an option.”
Meanwhile, we continue to pour money into Oracle licenses, not just for basic access but for additional features—like enabling data reading and analysis on the Oracle-embedded database in our main app. And, if we need to allocate more CPU cores on our VMs, we face yet another round of licensing fees.
Sometimes you don’t need much support. Yet pay tons of money.
Every time I hear a story like this - "management says 'no'" - I wonder if anyone cared/dared to ask follow up questions.
Why was PostgreSQL not an option according to management? I would not take their dismissal at face value. I'd want to know why not. But that might be Dutch culture.
It's a US approach not considered the same in Europe/internationally.
A good example is the GIS industry where ESRI (ArcGIS) dominates. In Europe the open source qGIS is generally an acceptable alternative despite less 'support'. In America its hard to find anyone using qGIS and ESRI is basically a monopoly.
> The regular IT environment in the European Parliament is managed by whole teams of professionals, it comes with training, and is supported by Microsoft partners and ultimately by Microsoft itself. There are also large amounts of computing power available to make things work well.
> An Open Source experiment meanwhile is typically operated by an enthusiastic hobbyist with borrowed equipment. Rolled out without training and without professional support, by someone who likely did this for the first time, it’s no wonder things often don’t work out well.
> After the experiment, the faction was disappointed and concluded that Nextcloud was no good. And that was also their lived experience. “Let’s not do that again!”
This is a rhetorical trick known as implication or insinuation. By presenting information indirectly, the author prompts readers to make a connection themselves without explicitly stating it.
The author implies that the European Parliament's failed experiment with Nextcloud was due to a lack of professional resources and expertise, suggesting it was handled similarly to typical open-source projects led by hobbyists without proper support. However, he doesn’t provide any factual evidence that the Parliament’s Nextcloud experiment actually lacked professional resources, training, or adequate equipment. Instead, he hints at this by describing common issues with open-source setups, leaving readers to assume the experiment suffered from similar shortcomings.
I would have appreciated some facts, or even sources for his claims, but there are none. And I couldn't find any information about the Nextcloud deployment having failed.
I always hear people say things like there needs to be support for the thing I'm using or, it costs time to implement open source.
I hate to break it to you but it takes time to implement closed source solutions as well. They also always have terrible documentation, because they make money on support.
Purely open source stuff lives and dies on how easy it is to start up.
Closed source paid stuff doesn't need to be easy. Often a decision has been made before implementation, and there are people to help you through it.
It's also easier to get approval for open source most of the time because there isnt a new bill, just my time.
You are mentioning that an experiment with nextcloud has failed? I cannot find any evidence regarding that, even more I see it highly used among governments and municipalities in the EU.
Tangentially, although there's been sporadic setbacks, as Limux[1] in 2017, there are new commitments to linux[2] that I hope will lead the way, at least in Europe.
I can tell that a few years ago a couple of NRW libraries used a SuSE variant in kiosk mode, apparently not everyone found that great, as some of the ones I regularly visit now have Windows in kiosk mode, with the usual set of Office, Adobe and other packages.
I’m aware of a party in Germany which, at some levels, uses Nextcloud to great success so I could imagine them pushing for it in their fraction. No idea why that wouldn’t work though given that they have tons of experience
It's more of a symbiotic relationship. The open source community depends on commercial support. Essentially all of the bigger projects indeed get a lot of their contributions from the companies that use, build, and depend on these projects. It's how the software world can collaborate with their competitors on the things they don't compete directly on.
This isn't charity, they are literally using more OSS software than they produce their own software. By several orders of magnitude in most cases. Companies like Google have many millions of lines of code in proprietary in house code. But they depend on an even larger amount of code in OSS form.
E.g. Android and Chrome OS are based on Linux. Those products are built on many thousands of open source packages. And of course Google is contributing to lots of them and created a few themselves. Chrome is open source because webkit was open source because Apple forked KHTML from the KDE project.
Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing.
VC funded OSS companies are a bit more challenging. These companies are perpetually confused about their licensing and need to keep things proprietary and open at the same time. These projects get a lot of attention because of the VC money but technically they only represent a tiny fraction of the OSS community.
> Companies like Google have many millions of lines of code in proprietary in house code. But they depend on an even larger amount of code in OSS form.
I don't think this is actually true:
1. The Google codebase is on the order of billions of lines of code, not millions.
2. It's basically all written in house, from the threading libraries and core standard libraries up. The parts that are open source (e.g. Linux, OpenJDK) are very small compared to the code they've written themselves.
ChromeOS and Android are open source, but they aren't even close to being the bulk of their codebase.
If Linux had never existed they'd have found some alternative, probably either a bulk licensing deal with a proprietary UNIX vendor or they'd have used Windows as the closest cheap Intel based alternative. Then they'd have put funding into developing their own in-house serving OS a lot earlier.
Source: I worked there.
> Chrome is open source because webkit was open source because Apple forked KHTML from the KDE project.
Chrome is open source for strategic reasons and because the executives in charge wanted it to be. There's no particular reason it has to be open. Safari and Edge aren't.
> Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing.
My conjecture is that open source is polished enough for most customers to use when there are commercial interests implied. Linux on the server is a resounding success, Linux desktop not so much.
And it's also not great when companies that are positioned as implementation open source and cloud closed (read: AWS/Azure/GCP reseller) also construct strange licenses that are inherently against traditional OSS values.
> Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech.
People have to put food on their table and can't work for free. Someone has to pay for that work. Nobody will pay for it if he can't extract some benefits from doing so.
It was a pipe dream, because at the end of the day not everything can be a side job, to compete against those that spend at least 8h day producing code.
Then the whole issue with non-copyleft licenses, that are nothing other than the old Whateverware or Public Domain licenses from the 16 bit home computer days.
We already had access to source code back then.
And for a large crowd this is already good enough, they aren't into it for religious definitions.
Readit News
>> (By the way, all new software without accompanying support & guidance is doomed to fail. And if that software comes from a dominant player, you’ll just have to deal with that by the way.)
There's a temptation to conflate the software license with the software business. This is natural, but places software as the primary value in the chain.
From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part.
I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. And a big part of that effectiveness is that staff can run it. And when it all goes wrong there's someone to call. I'm buying a -relationship-, not software.
Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc.
In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it.
>In truth the license doesn't matter.
It's funny to bring that up in the context of Red Hat who have started to circumvent the GPL by terminating their relationship with anyone who tries to actually make use of the rights granted by it. "The license doesn't matter" because they've found a loophole in it, but it clearly does matter in that they had to do so in the first place and weren't able to adhere to its spirit due to business concerns.
[1]: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...
[2]: https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-08-redhat-gets-around...
This is only because true most of the time businesses use a lot of publicly funded work without paying for it. If software development were entirely private, I'm sure businesses would find excuses that actually no it has to cost 100x what it would cost otherwise.
Everything you say about maintainability and stability is true. But writing software that can be operated as a service in the first place is substantially harder. It's just not as easy for a company to capture.
and they'd tell you to pay up 10x, or lose this stability in the future;
If it was an open source software, you will have the option to go to a competing vendor.
You could say that Canonical and IBM RedHat compete on offering Linux support, but the reality is that it's not that much harder to switch from RHEL to Ubuntu than switching to any other OS, so I don't think this counts.
You miss the point. Enterprises don't go looking for another vendor. Vendors come to them with a sales offering.
If I'm running SQL Server the I pretty much know where I stand with Microsoft, and there are endless MS approved support people.
With PostgreSQL some vendor has to come to me and convince me to switch. PostgreSQL is really well supported, and it's at least an option. 99% of Open Source though has 1 or 0 support entities, and 0 sales people.
Sure, with PostgreSQL I can do my own research. I might even have skills to do it myself. But now I have to explain my choices all the way up the ladder.
Am I going to use an OSS accounting system with no sales people? With no support people? Or am I gonna pay $99 a year or whatever for QuickBooks?
I totally agree with this. And not just businesses, individuals too.
On the flip side lot of open source devs are going to get 100x more productive in the Exploit part than the avg coder monkey at large corp.
Nothing is obvious and predictable about where that story goes in an ever growing ever changing system.
Large corps will keep funding whoever gets the job done. While AI might replace lot of Large Corps activity which is basically on the Exploit side of the Tradeoff.
It’s hard but I still think that’s the way to support OSS
The rise of the Internet and the dot-com boom happened largely without OSS, on proprietary UNIXes, proprietary web server engines, and proprietary database engines.
FAANG and other high tech businesses can easily afford very expensive servers and datacenters to house them thanks to the very very fat profit margins. They can also easily afford the cost of an OS license and other software tools.
Deleted Comment
> In truth the license doesn't matter.
Come on. What matters is the way the business extracts value from you, and the license is part of that. Especially when the software you produce is so great that nobody needs to be called, because it just works.
Still, the licence doesn't matter - while probably being a bit of an overstatement - is somewhat true. If my enterprise relies on an Adobe service, it's primarily about my relationship with them, not the product license.
... But of course, product price and therefore revenue will decline if competitors can sell my product too or customers can download and use it for free.
So you would pick a software costing 1 million over a software that is 90% as effective but costs 1 thousand?
If it fits your budget, and a commercial product has a good sales team (vs a cheaper opensource one with zero marketing), the commercial product is gonna get chosen even if it costs infinitely more. That's basically IBM and Oracle's play book.
The license matters indirectly: if it's open source, you know that as a fall-back other suppliers might be able to step up and take over, if your original guys fail or get too insufferable.
RedHat providing OSS licensed software is _less_ risk than RedHat providing proprietary closed source operating system.
It only doesn't matter if you don't care at all about software supply chain risks.
This is not a sane position in 2024 to hold.
IBM to save it's business had to merge with Red hat almost 50% 50% in 2018.
Microsoft it's security and cloud offering had to, open source it's .net framework, aquire GitHub, ditch Visual Studio fot Visual Studio Code,
ARM is eating the world, it over hauled the x86_x64 architecture, and became the Defacto architecture.
We can go on and on and on and on,that the Open Source business model, became necessary to survive in tech, not just to exist.
If you don't open it, they will eat you up.
Linux only took off during the dotcom days as IBM, Oracle and Compaq started adopting it into commercial workloads, back in 2000.
Visual Studio Code isn't in the same ballpark as Visual Studio. It was already an Azure project, as the Monaco editor, and it was a way to kill Atom.
ARM is only successful on mobile devices and Apple hardware.
If you mean ARM on server, the most successful company, Ampere, is largely owned by Oracle, and there are some ongoing discussions about a full acquisition.
Your "only" is funny. That is by far the biggest computing market worldwide.
How has Microsoft ditched VS for VSCode? VS is lightyears ahead in features and performance.
The two are not even remotely comparable. VSCode is a text editor that wants to be an IDE, but if you work with C++ or .NET you're shooting yourself in the foot if you use VSCode.
VSCode is not a serious alternative to VS or other IDE's like JetBrains Rider.
GitHub is not open source.
Without that leak we would not have the ecosystem evolving around Llama.
Meanwhile, we continue to pour money into Oracle licenses, not just for basic access but for additional features—like enabling data reading and analysis on the Oracle-embedded database in our main app. And, if we need to allocate more CPU cores on our VMs, we face yet another round of licensing fees.
Sometimes you don’t need much support. Yet pay tons of money.
Why was PostgreSQL not an option according to management? I would not take their dismissal at face value. I'd want to know why not. But that might be Dutch culture.
A good example is the GIS industry where ESRI (ArcGIS) dominates. In Europe the open source qGIS is generally an acceptable alternative despite less 'support'. In America its hard to find anyone using qGIS and ESRI is basically a monopoly.
> An Open Source experiment meanwhile is typically operated by an enthusiastic hobbyist with borrowed equipment. Rolled out without training and without professional support, by someone who likely did this for the first time, it’s no wonder things often don’t work out well.
> After the experiment, the faction was disappointed and concluded that Nextcloud was no good. And that was also their lived experience. “Let’s not do that again!”
This is a rhetorical trick known as implication or insinuation. By presenting information indirectly, the author prompts readers to make a connection themselves without explicitly stating it.
The author implies that the European Parliament's failed experiment with Nextcloud was due to a lack of professional resources and expertise, suggesting it was handled similarly to typical open-source projects led by hobbyists without proper support. However, he doesn’t provide any factual evidence that the Parliament’s Nextcloud experiment actually lacked professional resources, training, or adequate equipment. Instead, he hints at this by describing common issues with open-source setups, leaving readers to assume the experiment suffered from similar shortcomings.
I would have appreciated some facts, or even sources for his claims, but there are none. And I couldn't find any information about the Nextcloud deployment having failed.
I hate to break it to you but it takes time to implement closed source solutions as well. They also always have terrible documentation, because they make money on support.
Purely open source stuff lives and dies on how easy it is to start up.
Closed source paid stuff doesn't need to be easy. Often a decision has been made before implementation, and there are people to help you through it.
It's also easier to get approval for open source most of the time because there isnt a new bill, just my time.
I usually reach for open source first.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
[2]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/germa...
Hard to be an alternative when you serve the same master.
This isn't charity, they are literally using more OSS software than they produce their own software. By several orders of magnitude in most cases. Companies like Google have many millions of lines of code in proprietary in house code. But they depend on an even larger amount of code in OSS form.
E.g. Android and Chrome OS are based on Linux. Those products are built on many thousands of open source packages. And of course Google is contributing to lots of them and created a few themselves. Chrome is open source because webkit was open source because Apple forked KHTML from the KDE project.
Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing.
VC funded OSS companies are a bit more challenging. These companies are perpetually confused about their licensing and need to keep things proprietary and open at the same time. These projects get a lot of attention because of the VC money but technically they only represent a tiny fraction of the OSS community.
I don't think this is actually true:
1. The Google codebase is on the order of billions of lines of code, not millions.
2. It's basically all written in house, from the threading libraries and core standard libraries up. The parts that are open source (e.g. Linux, OpenJDK) are very small compared to the code they've written themselves.
ChromeOS and Android are open source, but they aren't even close to being the bulk of their codebase.
If Linux had never existed they'd have found some alternative, probably either a bulk licensing deal with a proprietary UNIX vendor or they'd have used Windows as the closest cheap Intel based alternative. Then they'd have put funding into developing their own in-house serving OS a lot earlier.
Source: I worked there.
> Chrome is open source because webkit was open source because Apple forked KHTML from the KDE project.
Chrome is open source for strategic reasons and because the executives in charge wanted it to be. There's no particular reason it has to be open. Safari and Edge aren't.
My conjecture is that open source is polished enough for most customers to use when there are commercial interests implied. Linux on the server is a resounding success, Linux desktop not so much.
https://gwern.net/complement
People have to put food on their table and can't work for free. Someone has to pay for that work. Nobody will pay for it if he can't extract some benefits from doing so.
Then the whole issue with non-copyleft licenses, that are nothing other than the old Whateverware or Public Domain licenses from the 16 bit home computer days.
We already had access to source code back then.
And for a large crowd this is already good enough, they aren't into it for religious definitions.