I'm building <a href="https://www.datasette.cloud/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.datasette.cloud/</a> and <a href="https://datasette.io/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://datasette.io/</a> almost entirely open source for a number of commercial reasons.<p>1. I want organizations (initially newsrooms that care about data journalism, but rapidly growing beyond that) to be able to trust the product. The default result of 95% of startups is to go out of business, and going all-in on a product that then blinks out of existence is bad! When I'm selecting a vendor this is a thing I always consider, so I'd like my customers to feel confident that they have the ultimate escape hatch - run it yourself - should they ever need it.<p>2. Newsrooms in particular have learned this lesson before, many times over - and not just for startups. Remember Google Fusion Tables? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables</a> That's just one relatively recent example.<p>3. Datasette is an ecosystem play. There are over 100 plugins already - <a href="https://datasette.io/plugins" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://datasette.io/plugins</a> - and I hope for there to be thousands more. Developers don't invest nearly as heavily in building and releasing plugins for closed-source platforms.<p>4. Open source is a way for me to punch _way_ above my weight. I can have a much larger impact on the world by participating in open source, compared to if everything I'd been building had been closed.
> Open Source is the ultimate form of sustainability.<p>If the company that produces open source fails, the software doesn't have maintainers anymore. Unless someone else picks up working on a possibly hugely complex piece of code, you will have an outdated, possibly full-of-secholes relic in no time. Software isn't static.<p>So many open source projects have a funding problem. A single company pays the 5-15-50 developers it takes to keep it alive, build releases and so on, and then suddenly goes under or pulls funding.<p>You can't just simply take over the mainenance of a large project at the snap of your fingers. The projects mentioned in the article are the exception, not the rule. The "community" doesn't typically come up with funding to the tune of several million dollars a year, nor does it have the know-how on all the details.<p>If you need an example, take a look at the commit graph of the oVirt project [1] after Red Hat decided to sunset it. No forks, very little in the eay of new maintainers. Unless you want to risk it, you probably need to move off oVirt sooner or later. (Bias disclaimer: I worked on the Kubernetes/OpenShift integration for oVirt for ~2 years.)<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-engine/graphs/commit-activity">https://github.com/oVirt/ovirt-engine/graphs/commit-activity</a>
While on the topic, I think EUPL should become the default license for open-source projects in the business context. It's a weak copyleft license (OSI and FSF approved), so it does not strike mortal fear of "viral" license spread on business partners. Similar to EPL, MPL, and LGPL, it creates an obligation of sharing back the changes made to weak-copyleft licensed portion of the code. Finally, EUPL closes the SaaS loophole, which is similar to a non-existent Affero LGPL license.
In light of Terraform/HashiCorp's license change recently, how "open source" should we consider companies like this?<p>Currently their GitHub repo is licensed under an open-source Mozilla license [1]. But contributors also have to sign a CLA [2] which perhaps (?) allows the company to re-license the work like HashiCorp did? Should we now consider companies like this to be "open source for the moment"?<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy">https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy</a>
[2] <a href="https://cla-assistant.io/frain-dev/convoy?pullRequest=1362" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cla-assistant.io/frain-dev/convoy?pullRequest=1362</a>
I really love the sudden surge of open sources businesses coming out of YC and in general. I share some of the same sentiments in the post, having open sourced my SaaS business of 7 years earlier this year. One of my main driving forces was market pressure from enterprises wanting to self-host. One of the other drivers was my bus-factor of 1, as was longevity as you mentioned. Time will tell if the distribution side of things will ring true for my business, but I'm hoping it will judging by initial growth i.r.t. CE.<p>I wrote more about my "whys" here [0] if anybody is interested in a similar post.<p>[0]: <a href="https://keygen.sh/blog/all-your-licensing-are-belong-to-you/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://keygen.sh/blog/all-your-licensing-are-belong-to-you/</a>
Well said, Subomi. I’d like to see more open source companies be public about how they think about open source as a strategic decision (admittedly, I could do better about this myself).<p>I think Vercel / Next.js and Automattic / Wordpress are great examples of aligning value to the business while also creating (and not capturing) a bunch of value to users of the open source project. As a result of leaving some value on the table for users, both projects have a thriving plugin/extension community that wouldn't exist if they were closed-source or confined to a single vendor. Likewise, I'm more likely to start a Next.js project knowing that I can host it anywhere, even though my default is to use Vercel.
It is quite intriguing that after <i>four decades</i> [1] it is not particularly clear why individuals and organizations adopt "open source" (in one of its many forms). Yet somehow it keeps growing as tangible reality and is now possibly irreversible.<p>There have been countless arguments for motivations, benefits (short and long term), sustainable business models etc., with various degrees of plausibility but in general rather vague, anecdotal and subjective.<p>What is missing is not reflection on the phenomenon by its practitioners (or others in the tech domain) but the sharp, objective and comprehensive eye of scholars with legal and economic expertise (and by now, also a knack for tech history).<p>Understanding the dynamics of "open source" (in quotes again, because of its wide and evolving range of manifestations) is quite important. E.g., there are many domains that seem completely allergic to it, for reasons that are as unclear as the reasons for success in other areas.<p>In any case, while techies are taking it for granted, it is one of the most remarkable social phenomena of recent times. There aren't that many examples of large scale cooperation / coopetition of complete strangers across the planet, working on very concrete and useful tools.<p>[1] lets take the GNU project as the nominal start of the open source era <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project</a>
Open source also serves as a "defense strategy" for larger companies whose core business does not directly / indirectly depend on commercializing its open source project(s). They in turn serve more like hedges.<p>For example, Meta with PyTorch in context of the machine learning tooling space. PyTorch is probably strategically important for them as they do not have a cloud business. The other large competing deep learning framework is Tensorflow, designed and open sourced by Google but also owns a cloud business (GCP). They also have in-house AI accelerators like TPUs. Microsoft didn't really have a deep learning framework, but they have ONNX, and is now using ONNXRuntime as an on-ramp to their cloud business (Azure).<p>If Meta wants to continue doing ML, and all the other cloud players jacked up their prices, that's gonna hurt Meta's operating costs. So it's still "cheap" to have hedged against such a scenario. All these on top of upsides like developer marketing etc.
Elephant in the room: People looking for open-source solutions are not looking to spend money, it's usually the opposite. If you want to build a business around open-source you should keep in mind, that your users are <i>not</i> your customers. What individual software developers want is different what enterprises want to pay for. Focus on the latter
Convoy being a VC funded company<p>I think the mission for Conoy is to grow, grow, go public, increase
shareholder value.
Or these days, perhaps build, grow and make actual real profits.<p>not<p>""
At Convoy, our mission is simple; we genuinely want to put our technology into the hands of as many engineers as possible without having to worry about long sales cycles, data compliance issues, and being constrained to your immediate network & friends.
""
Though as an end user I love open source - I love it because it’s free, but you’re not going to necessarily build a business off people who like free stuff unless it involves monetizing them another way (ads, getting them to give you labor for free, etc).<p>Open source aside I wish there were some improvements on doing a highly available self hosted setup. I’m talking plugging 5 machines into a router and power and it just works. Auto healing, redundant backups, etc.
Open source software deserves celebration. Its impact on the world is profound and transformative. Recently, I began porting the 3D Gaussian splatting paper to C++ and CUDA with an aim to optimize the training speed of such models. This endeavor was only possible because the original authors open-sourced their work. The feedback has been encouraging, and I feel that I'm making a difference—perhaps even more than in my regular job. That said, it's essential to remember that contributing to open source, while rewarding, can be demanding if it's not your full-time occupation. Yet, through such efforts, we ensure these tools remain freely accessible and aren't monopolized by corporations.
I provide you the link to this GitHub project in case you are interested.
<a href="https://github.com/MrNeRF/gaussian-splatting-cuda">https://github.com/MrNeRF/gaussian-splatting-cuda</a>
I used to open source every single thing I built. But recently, I stopped doing that because now I build everything as a single monorepo. All of my completely disconnected side project ideas are all in one repo and I'm much more happy being able to keep this like dependencies up to date in one place instead of having a different repo per project.<p>I would like to go back to open sourcing all things I play with but maybe I need to find a repo structure and tooling that would make that more sustainable.
Honestly? I personally care very little whether or not something is open source at this point in time. Code bases have become so large that there’s little benefit to me other than self-hosting, and there are few things I care to self-host. The main argument I would make is that companies should, at the very least, open source everything before shuttering. If you’re going out of business, allow your former customers to maintain themselves what you’re no longer going to maintain yourself.
Open source creates the largest possible market share for the project.
Those doing most of the code contributions will miss out on monetizing a lot of this market. But it's better to monetize 10% of a market that is 100x bigger than monetize 100% of a market that is 100x smaller. Even if someone else isn't contributing much and is monetizing another 1% of the market.
How does being open source free a company from data compliance issues?<p>> ... without having to worry about long sales cycles, data compliance issues<p>which may or may not be associated with this part:<p>> ... and try to justify it with something-something data privacy.
It's an interesting question, but it's the opposite of the one I usually ask.<p>Software should be open source. "Why try to monetize?" would be the question I'd ask myself.
Thought this was great - especially being so up front about the value of distribution.<p>I wrote a post about the very same meetup, but note distribution is not one of our "why open source" answers <a href="https://www.medplum.com/blog/yc-oss-faq">https://www.medplum.com/blog/yc-oss-faq</a> - perhaps we are alone in this regard<p><a href="https://github.com/medplum/medplum">https://github.com/medplum/medplum</a>
I looked into this recently in relation to AI models, and had the following list for reasons companies (and ICs to some extent) open source. It's my own post but I think it's on topic here: <a href="http://marble.onl/posts/motivations_for_open_source.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://marble.onl/posts/motivations_for_open_source.html</a><p>Name recognition<p>Community contribution<p>Collaboration<p>Building a user base<p>Creating a standard
I described a checklist for open source vs fake open source evaluation<p><a href="https://blog.oss.fund/p/a-framework-for-open-source-evaluation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blog.oss.fund/p/a-framework-for-open-source-evaluati...</a>
Feel the same way with integralapi.co – we'll be going open source very soon but want to make sure we have everything "open source ready".<p>Can't give out code that can't be exposed to the public.
It’s interesting to see how “being open source” has become the new “freemium” GTM model, but with significantly more downsides for the vendor.<p>E.g., now you don’t even know who’s using your product, how to collect their feedback nor who to contact to convert them to paid.