Think of Office365, SAP Cloud Platform. It's benefical for a closed source vendor to switch to a service model, collect monthly recurrent fees and get free ultimate leverage against the customer.
The root of the issue is that licensing costs, the only costs that open source is guaranteed to reduce, can be a small percentage of operational costs in practice. If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience, it can literally be economically uncompetitive with a closed source product that does optimize those other operational costs even if it has a license overhead or creates vendor lock-in.
I see this dynamic more and more, companies have figured this out. Sure, buyers prefer open source infrastructure without vendor lock-in, but they don't prefer it enough to spend 2-10x the OpEx, which is often the case in these discussions. The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. Open source is a nice idea that most companies love, but they aren't going to spend mountains of extra money in operational costs to get it.
Reducing OpEx often requires cooperation and pooling of resources that a proprietary vendor can force on their users with little choice, while by default software like Mastodon, Pleroma, etc treat other instances as potentially hostile, replicating data (often) needlessly.
> If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience
I feel the opposite is true. There are many open source projects that are at least on par with their proprietary counterparts. Postgres is competitive with every SQL DB I've heard of except maybe in some niche use-cases. Redis is open source and incredibly performant. Same with Kafka (if you use it well). Linux sure runs better than Windows in my experience.
There is also a whole class of open-source libraries like React that have taken over. I can't even think of a proprietary frontend framework.
What software are you thinking of when you make these claims?
Not the parent but I thought of AWS services like RDS and S3.
I believe the point being made was the money you save on licensing fees are insignificant compared to the amount you spend on paying people to maintain your infrastructure.
I have used Postres during 4 years, Oracle and SQL server since 2000.
Postgres is a nice database, but there are enterprise deployment use cases that it doesn't cover, which might be consired a niche, fair enough.
What I don't consider a niche use case, is that its development tooling, meaning graphical DB management, graphical debugging of stored procedures, data modeling tooling, or integration of language runtimes into the database are all a bit behind of what those big DBs are capable of.
There are two major dimensions to the operational cost weaknesses of open source. Neither is guaranteed to be meaningfully exploited by proprietary software in any particular case. Since we are talking about operational costs, this is almost entirely about data infrastructure software, not things like React.
First, there is a vast amount of supported operational tooling that is simply missing from open source ecosystems. PostgreSQL, which I still use extensively, is a perfect example of this. The code bases around this tooling are several times the size of the product they support, and it isn't the kind of code that most developers aspire to write despite its high value to the customer. Oracle and SQL Server have architectures that are as obsolete as PostgreSQL, they don't compete on the basis of being modern, efficient designs but on the basis of having dramatically better operational tooling. Cloud RDBMS attack a different aspect of this.
Second, is the operational infrastructure costs i.e. how much hardware is required to run a given workload. This is the larger threat to open source, particularly as the data intensity of business increases. PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Redis (I've used all three operationally) have several times the hardware requirements to deliver a workload in practice than is required with a state-of-the-art architecture. This isn't hypothetical, I've designed engines that replaced them when warranted. An 80% reduction in infrastructure cost is attractive when you are already spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year on it. Some popular proprietary software is just as inefficient but that isn't guaranteed to remain the case (and I've replaced those systems too). Designing efficient software architecture isn't magic (see: ScyllaDB), you simply see very few examples of it in open source because it isn't a priority (see: use of managed languages for data infrastructure despite this being a known limitation).
The reality is that I can guarantee data intensive businesses who make competent use of open source that I can reduce their infrastructure costs by 4x with ease. You can bury a massive amount licensing and engineering costs in those savings.
Also, some companies are explicitly looking at this as a major "green" initiative. The wasteful infrastructure footprint to deliver a workload with open source is viewed as environmentally unfriendly, and this is pushing companies to consider proprietary solutions even if they are not sensitive to operational costs. That isn't a conversation open source is currently prepared to have but it is coming.
> I can guarantee data intensive businesses who make competent use of open source that I can reduce their infrastructure costs by 4x with ease
I am interested in your perspective and experiences.
> Oracle and SQL Server have architectures that are as obsolete as PostgreSQL, they don't compete on the basis of being modern, efficient designs but on the basis of having dramatically better operational tooling.
What dramatically better tooling does SQL Server has?
> PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Redis (I've used all three operationally) have several times the hardware requirements to deliver a workload in practice than is required with a state-of-the-art architecture.
What should I think of when you talk about state-of-the-art architecture? And what would replace aforementioned tools?
What should the open source offerings do to win you over?
> What dramatically better tooling does SQL Server has?
I don't know about Oracle but SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) are vastly better than anything I've seen for open source databases.
SSMS is just a really good visual client with an excellent table/view designer, diagram builder and query builder with GUI management features that let you manage virtually every facet of your server and databases.
SSDT lets you treat your SQL schema, database settings and deployments like code, with versioning. All of your table schemas, views, functions, procedures, settings, seed data, etc. are stored as text in your git repo. When you're creating, it has excellent intellisense/autocomplete. You can use it to diff your schema and data against a given SQL Server database to generate migration scripts. You can also do data comparisons between your seed data and your server and you can diff schemas and data between 2 different servers without even having created an SSDT schema. Another very useful feature is that you can reverse engineer a SQL Server database that was already created in order to start your SSDT project. It also has visual designers for all of the aforementioned things. It used to be a separate tool, but now it's part of the free Visual Studio community edition. Both tools are free, as are various editions of SQL Server.
Also, SQL Server itself has had features for a long time that PG is just starting to get such as real Stored Procedures, ones that can return multiple heterogeneous result-sets, run transactions and do control of flow with SQL-like statements (IF/THEN, DO, WHILE, etc.) It also has table variables, which are like in-memory tables, that you can use as a faster type of temp table for certain sets of data.
Since I moved off of Windows for my workstations, I've been running SQL Server in Docker on Linux for the past few months - it's rock solid.
Afaik, those things are available in DBeaver [0] and MySQL Workbench [1] as well.
@jandrewrogers also mentioned a 4-fold performance increase by switching to proprietary solutions from pgsql. I am still wondering what those solutions might be...
I’ve used both and I can assure you that both the products you mention fail to approach the utility and more importantly, the quality of either SSMS or SSDT.
Have you tried the SQL Server based products at all?
I disagree about the opex cost, as anyone who has had to pay for oracle consultants to come in and fix a borked dB would.. I think that a more accurate assessment is 2x-10x the claimed sticker opex cost that the vendors talk about. The problem bring that "boss my system has shat its pants and I need half the budget to g fix it" is a story that NO ONE in ANY corporate can tell twice.
You are not limited to Oracle engineers and access to proprietary source code and documentation to clean your systems pants. That makes individual fixes cheaper and the fixes can be shared publicly, leading to additional cost savings.
> The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully.
This is the developers perspective. In the time it takes to develop something the licence fees are indeed at tiny part of the cost.
However, over the lifetime of the software itself it's usually a different outcome. Software typically lasts decades. Banks are still running cobol software written decades ago. Perhaps it's possible even over those long lifetimes the licensing costs still win. When it breaks down completely is when you deploy that software multiple times, paying those licence fees each time you do it. If you start paying for 1000 CAL's you have a problem.
The other comment here that is a red flag to me is "all the tools that give you visibility into the database save you time". If it is development time then well and good, but if you are needing DBA's once the thing is deployed then just no. No matter how sophisticated those tools are, they still cost far more than needing no attention whatsoever. This is where open source usually wins, because it's lack of sophistication is usually an case of being pared back to the bare minimum to do the job.
I work at Pivotal and disagree with a fair amount of the characterisation thereof, but my bias is mostly informed by actually working there for the last 6 years. Let's look at the heart of the argument instead.
> If you squint, open source could be seen as a very generous charitable donation to some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet.
Broadly: yes. Except backwards.
FLOSS can be seen as a public good -- it is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Excludability is the property that someone can be prevented from using the good (eg, requiring payment to consume a can of soft-drink). Rivalrousness is the property that utility from consumption of a good by one person diminishes utility for another person (if I drink the soft-drink, you get less of it).
Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level.
A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption.
This hints at one of the ways that public goods get provided: through subsidy by benefactors, who will capture some but not all of the value created by their benefaction. A wealthy person may so enjoy seeing the opera that they will donate heavily to the local opera house. They don't capture the full benefit -- other folks can watch the same shows -- but they capture enough value that they are satisfied with the arrangement. They might also get value from other factors, such as social approval.
The cloud providers do not sell public goods. Their services are fully excludable. If you refuse to pay, service will end. They are rivalrous at the limit, though, putting them into the category of club goods. These are much more likely to be provisioned in a pure market, since the benefits and costs fall more "correctly" on those who obtain or bear them.
>>Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level.
>>A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption.
Thus the reason Free (As in Freedom) software advocates promote the use of Copy-Left Licensing, and why non-copyleft (like MIT, BSD, and others) are slowly eroding "open source" to less fully formed software and more just the tooling, libraries and dev environments used to create software
Being an old dog at tech, given how the community has been anti-GPL licensing, pushing for non-copyleft licenses, I predict that in a couple of years we will be back to the PD, Shareware, Demoware, Beerware, PostcardWare, whatever were all the way to share code during the 80 and 90's on home computers.
And it is already too late to change course back to GPL being widespread.
Every year there is a new project replacing GCC with LLVM, on Android the kernel is the only major GPL piece still standing (with Fuchsia on the horizon), on embedded there is a rise of non-copyleft OSes (including Zephyr, a Linux Foundation project), and so on.
Copyleft doesn't guarantee payment and developers are not paid in patches. What you're arguing for is like-for-like bartering, which is a subset of all possible market exchanges.
The GPL creates neither excludability nor rivalrousness in the sense I am describing.
> A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good.
True in the general case of course, but there are arrangements that can be used to mitigate this. Crowdfunding with a threshold mechanism, ala Kickstarter, is one of these - reaching the crowdfunding threshold is a stable equilibrium. The intuition is that if every funder's contribution is critical to the threshold being reached, the funders are essentially "matching" each other's contribution, and thus providing a successful incentive even in a strictly rational sense.
A 'crowd' of enterprises is called a consortium, joint venture, foundation etc. While the funding arrangement for those is less formal than in actual crowdfunding, plenty of those do get funded out of enterprise budgets.
> The unexpected and asymmetric competition from the clouds confounds open source companies, who must confront the fact the competitive advantage of knowing their software better than anyone else isn’t the insurmountable moat they had hoped. It is never fun to wake up and discover your product is now just a feature of a broader offering, but this is what is happening with software. Claiming open source is eating the cloud is like coffee bean farmers claiming they’re eating Starbucks: it willfully (or just out of delusion) ignores the vast majority of what the customer is buying.
> (in Robert Metcalfe’s infamous expression, cross-platform web browsers & the Internet would reduce Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”)
Compare the number of platforms nowadays which (to varying extents) treat Linux as a free set of buggy device drivers.
Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3).
The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql.
These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This makes the stock version of open source software hard to operate in the way AMZN / GOOG operate it, while still allowing AMZN / GOOG to benefit from community effort without giving much back.
With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.
That's just simple competition that we've always had. Microsoft working on a competitor to your product was the huge fear of the 90s. Cloud providers competing with your own source code is a new phemonema.
The original thesis would be that brand loyalty would be strong enough to prevent forking like this. "You don't want that third-rate version, get the real thing from the original authors!". It appears that the customer base assumes quality is roughly equal considering its mostly the same code.
In many businesses, getting permission to buy/license from a new supplier is way more effort than just selecting another option at the cloud provider you're already set up with.
Could a trick along the lines of the Apple SMC copyrighted phrase be used to poison a protocol against a cloud provider? Release your client and server under a license like AGPL, with an attached file not under AGPL that both components require.
It's not possible to say the code is non-free because it's explicitly free, but packaging and placement (such as e.g. default pip installs using a trademarked name) could ensure at least some pain is felt to make a typical client talk to a server that does not have that file. Perhaps the file's license allows to be embedded anywhere so long as it is only used to play the role of a client
Sounds like open source companies will just need to become patent trolls. At least if Google is unable to successfully win the appeal in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit.
Yeah, but open source is just not a generally good business model, and open source companies seem to be rediscovering the reason intellectual property exists, leading to cognitive dissonance.
Open source is a good business strategy when you're trying to achieve vendor lock-in via price-dumping, a la what Google did with Android (and has been fined for in the EU).
AGPL doesn't protect the Free Software business. It protects the Free Software code itself.
The fact that a company backing an AGPL-licensed work goes under isn't the direct concern of the license. The fact that the code itself remains as Free Software, with a source-release obligation, even when run as an online service, is the principle concern.
Copyleft free software licenses, as with the GPL and AGPL, promote the concept and system of free software, first and foremost.
You're right, but there's another concern: who maintains the software? The original developers forming a company that supports development is not possible if the company is not protected by the license in some way.
Under the philosophy of the FSF, that'd be the "commons", i.e., the users of the software take on responsibility for adding new features or fixing bugs that affect them, and then contributing it back.
Without the provisions of the AGPL, an Amazon could co-opt some GPL'd (or even more permissively / less copylefted licence: MIT/BSD as examples), make extensive changes, use the code as part of an online service, and have no obligation to provide source to user(s).
Under the AGPL, the source-disclosure provision persists.
In both cases, Amazon is doing software development, but in the first, they're not contributing back to the codebase. In the second, they are.
Amazon are maintaining the software. Along with other users.
Me too. I don’t think there are many people making enough money to eat working on Open Source software. If you see GitHub, the largest most active projects are funded by Mega Corps like Micro Face Goog.
I wonder how many companies are successful with open source but paid licence for commercial use.
The cloud is eating business relying on licensing. This is relevant for both open and closed licenses. By the way I have wrote a post on that when the MongoDB debate was raging: https://medium.com/hackernoon/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-.... The way for Open Source to survive is to make it attractive for cloud providers.
How does one make their project attractive to cloud providers? For the sake of discussion; an infrastructure project like a job scheduler or some such?
I was more thinking about making the licensing attractive to cloud providers. The idea is that cloud providers are the dominant players - so for Open Source to survive it needs to be adopted by them. But yeah - I don't know how to do that. Licensing is not a core of their proposal, open sourcing their software does not impact their revenue directly - but might indirectly by letting other cloud providers compete with them using their own code.
I'll play the 'open source eating cloud' argument because what merit it has, isn't addressed in this piece.
How do computers earn people money? Speaking in 2019 that's obvious. Cloud providers earn the most.
There used to be other ways people got rich off computers.
But all those businesses imploded against the awesome might of '0 marginal cost', 'only good solutions survive', world of open source.
Open source has 'removed more profits'/'provided more value' then the cloud.
Cloud is simply the high profit game until competition kicks in, open source tools become the norm, and only the value of the virtual machine is sold at 1% the current price.
I wonder if advancement in orchestrator will shift the balance. There is a lot of effort into putting human knowledge into software, so that it can react to unexpected situation and self heal. K8s operators to be specific.
If this software works well enough, what would be the competitive advantage of AWS?
K8s is not an advancement in orchestration and is very much on the AWS side in this, deeply integrating with proprietary cloud services that do their own operations and infrastructure, not even considering open sourcing those services and their supporting infrastructure nor working towards alternatives to replace them. It's just that the same thing that makes AWS piles of money is the same thing the company behind k8s is after, so they are definitely not going to advance k8s in a way that commoditizes AWS. Not that they are even capable of doing so.
I think the Operator pattern reveals a real shortcoming in Kubernetes: there's a wide gap between the core orchestration problem and the many fiddly particulars of individual pieces of software.
What we gained in homogeneity for cloud-native software we're now losing in wide heterogeneity of Operator software.
I'm skeptical about "multi cloud eats cloud". If you're going to be boxed into using a lowest common denominator of services, cloud has less value. You might as well jump straight to hosted bare metal. The skill sets needed aren't much different than multi-cloud, and it's much cheaper.
I believe it's just saying that Google was disappointed that their MapReduce research didn't give them any market presence or power. Hadoop took the concepts and ran with it, with no direct benefit to Google. Pivotal benefited a lot with their commerical distro of Hadoop.
Google didn't make the same mistake with K8S and it killed Pivotal's PCF.
Hadoop looked to be a big part of Pivotal's overall strategy early on but didn't pan out. Labs and Cloud Foundry have contributed the lion's share of revenue for most of Pivotal's life, though data products like Greenplum, Gemfire and RabbitMQ have also contributed a lot.
Kubernetes was never really about Pivotal in any universe I can think of. It was about AWS.
People rarely mention in these debates that Bitcoin is open source, along with essentially all other cryptocurrencies. Indeed, the cryptocurrency business model could hardly exist without open source. It isn’t the same community at all as Linux / Postgres / etc, but it certainly should be considered a great success for open source.
Open source thought they could sell consulting and hosting services to fatigued devs, if they fatigued them enough. All those single project focuses left the door wide open for multi-clouds to "just add glue" between disparate open source projects and actually aim to be easy.
We now await to see if compute will become a commodity or just priced that way to prevent it becoming so. Is any challenger bold enough to bite off more of the pie than they can chew?
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadThink of Office365, SAP Cloud Platform. It's benefical for a closed source vendor to switch to a service model, collect monthly recurrent fees and get free ultimate leverage against the customer.
I see this dynamic more and more, companies have figured this out. Sure, buyers prefer open source infrastructure without vendor lock-in, but they don't prefer it enough to spend 2-10x the OpEx, which is often the case in these discussions. The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. Open source is a nice idea that most companies love, but they aren't going to spend mountains of extra money in operational costs to get it.
Efforts like https://jortage.com can reduce OpEx quite significantly.
I feel the opposite is true. There are many open source projects that are at least on par with their proprietary counterparts. Postgres is competitive with every SQL DB I've heard of except maybe in some niche use-cases. Redis is open source and incredibly performant. Same with Kafka (if you use it well). Linux sure runs better than Windows in my experience.
There is also a whole class of open-source libraries like React that have taken over. I can't even think of a proprietary frontend framework.
What software are you thinking of when you make these claims?
I believe the point being made was the money you save on licensing fees are insignificant compared to the amount you spend on paying people to maintain your infrastructure.
Postgres is a nice database, but there are enterprise deployment use cases that it doesn't cover, which might be consired a niche, fair enough.
What I don't consider a niche use case, is that its development tooling, meaning graphical DB management, graphical debugging of stored procedures, data modeling tooling, or integration of language runtimes into the database are all a bit behind of what those big DBs are capable of.
First, there is a vast amount of supported operational tooling that is simply missing from open source ecosystems. PostgreSQL, which I still use extensively, is a perfect example of this. The code bases around this tooling are several times the size of the product they support, and it isn't the kind of code that most developers aspire to write despite its high value to the customer. Oracle and SQL Server have architectures that are as obsolete as PostgreSQL, they don't compete on the basis of being modern, efficient designs but on the basis of having dramatically better operational tooling. Cloud RDBMS attack a different aspect of this.
Second, is the operational infrastructure costs i.e. how much hardware is required to run a given workload. This is the larger threat to open source, particularly as the data intensity of business increases. PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Redis (I've used all three operationally) have several times the hardware requirements to deliver a workload in practice than is required with a state-of-the-art architecture. This isn't hypothetical, I've designed engines that replaced them when warranted. An 80% reduction in infrastructure cost is attractive when you are already spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year on it. Some popular proprietary software is just as inefficient but that isn't guaranteed to remain the case (and I've replaced those systems too). Designing efficient software architecture isn't magic (see: ScyllaDB), you simply see very few examples of it in open source because it isn't a priority (see: use of managed languages for data infrastructure despite this being a known limitation).
The reality is that I can guarantee data intensive businesses who make competent use of open source that I can reduce their infrastructure costs by 4x with ease. You can bury a massive amount licensing and engineering costs in those savings.
Also, some companies are explicitly looking at this as a major "green" initiative. The wasteful infrastructure footprint to deliver a workload with open source is viewed as environmentally unfriendly, and this is pushing companies to consider proprietary solutions even if they are not sensitive to operational costs. That isn't a conversation open source is currently prepared to have but it is coming.
I am interested in your perspective and experiences.
> Oracle and SQL Server have architectures that are as obsolete as PostgreSQL, they don't compete on the basis of being modern, efficient designs but on the basis of having dramatically better operational tooling.
What dramatically better tooling does SQL Server has?
> PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Redis (I've used all three operationally) have several times the hardware requirements to deliver a workload in practice than is required with a state-of-the-art architecture.
What should I think of when you talk about state-of-the-art architecture? And what would replace aforementioned tools?
What should the open source offerings do to win you over?
I don't know about Oracle but SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) are vastly better than anything I've seen for open source databases.
SSMS is just a really good visual client with an excellent table/view designer, diagram builder and query builder with GUI management features that let you manage virtually every facet of your server and databases.
SSDT lets you treat your SQL schema, database settings and deployments like code, with versioning. All of your table schemas, views, functions, procedures, settings, seed data, etc. are stored as text in your git repo. When you're creating, it has excellent intellisense/autocomplete. You can use it to diff your schema and data against a given SQL Server database to generate migration scripts. You can also do data comparisons between your seed data and your server and you can diff schemas and data between 2 different servers without even having created an SSDT schema. Another very useful feature is that you can reverse engineer a SQL Server database that was already created in order to start your SSDT project. It also has visual designers for all of the aforementioned things. It used to be a separate tool, but now it's part of the free Visual Studio community edition. Both tools are free, as are various editions of SQL Server.
Also, SQL Server itself has had features for a long time that PG is just starting to get such as real Stored Procedures, ones that can return multiple heterogeneous result-sets, run transactions and do control of flow with SQL-like statements (IF/THEN, DO, WHILE, etc.) It also has table variables, which are like in-memory tables, that you can use as a faster type of temp table for certain sets of data.
Since I moved off of Windows for my workstations, I've been running SQL Server in Docker on Linux for the past few months - it's rock solid.
@jandrewrogers also mentioned a 4-fold performance increase by switching to proprietary solutions from pgsql. I am still wondering what those solutions might be...
---
0. https://dbeaver.io/
1. https://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/
Have you tried the SQL Server based products at all?
This is the developers perspective. In the time it takes to develop something the licence fees are indeed at tiny part of the cost.
However, over the lifetime of the software itself it's usually a different outcome. Software typically lasts decades. Banks are still running cobol software written decades ago. Perhaps it's possible even over those long lifetimes the licensing costs still win. When it breaks down completely is when you deploy that software multiple times, paying those licence fees each time you do it. If you start paying for 1000 CAL's you have a problem.
The other comment here that is a red flag to me is "all the tools that give you visibility into the database save you time". If it is development time then well and good, but if you are needing DBA's once the thing is deployed then just no. No matter how sophisticated those tools are, they still cost far more than needing no attention whatsoever. This is where open source usually wins, because it's lack of sophistication is usually an case of being pared back to the bare minimum to do the job.
> If you squint, open source could be seen as a very generous charitable donation to some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet.
Broadly: yes. Except backwards.
FLOSS can be seen as a public good -- it is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Excludability is the property that someone can be prevented from using the good (eg, requiring payment to consume a can of soft-drink). Rivalrousness is the property that utility from consumption of a good by one person diminishes utility for another person (if I drink the soft-drink, you get less of it).
Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level.
A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption.
This hints at one of the ways that public goods get provided: through subsidy by benefactors, who will capture some but not all of the value created by their benefaction. A wealthy person may so enjoy seeing the opera that they will donate heavily to the local opera house. They don't capture the full benefit -- other folks can watch the same shows -- but they capture enough value that they are satisfied with the arrangement. They might also get value from other factors, such as social approval.
The cloud providers do not sell public goods. Their services are fully excludable. If you refuse to pay, service will end. They are rivalrous at the limit, though, putting them into the category of club goods. These are much more likely to be provisioned in a pure market, since the benefits and costs fall more "correctly" on those who obtain or bear them.
>>A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption.
Thus the reason Free (As in Freedom) software advocates promote the use of Copy-Left Licensing, and why non-copyleft (like MIT, BSD, and others) are slowly eroding "open source" to less fully formed software and more just the tooling, libraries and dev environments used to create software
And it is already too late to change course back to GPL being widespread.
Every year there is a new project replacing GCC with LLVM, on Android the kernel is the only major GPL piece still standing (with Fuchsia on the horizon), on embedded there is a rise of non-copyleft OSes (including Zephyr, a Linux Foundation project), and so on.
The GPL creates neither excludability nor rivalrousness in the sense I am describing.
True in the general case of course, but there are arrangements that can be used to mitigate this. Crowdfunding with a threshold mechanism, ala Kickstarter, is one of these - reaching the crowdfunding threshold is a stable equilibrium. The intuition is that if every funder's contribution is critical to the threshold being reached, the funders are essentially "matching" each other's contribution, and thus providing a successful incentive even in a strictly rational sense.
As always, 'commoditize your complement': https://www.gwern.net/Complement
Compare the number of platforms nowadays which (to varying extents) treat Linux as a free set of buggy device drivers.
The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql.
These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This makes the stock version of open source software hard to operate in the way AMZN / GOOG operate it, while still allowing AMZN / GOOG to benefit from community effort without giving much back.
The original thesis would be that brand loyalty would be strong enough to prevent forking like this. "You don't want that third-rate version, get the real thing from the original authors!". It appears that the customer base assumes quality is roughly equal considering its mostly the same code.
It's not possible to say the code is non-free because it's explicitly free, but packaging and placement (such as e.g. default pip installs using a trademarked name) could ensure at least some pain is felt to make a typical client talk to a server that does not have that file. Perhaps the file's license allows to be embedded anywhere so long as it is only used to play the role of a client
Open source is a good business strategy when you're trying to achieve vendor lock-in via price-dumping, a la what Google did with Android (and has been fined for in the EU).
The fact that a company backing an AGPL-licensed work goes under isn't the direct concern of the license. The fact that the code itself remains as Free Software, with a source-release obligation, even when run as an online service, is the principle concern.
Copyleft free software licenses, as with the GPL and AGPL, promote the concept and system of free software, first and foremost.
Under the AGPL, the source-disclosure provision persists.
In both cases, Amazon is doing software development, but in the first, they're not contributing back to the codebase. In the second, they are.
Amazon are maintaining the software. Along with other users.
Note that AGPL applies to few projects at this point. Amazon is very heavily reliant on, e.g., Linux and Xen, both of which are GPL v2.
I wonder how many companies are successful with open source but paid licence for commercial use.
How do computers earn people money? Speaking in 2019 that's obvious. Cloud providers earn the most.
There used to be other ways people got rich off computers. But all those businesses imploded against the awesome might of '0 marginal cost', 'only good solutions survive', world of open source.
Open source has 'removed more profits'/'provided more value' then the cloud. Cloud is simply the high profit game until competition kicks in, open source tools become the norm, and only the value of the virtual machine is sold at 1% the current price.
If this software works well enough, what would be the competitive advantage of AWS?
What we gained in homogeneity for cloud-native software we're now losing in wide heterogeneity of Operator software.
Would anyone care to give a brief summary? It's the first I've heard of this.
Google didn't make the same mistake with K8S and it killed Pivotal's PCF.
Kubernetes was never really about Pivotal in any universe I can think of. It was about AWS.
Disclosure: I work at Pivotal.
We now await to see if compute will become a commodity or just priced that way to prevent it becoming so. Is any challenger bold enough to bite off more of the pie than they can chew?