When ES writes effectively a response, the initial comments don't like ES's response or what they're doing either.
It may be that the collective HN vibe is critical no matter what. But also maybe "we" in aggregate legitimately don't like either option given.
I know open source devs need to make money somehow. I also wish there was a way to do it that was open source. I'm not sure there is. I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source.
In the original period of open source, people generally worked on open source on the clock at their existing jobs, a building tools they needed for that job, a job not dedicated to that particular product but to getting something done that product helped with. People were getting paid to write open source, but it wasn't by "productizing" it. The results were still shared freely.
(this is how/where apache httpd, for one, came from; people with jobs who needed an http server writing one on the clock, even though their job was not "writing an http server." They needed an http server to accomplish what was needed for their employers, but their employers had no desire or capacity to be in the business of selling an http server. Why not collaborate on one we can all use?)
But those days are gone, software has just gotten _so much more complex_ and time-consuming to develop. The open source software we have and need can't be developed in someone's "spare" (even on-the-clock spare) time. Some open source is still written by people working for a large employer, who pay them to be dedicated to that product. But we see the perils of that when an employer decides "wait, why aren't we making money selling this? Why are we contributing our employee's time to it?" (thanks Oracle).
So that leaves people trying to productize it one way or another. It is not clear to me how to have a healthy open source ecosystem in that market environment. I don't think "proprietary layer on top" is actually good for open source, especially if it's gonna lead (naturally) to rejecting contributions from outside to add those same features as open source (why would we want to spend time working with a contributor to make the feature solid, when we _already wrote it_, and when accepting the contribution would _harm our business model_ because that feature is what we want to charge for?), and then resistance to the "right to fork" which I consider the fundamental basis of open source freedom.
Perhaps the thing just is that "programming open source stuff" is a shitty business model?
Build a database, not a database engine.
> Some open source is still written by people working for a large employer, who pay them to be dedicated to that product.
Take e.g. tensorflow by google. The software itself, is per se worthless, so they can release it as OSS as some kind of calling card or recruiting tool. The crown jewels they are guarding closely and are never letting any outsider access directly is their data.
> Take e.g. tensorflow by google. The software itself, is per se worthless, so they can release it as OSS as some kind of calling card or recruiting tool. The crown jewels they are guarding closely and are never letting any outsider access directly is their data.
No, I think it's a little more complicated than that. I don't think this is a good comparison.
Tensorflow is only "worthless per se" because it was completely open sourced. It's quite a sophisticated library and a substantial product could have been built using it if it was kept proprietary.
However, Google got to the space first and Google is fundamentally a software service company. The reason they open sourced Tensorflow is because they have data and recognized the data would be more valuable; hence, they decided to commoditize the complement. By open sourcing Tensorflow they made their data even more valuable (likewise for their services which can be used to build and manage a data pipeline).
I have to strongly disagree here. Stuff like Kafka from LinkedIn, Envoy from Lyft, Prometheus from Soundcloud are just the tip of the iceberg of people writing tools because they need them, not because they are in the business of making infrastructure software.
I believe that selling software, be it foss, open core, or fully proprietary is not good business model, neither from business nor from ethics point of view. Sell your expertise or use the software yourself to generate value, but trying to sell it is just futile.
Funny you should mention Kafka. Jay Kreps, Jun Rao, and Neha Narkhede, formerly of LinkedIn who worked on Kafka, left to form Confluent. They provide support, managed cloud, and licenses for their own flavors of Kafka and ecosystem add-ons, and recently made license changes to their open source add-ons to block providers like AWS from offering them as SaaS as well.
Considering the direction Microsoft has taken, I think they in particular would agree. It is no coincidence that MS is more and more straight up giving away their software, or at least bundling it as a service.
> I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source.
I believe you're conflating "open core" with with "open source". I don't believe that open source needs a profit motive to exist and flourish. While this may be a blow to the open core FOSS business model, there are a number of other models that continue to exist that do not involve proprietary enterprise extensions.
While these models may not be attractive to venture capitalists, they can certainly provide a way for developers to make money.
> I don't believe that open source needs a profit motive to exist and flourish.
The question is, who is going to write open source projects at a complexity/polish level similar to ElasticSearch. And how are they going to pay their rent?
People working on it need to pay the rent somehow.
I am suggesting that the way people paid the rent while working on open source historically in the "first phase" of internet open source (doing it on the clock at jobs for which the open source was useful for their job role, but producing the open source was not their job) -- is no longer working to get software written at the complexity level of 2019 software, as software gets much more complex requiring more people coordinating with themselves and spending more hours.
I agree, at least for the sake of argument, that "open core" is distasteful and problematic. I believe it was a response to the question of "how do we write open source and still earn a living." It may not be a satisfactory answer. I'm not sure what other answers exist. If there aren't better answers, open source will shrink, including by "open core" and such.
I reject the notion that Elastic is in this situation because they need rent money. In my view, they're in this situation because they accepted over 100M in venture capital, and now those investors want to see a return.
I believe that "open core" was not a response to the question of "how do we write open source and still earn a living?" but rather "how do we leverage open source to make a billion dollar company?". I think the distinction, however minor, is important.
I find that a reasonable line of inquiry, but the obvious next question is: How would they have paid themselves salary without the venture capital? How would they have done open source and still earned a living without it?
I am not sure there are obvious models/examples that are working. I think there's a reason that "open core" is an increasingly popular thing to try to do. I'm not sure if I can think of many earning a living while producing high-complexity high-quality open source software _except_ "open core".
(And I still think "open core" is problematic for the continued viability of actual open source).
Many of the most successful open source projects I can think of were funded by universities (Linux and Gnu) or natural monopolies (Unix). Their creators didn't become billionaires, but the sources of money were willing to pay them a comfortable living. Maybe it's the expectation that open source should be a massive fountain of wealth that is the real problem.
Well, there is an option of selling services which is even worse, both for developers and the product itself.
Or, there are Fair Source License / Commons Clause / Business Source License /... that allow developers to capture some of the value they generate, but this of course means they are not open/free/libre because they limit some of the freedom to accomplish that.
Do you know how the people who work on vue.js get paid? Do they have fulltime jobs as employees? Do they get paid to work on vue.js?
I find in general it's easier to get free labor on something the newer it is. Both because it's more exciting, and because the more 'mature' something gets the _more work it is_ for _less gain_, there's more time dealing with backwards compat and filing off rough edges and keeping the existing code just working, which is all less interesting to do for free. Plus, the more mature something is, the _more work_ it _takes_ to keep it going.
The critical thoughts are the ones that generate comments. How good is a comment that says “yeah this is good, I agree”? If you are angry or unhappy, that’s when you feel inclined to comment.
When Amazon wrote their letter, the [HN response](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961) seemed to tip towards not liking what Amazon had to say or was doing.
When ES writes effectively a response, the initial comments don't like ES's response or what they're doing either.
It may be that the collective HN vibe is critical no matter what. But also maybe "we" in aggregate legitimately don't like either option given.
I know open source devs need to make money somehow. I also wish there was a way to do it that was open source. I'm not sure there is. I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source.
In the original period of open source, people generally worked on open source on the clock at their existing jobs, a building tools they needed for that job, a job not dedicated to that particular product but to getting something done that product helped with. People were getting paid to write open source, but it wasn't by "productizing" it. The results were still shared freely.
(this is how/where apache httpd, for one, came from; people with jobs who needed an http server writing one on the clock, even though their job was not "writing an http server." They needed an http server to accomplish what was needed for their employers, but their employers had no desire or capacity to be in the business of selling an http server. Why not collaborate on one we can all use?)
But those days are gone, software has just gotten _so much more complex_ and time-consuming to develop. The open source software we have and need can't be developed in someone's "spare" (even on-the-clock spare) time. Some open source is still written by people working for a large employer, who pay them to be dedicated to that product. But we see the perils of that when an employer decides "wait, why aren't we making money selling this? Why are we contributing our employee's time to it?" (thanks Oracle).
So that leaves people trying to productize it one way or another. It is not clear to me how to have a healthy open source ecosystem in that market environment. I don't think "proprietary layer on top" is actually good for open source, especially if it's gonna lead (naturally) to rejecting contributions from outside to add those same features as open source (why would we want to spend time working with a contributor to make the feature solid, when we _already wrote it_, and when accepting the contribution would _harm our business model_ because that feature is what we want to charge for?), and then resistance to the "right to fork" which I consider the fundamental basis of open source freedom.