Open-source companies gather to gripe: Cloud giants sell our code as a service – and we get the square root of nothing On Thursday, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, companies building open-source code gathered to figure out how to survive having Amazon, Google, and Microsoft sell their software as a service without paying for the privilege. The confab has a name, the Open Core Summit, where "Open Core" refers to the marketing …
People offer their software for free, and are shocked when other people use it for free.
Or in other words, if you don't like the terms of the license, use a different license. Too many people use "GPL" etc. because it's "cool", and then moan when people use their product in a way the license specifically allows.
If you're not truely believing in the open-source philosophy, then don't pretend you are. Simple.
True, although it can be a bit hard to use those to satisfy your landlord. It's a bit like artists being paid in "exposure." ;)
The funny thing is, if you foresee wanting to actually sell software based on your code, you're better off using a BSD license, because then you can tack on closed-source improvements to make it worth paying for over the free version.
Yes, from the context of getting paid, that's true, but again, it's about the philosophy. BSD wants good code to be used everywhere, hence the lack of restrictions.
GPL, well, similar goals, slightly different approach.
Again, it simply comes down to philosophy, whether BSD, GPL, or any other - if you don't like the terms of the license, use a different licence!
Some of these GPL'ers obviously don't really share the RMS philosophy they claim to when opting to use the GPL
If I distribute an improved version of MySQL for example, I have to make my improvements available for other people to use as they wish.
If, on the otherhand, I provide a cloud database service using my improved MySQL offering, then I don't have to distribute it, and if I don't then I don't have to make my improvements available.
You dont have to publish your improvements only if your fork has to be better than the community driven one in the future too.
You have to merge from upstream or your fork will lag behind. If its too different clients might stop working.
E.g. Google deciding to unfork their Debian version.
If you can keep you private fork better you are essentially just selling closed source software you wrote and maintain. Its a bit of a skank but Mr Torvalds has ben famously relaxed about this issue.
Facebook work made it back eventually and now MySql has a bunch of cool scaling options.
'Volunteer' and 'high quality' often do not get along. Why a very skilled developer should work for free, while others makes millions or billions from his or her work? Do you 'volunteer' your work, or you expect to be paid? Living under a bridge and looking into garbage for food is not my lifestyle.
You 'universe' is far from being 'normal', and your idea of work is very akin to slavery.
Just sometimes, and usually only if they have another source of revenues, or like to live like monks.
Satisfaction may be good, but it doesn't put food on a table nor a roof above it. And even the hardware you use to write software isn't free, just like the power to run it.
Moreover writing a complex software is far more than a sleek algorithm in a few lines of code.
But teach us, how do you live writing code for nothing?
Yes. But also at times no. You can try to do everything yourself. Being self sufficient is harder than trading skills.
However, having a Gold Toilet, you would not spend money on a plumber offering to fit a ceramic one. Thus value of services/products/work offered vary.
I'll bet most open source code is written by people that want that tool themselves and use open source to make it better for themselves, and everyone else.
I doubt there are many os devs working as volunteers without being users themselves.
If an os team has just two people on it, both get free code in return for their effort, provided they are both users.
Ref: the Cathedral and the Bazaar
If you volunteer free code for Amazon that you dont use yourself, you are mugging yourself. Dont do that.
Most open source is written by people that are paid by some companies to write that code because they have in interest in it. They can pay less if the effort is shared among different companies and some enthusiast also help - especially testing it.
So yes, they are users themselves in some ways, but there is a far more selfish motivation than you think. Do not expect, for example, Google making available its search engine code...
They are not volunteers if they are paid by someone to write the code.
So we are back why they are paid to work on a project and where the revenues are from.
There's a big risk software becomes a side effect of some other interests able to bring in the money to pay for development. Interests that may be far worse than having to pay directly for software development.
Look at Android: it only exists because Google needed a way to gather as much data as possible from users, and smartphones are the perfect source. And the best way to achieve it was working on a phone OS.
If nobody can make money selling a phone OS, you just get what other interests like data slurping, user tracking and profiling, and ads slinging make available, and there will be no choices.
What is worst? Paying for software, or having a surveillance device in your pocket?
Not surprisingly, Microsoft switched Windows software development in the same direction. Take advantage of open source work, and bind people into something with no other choice available, and exploit them to make money.
It's very ironic that the open world promised by Open Source is turning into a world dominated by few monopolies that could grow quickly at that scale exactly because they didn't have to pay for software, and can now "volunteer" some people to some projects that are actually used to sustain their main business - and the code running the latter you will never see....
I dont understand this?
"There's a big risk software becomes a side effect of some other interests able to bring in the money to pay for development. "
ALL software is a side effect of someone having money to pay for development. Even if you write a simple bash script. The software is a side effect of you paying (with time) to write it.
Open Source movement has nothing to say about people doing work, not selling that work directly but making money as a side effect. Thats just business. Its like offering free wifi and selling coffee. If you dont get wifi installed at home because you can get it "free" in coffee shops, you ought not to complain about paying for coffee, surely?
I dont really see how this is relevant to an open source debate when clearly Google write all the code in Android. Its there work they can give it away free. If os did not exist they can still give it away free? They open sorce it to make it more appealing to take it. Because if you dont like the snooping code you can take it out. I have done that. I built a chromium version with no snoopware I can do that because google open source the code. Best of both worlds free code no snoopware.
Android is basically some custom kernel patches (Binder / IPC layer) to the upstream Linux Kernel.
Some userland original sw from google, of frankly meh quality (media flinger anyone?)
The rest is very much open source software, which in my view proves the point.
Even google can't afford to rebuild the entire stack, to any advantage.
Apple sit on a BSD userland.
Sony ship BSD as the development environment in the PS4.
The thing that makes Android problematic is the binary blobs which control the radio processor and the application processor, are opaque to the user.
So that's an exploitable backchannel, which is not open, and there is no source to allow its auditing.
That google make some SW available is to their credit. But android is not googles work, It's the community's work + binary blobs + a little of googles work.
Sorry you don't want to understand.
There are software that is the MAIN direct effect of someone paying for development. That's your main product and your main source of revenues. It's not a side-effect.
Then there is software that is a side effect of a larger business - built only to sustain the main source of profits.
That's the difference between iOS and Android, for example - Apple makes money selling iOS devices, Google makes money giving away Android because it helps its data slurping and ads slinging business. Without such business, Android would not exist. It's a side-effect of the need to slurp users' data and sling them ads. If there had been a law forbidding data slurping, Google would have never created Android. Apple would have created iOS anyway.
And BTW, if Google had to write Android from scratch, it would have costed them far, far more. Reusing Linux Kernel and existing Java tools and libraries saved them a lot of money - what they write is basically their non-open source "Google services blob" - while their main business became even more profitable.
The thing is that manufacturers care about the OS and how easy it is to support the new hardware.
Users don't care about that. Users care about applications, and there appears to be no completive advantage to having a different OS under the same applications.
Contributing to the OS stack on Android, is going to result in a better return on investment.
As an example, Google needed full text search support, they hacked that into SQLite3.
As a result SQLite3 users on all platforms get full text support available, and google don't have to pay to maintain that code.
The SaaS movement is actually quite a good thing, as an ecosystem of people get to use software, without learning to configure it. The users slowly discover the actual service is what they want and more resources accrue to keeping that service scalable, until a tipping point is reached and the service is brought back in house again. For AWS, this figure is supposed to be about 10k/month. FWIW, I quibble with the figure, but I agree with the point.
As a final example look at the improvements to ruby/rails provided by Github/Microsoft using rails for their SaaS. That's pure commercial self-interest, if they engage with upstream, throw some devs and cash at them, they save a boatload of money.
So, people saving money by collaboration, improvements to the common code base, are shared.
I maintain some open source software as it solved my problem, if you can go make money using it, please go ahead, I care not.
All I want is to use my work, to save my self from solving the same problem over and over again.
"They are not volunteers if they are paid by someone to write the code."
Yup, but it was you who described them as volunteers in the first place. If you care to read the article it's not individuals complaining about this, it's companies. Their problem seems to be that they wanted to start S/W companies, decided that some sort of FOSS licence was cool and used that, not having worked out whether it was appropriate for their business model. There are a number of models that do seem to work. One is the Red Hat 1.0, give away the product and sell support (Red Hat 2.0 is being so successful that IBM pays good money to buy yo out). Another is the Intel model where you sell some H/W and provide FOSS drivers. A less publicly visible model is that you need some particular FOSS S/W and either do some debugging or add new features and contribute back to the project.
'Volunteer' and 'high quality' often do not get along. Why a very skilled developer should work for free, while others makes millions or billions from his or her work?
When 'Volunteer' is mentioned, there's the tendancy to think of a person or persons working from home/garage/parents basement.
The issue here is software companies releasing their product as Open source and failing to profit from that.
It was only a few years ago there was a plethora of articles encouraging more permissive licences and criticising the GPL.
I believe in Free Software, but I also believe if software is being used to turn a profit, there should be a cost to that. If you're dancing to the organ grinder for pleasure, great, if you are dancing and handing a hat, round some share should go to the grinder, or you are a naughty thieving monkey.
But if the grinder explicitly gives the monkey the rights to do so, just how naughty is the monkey?
I remember questions about the inevitability of this sort of development being raised in the mid nineties (when I started professionally programming). We're 25 years on, and the best answer is always "services". I say "best" because it obviously fails if your biggest users are 1000 times larger and 100000 times richer and are developing lots of software themselves.
Define "volunteer". How much do you think "volunteers" are paid, and why are they called "volunteers"?
That's the root of the problem: OSS has been built on volunteers' (unkind folks even say "hobbyists'") efforts, and now these volunteers don't want to be volunteers anymore, they want to be contractors or employees.
Fat chance.
The thing that irks me is how SaaS manages to use open source software to completely defeat the point of open source software.
The original idea was to make the source code available to the end user so that they would not be locked out of their own data or systems when a program failed or was withdrawn from the market.
Software As A Service not only makes the software unavailable to the user, in many cases it also removes their data as well.
Perhaps we need an open source license that insists that it is the end user of the program that has the rights, not some remote service provider.
Like the AGPL?
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
"The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works, specifically designed to ensure cooperation with the community in the case of network server software."
Open Source / Free Software is not a business model.
I've been doing this for nearly 30 years, getting paid for all of it. You don't create the software and Open Source it to make money, you create the software as it's what you need for yourself. If you Open Source it then others can help you. Only if it's any good will people start paying you to maintain it.
This whole idea of:
1). Open Source
2). ????
3). Profit !
Is worthy only of underpants gnomes thinking.
Open source (and software libre) do not exclude the profit motive. But that would be services one offers around it. Like someone wants a new feature, he can pay you to develop it. Or pay you for setting it up on premises, things like that. After all, companies that provide SaaS with OSS do pay their developers and admins. It's just that there's no artificial scarcity from which to extract exuberant profits.
At least that's how the theory goes. I'm not taking sides in this, just noting.
Can you see the failure of your assertion in the article case?
1) They don't need to pay you to develop anything, they develop it themselves and don't make it open, as the license doesn't require it
2) They can set it up themselves.
Anyway, the opportunity of making money by developing new features and installing disappear when everybody can obtain and install your software - you can offer it at far lower prices when you don't have to pay for development also - while you can just wait for someone to add the new feature for free, or, if you don't redistribute the software, you can pay someone cheaper and keep the code for you.
"they develop it themselves and don't make it open, as the license doesn't require it"
Now whose fault is that? Maybe the FSF was on to something? Developing software with BSD/MIT type license is charity work, plain and simple.
Presumably someone else who hasn't read and understood the licences they pontificate about.
The GPL doesn't require you to open up your changes either if they are purely in-house. Sure, you can't redistribute the code even in binary form in that case but for the big cloud players that isn't a motivation, indeed exclusivity is a virtue.
There was an article about this issue here on El'Reg a few months ago. The GPL was designed in a pre-cloud time and so the assumption was that anyone wanting to base a "product" on the SW would be distributing it and therefore would be covered by the terms of the GPL. The cloud players don't want to distribute the SW, they want to have people use the SW on their cloud, so no distribution and therefore no need to publish your enhancements.
The GPL isn't fit for this situation.
In the case of many of the companies mentioned, however, the cloud providers aren't continuing development and keeping their code away from people. In many of the cases, all the new code the companies provide, which isn't all that much, is being released freely. The problem these places are talking about is that the cloud places are making bunches of money by selling the administration of this software and the resources it runs on. And while I see the point that these companies are profiting from the work of others, it's also the work others specifically said people could use for whatever purpose without needing to pay them.
This isn't to deny the usefulness of a license like the AGPL; it makes sense why people want it and there are other places that would have had to release a bunch of code if they had AGPL-licensed components. Even if all the projects mentioned in the article were AGPL licensed, however, the cloud places could still charge for servers that run these projects, management of those servers, and programs and scripts that modify the running of that program without being written into it.
Some problems we can deal with:
"Can you see the failure of your assertion in the article case?"
Original assertion: "he can pay you to develop it. Or pay you for setting it up on premises"
"1) They don't need to pay you to develop anything, they develop it themselves and don't make it open, as the license doesn't require it"
So clearly, they won't pay you for that, because they paid someone else for that. Doesn't really change the math; you could have been paid for that if they chose you for the job.
"2) They can set it up themselves."
Once again, someone else is being paid for something you could have been paid for if they chose you.
The assertion said that you could attempt to sell further development or setup for money, not that people were guaranteed to provide you with work in that area. There are various services you could provide around an open source codebase, but there are several caveats about those. The primary one is that you would be providing a service that someone else could provide. For example, it would be completely possible for someone else to provide the kind of Linux support for which Red Hat is known. In that case, Red Hat loses. But Red Hat didn't lose, so it clearly works at least some of the time. Meanwhile, I run plenty of code that Red Hat wrote at some point, but I don't pay them for support (using Fedora/Cent OS/other distributions that contain some Red Hat projects, but not using REL). By making their code open source, they accept that some people will be like me, and they realize that this might actually be quite helpful to them later down the line.
"Anyway, the opportunity of making money by developing new features and installing disappear when everybody can obtain and install your software"
Not really. Plenty of people hire open source developers to put another feature in because the developer wasn't already planning to but they are most competent to continue developing on their own codebase. You're correct that there are many other options that don't result in the dev getting money, though. But the opportunity of making money by making people buy the software disappears when you make the software free, too, and we don't complain about that because the dev theoretically realized that when they made that choice.
"you can offer it at far lower prices when you don't have to pay for development also"
This was in the sentence with a discussion about developers, but I presume "you" now means the companies that sell stuff based around the software. And your point is? Lots of people don't pay for everything in their system. The raspberry pi probably would have cost more if they had to pay for development of their own OS to run on it. Instead, they ported Linux, requiring much less code. That resulted in more Linux users, more developers who can contribute code upstream, and a cheaper computer for us. This strikes me as a win-win situation, but your tone above sounds like you took this another way.
Just, developing little modifications is a far smaller investment than developing a whole complex application from scratch. The problem is how you repay the investment if people can simply grab your code for free and make smaller changes themselves. If for in-house use, they aren't obliged to turn them to you too.
And again, grabbing someone else code and learning to set it up is far, far cheaper and easier than developing it. And again, you have nothing to give to the original developer.
Thereby you get competition from people who has to invest a far, far smaller sum than you have to.
Try to run a company. You'll see the difference.
BTW: RedHat was sold to IBM. Maybe even its business model wasn't working so well to keep on being profitable on its own?
All that is true. All that is obvious. All that was known when people put their code under an open license. Nobody said you were guaranteed work, just that you had a way to try to get it. It's also true that it is sometimes easier to get paid making something closed rather than something open.
"BTW: RedHat was sold to IBM. Maybe even its business model wasn't working so well to keep on being profitable on its own?"
You either misunderstand how companies work or you don't know how the Red Hat deal went down. Red Hat wasn't "sold to" IBM because they needed to shut things down. IBM bought Red Hat because it was making a bunch of money and IBM wanted their IP and developers. IBM isn't a private capital company that specializes in trying to get something out of a failing company; they're a technology company and they really liked Red Hat's technology. The fact that Red Hat's business model was pulling in revenue from lots of people probably helped get them to that $34B asking price, too. Strike that, it definitely did.
Capitalism and altruism do not play well together. (Or perhaps unregulated Capitalism.) It was inevitable that Open Source would become commercialized regardless of the creator's intent.
Having watched the Internet as it was destroyed by commercial interests it's hardly surprising that the software underlying it would also be exploited.
If you want to make money from your software, don’t give it out for free. And if you do give it out for free don’t complain when someone else makes the money.
The companies around Open Source want to make money out of work done by other people (they use OSS themselves) but don’t want the same happening to their software.
I'm sure most of know about SugarCRM. An Open Source project for 14 years or so which churned out a fantastic product in the form of the Community Edition. Impressive work and one in the eye for the big boys in the CRM world.
But... greed took its toll and they decided to go 100% commercial and stopped the Community verson (i.e. free) in its tracks. So a big 'cheers for constructing our business model guys, we can afford our own developers now so sod off and do one'.
That is the problem. The developers don't want paying for their work, but you know, they'd like to use it!
Its not just the "not getting paid" element. Many people being happy to give away code to help other solve a problem.
The underlying issues is that others ARE getting paid, for the thing you gave away, especially when directly offered as a service, and not just a background function.
It may be that trying to get paid is the wrong approach (albeit required as a business model) but the services being charged for should themselves be free of charge. Add some value service providers, don't just skin someone else's code with a billing system.
And yes, fundamentally, look at the licences and their terms. If it says free to use anywhere without even a credit, what did you expect!
The cloud providers could argue that they aren't just selling the software; the users could just download that from the original source any time they wanted. Instead, they're charging for the resources the software is run on, and optionally the management of the systems concerned. Clearly, a lot of the value for them is coming from the users' desire to run the software they didn't develop, and they are getting benefits from that, but they could argue that they are not charging users for that software, just the extra services they provide. You decide if this argument is good enough, but as you've said, it should be expected given the pretty explicit way the licenses say people can do that.
"open-source software is a loss leader for the cloud."
Sounds to me like a pretext for getting a freebee. Loss leader in the commercial sphere usually means selling a product below the cost of production in order to promote sales of other product. Since their Cloud biz is using the code for free then how can this be realistically described as “loss leader”.
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