> Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor
Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model. You can only get away with that as long as you've got a lock on expertise and development. As soon as a significant portion of development and expertise is coming from outside, what makes the original business entity any more appealing than those others (as in this case)?
One way to stave that off for a while might be to make sure you're releasing new features you've developed at a good clip, and as you've developed them you're naturally going to have more expertise. That likely only works for so long though, most projects hit some level of maturity eventually at which point new features are somewhat superfluous, and might even be detrimental.
I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative.
> Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model.
Trite as it may sound, open source isn't a business model. For a profitable business, you need something unique, a moat that competitors can't cross easily. Open source can certainly be part of that model, for example by increasing the value of your core assets. Or as Joel Spolsky wrote many years ago, commodify your complement.
Google, say, releases a lot of OSS. Guess what they're not releasing? The data they have hoovered up of practically every internet user, that they sell to their customers (companies that buy advertising, not the users). "Data is the new gold". They release tensorflow under a permissive license, not the data they're training and running their DL models on. They release Android for free, as that lowers the cost of phones and drives more users into the Google online empire, giving them ever more data. Again, "data is the new gold", "commodify your complement".
(Not picking on google here to say that they are good or evil, just an example of how you can build a spectacularly good business while also releasing a lot of OSS)
Or for all those VC-funded corps popping up trying to build OSS databases and seeing it doesn't work out (Mongo, Elastic, etc.), build a database, not a database engine. Data is the new gold, software, particularly OSS, is a commodity.
> I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative.
Amazing. I think capitalism wouldn't be hurt if occasionally companies made the choice to end themselves "get out while you're no top" and distribute their wealth to the stakeholders, ideally with some sort of bonus to the terminal employees. Of course, the employees might not like that, but it is an attitude of entitlement (if an understandable one) to think that you should have a job for life.
Agreed. This is quite insightful bit from kbenson. It explains well the mystery I was wondering for a while: why company wrote the code in the first place cannot compete successfully against others who supposedly have less expertise and has to rely on license change to defend their moat.
Software matures, and the expertise transfers to many other people while it matures. That shared expertise enters into public common for good. Natural and beautiful.
Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model. You can only get away with that as long as you've got a lock on expertise and development. As soon as a significant portion of development and expertise is coming from outside, what makes the original business entity any more appealing than those others (as in this case)?
One way to stave that off for a while might be to make sure you're releasing new features you've developed at a good clip, and as you've developed them you're naturally going to have more expertise. That likely only works for so long though, most projects hit some level of maturity eventually at which point new features are somewhat superfluous, and might even be detrimental.
I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative.