>> (By the way, all new software without accompanying support & guidance is doomed to fail. And if that software comes from a dominant player, you’ll just have to deal with that by the way.)
There's a temptation to conflate the software license with the software business. This is natural, but places software as the primary value in the chain.
From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part.
I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. And a big part of that effectiveness is that staff can run it. And when it all goes wrong there's someone to call. I'm buying a -relationship-, not software.
Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc.
In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it.
>Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc.
>In truth the license doesn't matter.
It's funny to bring that up in the context of Red Hat who have started to circumvent the GPL by terminating their relationship with anyone who tries to actually make use of the rights granted by it. "The license doesn't matter" because they've found a loophole in it, but it clearly does matter in that they had to do so in the first place and weren't able to adhere to its spirit due to business concerns.
> From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part.
This is only because true most of the time businesses use a lot of publicly funded work without paying for it. If software development were entirely private, I'm sure businesses would find excuses that actually no it has to cost 100x what it would cost otherwise.
Everything you say about maintainability and stability is true. But writing software that can be operated as a service in the first place is substantially harder. It's just not as easy for a company to capture.
Is there a single example of multiple vendors selling support for the same open-source piece of software, where I can just hire a different vendor if I no longer like my current one, without changing anything major in my operations?
You could say that Canonical and IBM RedHat compete on offering Linux support, but the reality is that it's not that much harder to switch from RHEL to Ubuntu than switching to any other OS, so I don't think this counts.
It works, but just for _some_ solutions. For instance, there are multiple providers of support for PostgreSQL. And there are many companies offering support/consulting for WordPress.
IBM RedHat is the steward of RHEL, and Canonical is of Ubuntu, so if you want support from them there are no real other options, but they do work with multiple different ISVs.
If you want to stay 'independent' and have the most leverage you can take a linux which is not from a bigco, such as Debian.
I'm really worried about cloud-lock-in for bigger companies. My previous company switched large amounts of product to AWS, when I asked about how this was feasible after doing back-of-the-envelope calculations they said: well you should not consider list price, nobody is paying list price, we get discounts.
This reminded me of an ISP I worked for in 2006 that invested in large amounts of Solaris machines because they got big discounts instead of going for the much more obvious Linux route. Then after two years or so the new (Oracle at that time?? I'm not sure) sales rep paid a visit and they said, when they were not able to sell MORE new servers: OK screw the discounts, from now you're paying list price. So that got them stuck in a real bad place. I'm afraid the same might happen to companies who move to cloud providers as well.
And then I've not even touched on issues such as privacy, security, business continuity, and losing the skill to actually run your own hardware
> losing the skill to actually run your own hardware
i see a trend in recent years in losing the skill for making proper software too - Something that works and is usable and is not about changing colors and pixels and protocols everyday for the sake of it. Maybe the opposite trend of the everybody-can-program since 1995? Or maybe not - not sure how ML-generated stuff will impact all this.
btw there was ~2021 talk/article by same guy about how outsourcing-everything leads to total deskilling:
Actually yes; SuSE sells support [1] for RHEL, Ubuntu LTS, and SuSE itself). Quotes: "SUSE Liberty Linux consolidates support for your entire Linux environment, including CentOS, RHEL and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) distributions" and "Our world-class support team is trained to assist your entire mixed Linux estate — not just SUSE solutions."
>> If it was an open source software, you will have the option to go to a competing vendor.
You miss the point. Enterprises don't go looking for another vendor. Vendors come to them with a sales offering.
If I'm running SQL Server the I pretty much know where I stand with Microsoft, and there are endless MS approved support people.
With PostgreSQL some vendor has to come to me and convince me to switch. PostgreSQL is really well supported, and it's at least an option. 99% of Open Source though has 1 or 0 support entities, and 0 sales people.
Sure, with PostgreSQL I can do my own research. I might even have skills to do it myself. But now I have to explain my choices all the way up the ladder.
Am I going to use an OSS accounting system with no sales people? With no support people? Or am I gonna pay $99 a year or whatever for QuickBooks?
That's the main point. No one buys software, they buy solutions. Accounting is a good example. I use a SaaS solution, but it doesn't matter because I could also take all my invoices to an accountant, and the effect would be the same.
Also, mixing open licenses into business doesn't usually make sense.
I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source.
Large Corps arent exactly well known to handle the Explore part of the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff.
On the flip side lot of open source devs are going to get 100x more productive in the Exploit part than the avg coder monkey at large corp.
Nothing is obvious and predictable about where that story goes in an ever growing ever changing system.
Large corps will keep funding whoever gets the job done. While AI might replace lot of Large Corps activity which is basically on the Exploit side of the Tradeoff.
Years ago I tried to build a certification / service team out of independent software vendors and open source systems - ie you could buy 1 years of support for Apache httpd from any certified vendor (ie they knew enough about httpd)
It’s hard but I still think that’s the way to support OSS
Software license may not consciously matter to end users, but they do have a huge impact on everything else. That is, the end user would not have the software, or would have vastly different software, if the licenses were different. They just don't know and don't care about the licensing details and effects, like so many other technical aspects.
License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyone used them for free, then they were acquired by giant companies who charge for their use.
That's the point. It wouldn't exist. It's not possible without research and OSS. You can't write off the entire foundation of CS before a date. Well you can, but it's ignoring history.
> "Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist."
The rise of the Internet and the dot-com boom happened largely without OSS, on proprietary UNIXes, proprietary web server engines, and proprietary database engines.
FAANG and other high tech businesses can easily afford very expensive servers and datacenters to house them thanks to the very very fat profit margins. They can also easily afford the cost of an OS license and other software tools.
Not sure who “us” is meant to be, but the first Internet boom (1995-2000) used a whole lot of Solaris, Windows, and Cisco. Of course there was plenty of OSS too, but Linux servers, or Intel servers, weren’t the standard.
I remember visiting early Hotmail and their sharded “capital unit” was a great big Sun storage server and a bunch of Intel desktop towers running BSD. The latter was considered rather wild at the time.
Last I checked, some eBay URLs still had “ebayISAPI.dll” in them, which is a remnant of that period.
So if Adobe open-sources all of their software tomorrow, that would not impact their business?
> In truth the license doesn't matter.
Come on. What matters is the way the business extracts value from you, and the license is part of that. Especially when the software you produce is so great that nobody needs to be called, because it just works.
I think the OP framing is about the enterprise / government framing, so Adobe maybe isn't the best example.
Still, the licence doesn't matter - while probably being a bit of an overstatement - is somewhat true. If my enterprise relies on an Adobe service, it's primarily about my relationship with them, not the product license.
... But of course, product price and therefore revenue will decline if competitors can sell my product too or customers can download and use it for free.
Weird question. There is no 100% effective software, there is no way to measure effectiveness (what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness") and it all depends on the budget.
If it fits your budget, and a commercial product has a good sales team (vs a cheaper opensource one with zero marketing), the commercial product is gonna get chosen even if it costs infinitely more. That's basically IBM and Oracle's play book.
I haven't make any claim about 100% effective software. However, one software can be less effective than another. Saying that one is 90% as effective than the other is just to help visualise things.
> what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness"
I work for a SaaS company. Our marketing and product teams work hard to convince potential customers that our software fulfills their needs at a reasonable cost.
When we buy services and software we don't look at any of the marketing materials, there are very trough analysis of costs/benefits being made, dollars and even cents are counted. Every cost that can be cut while we can still deliver something to our customers will be cut.
I run a SaaS company as well. We are outliers, especially if you are selling to other tech people, who are technically proficient and don't value their time very much—they'd rather spend hours writing their own half-arsed solution than paying someone else $5/month. I know how hard it is to sell to someone that believe your product is nothing more than "a shell script written over a weekend" (paraphrased comment from my Show HN)
Outside of tech, that's not how it works. They don't have in-house developers. They don't read HN. When they need a database, they ring up a large vendor and spend hundred of thousands a year for Oracle, when a PostgreSQL container would do just fine. They often don't even care they could pay zero, simply because PostgreSQL doesn't come with a phone number to call when the DB crashes.
> they'd rather spend hours writing their own half-arsed solution than paying someone else $5/month
Paying someone else to solve your problems can also carry huge risks of all sorts. Sometimes investing 1000 dollars into a risk-free solution is better than 5 dollars a month with gigantic strings attached.
> In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it.
The license matters indirectly: if it's open source, you know that as a fall-back other suppliers might be able to step up and take over, if your original guys fail or get too insufferable.
Moreover, if you have an issue with OSS software and have competent people in your own IT team, they could attempt to fix the problem and get results faster than going through the whole incident-report-blame-the-victim-finally-have-them-confirm-your-repro-wait-for-next-version-release-which-hopefully-includes-the-fix ordeal.
Then if you contribute the fix back to the project, the community of users benefits as well, with possible free publicity for your organization to boot.
That's the theory, but in practice that's not how it works.
Firstly, of course, most customers don't have any programming skills at all, so the point is moot. But let's limit ourselves to customers that do have IT departments.
It's worth noting that IT departments are already busy. Deploying resources because you found a bug in PostgreSQL is unlikely.
But ok, you found a bug. And we happen to have a highly paid C programmer on staff. Let's ask him to take a look.
He's not familiar with PostgreSQL architecture- do it'll take a few days to download the source, make a build, hope the build is close to our version, and deploy to production. (This has already cost the business more than a enterprise support contract from Postgres but whatever...)
He then spends a month working through various subsystems to determine the exact flow that leads to your bug. (I'm gonna ignore all the cases where the "bug" isn't a bug.) He makes a tweak, merges it into the current build, and deploys.
He even submits the PR which may or may not be accepted. Until it is he's regularly pulled from his task to update the PostgreSQL source and rebuild.
Everyone else plagues him either PostgreSQL questions twice a week now. His manager gives him a 'poor' rating at the next review because the thing he was actually hired to do is not getting done.
Unless the company is selling to other PostgreSQL developers, there's no "free publicity". That's not how publicity works.
So yes, your scenario is possible, but its simply not how things happen. You complain to the IT department - they add PostgreSQL enterprise support to the next budget. They're not looking to take on extra load unnecessarily.
Yes, the major contributers to big OSS projects are tech companies contributing full time programmers. And that's a good thing. But customers do not have the time or resources (or inclination) to go down this road.
Frankly, it's too hard (in most cases) to just build the software, much less understand the code to make changes.
It might seem like "fall back insurance". And I guess it does happen sometimes. But it's of negligible value in the _purchasing_ decision.
If we're worried about the supplier now then we don't bu from them. If they suddenly change down the road (and most established ones don't) then the fallback is either "we don't need support anymore" or (more likely) we start looking for another system.
I've been on the other side of this. We sell a product into an established mature domain. We're the "newbie" on the block. Most of the sales we get in this space are from customers who are unhappy with their supplier. We offer better sales and service, and obviously a smooth transition from their existing data (which we import.)
Neither product is OSS - but even if it was that would be irrelevant to the user. (It would however have made our integration code a lot easier to write, so there is that...) A lot of the users we convert have "bought" their software. It's costing them nothing to use it. But they switch to us anyway (we have a subscription model) because our model can afford to fund full time support staff, whereas the sales model cannot.
So, I think this "choose another servicer" is more of a theoretical than practical feature for most OSS systems. Obviously there's really good support for the really big projects, but basically nothing from 99% of them...
>> (By the way, all new software without accompanying support & guidance is doomed to fail. And if that software comes from a dominant player, you’ll just have to deal with that by the way.)
There's a temptation to conflate the software license with the software business. This is natural, but places software as the primary value in the chain.
From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part.
I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. And a big part of that effectiveness is that staff can run it. And when it all goes wrong there's someone to call. I'm buying a -relationship-, not software.
Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc.
In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it.