Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 5, 2024 12:58 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are? by excors
Parent article: OSI board AMA at All Things Open

> and a second licence for larger businesses which requires royalties of 1% of the business's entire revenue paid to the Post-Open organisation.

So a large business that has nothing to do with the software industry will end up paying far more than a "small" software house, in return for much less benefit ... and depending on the definition of "revenue" a licence may well be out of reach for companies in low-margin businesses ...

That doesn't sound a sensible business model at all. "Idealism, meet reality! Score, reality 1 idealism nil".

Cheers,
Wol

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 14:40 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not sure I'd give Bruce Perens' idealism a score of 'nil'. Pretty sure he's put a few points on the board over the ~~years~~decades.

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 14:59 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not saying I disagree with his idealism. I just think - in this particular instance - it won't work. Businesses are as assorted as people, and while it would work for some, I don't think it would work for most.

Cheers,
Wol

Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

Posted Nov 7, 2024 17:32 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

He accepts it won't work for some companies:

> We also have some non-goals:
> * Don’t worry about when or if today’s giant companies will join Post Open. The answer to "When will IBM come on board" may well be "never", because for such a large company, participation would mean a new USD$60 Million dollar per year fee (1% of USD$6 Billion). Instead, attract small and new companies with a free license, and grow them into paid license customers.
(https://postopen.org/how-post-open-works/)

...but I think those numbers are wrong - IBM's annual revenue is more like $60B, so the fee would be $600M per year. ($6B is IBM's recent annual net income, or their quarterly revenue from "software" alone (excluding "consulting", "infrastructure", etc))

And IBM isn't even a very big company by revenue (219th according to https://fortune.com/ranking/global500/ - the top companies are 10x higher), and it gets a higher proportion of its value from open source software than most companies, and it has reasonably decent net profit margins (~10%, compared to e.g Walmart's 2% which is typical for the grocery industry, meaning this fee would be half of Walmart's entire profits), so IBM is one of the better cases for this licence.

I think the non-goal is effectively excluding all companies in low-profit-margin industries, and most large-ish companies in high-profit-margin industries, and any small/medium company which hopes to either grow into a large-ish company or be acquired by one. So I find it hard to imagine _any_ company would ever agree to this. And without buy-in from companies totalling probably billions of dollars in revenue, there won't be enough money to fund the project.