LWN: Comments on "Business models and open source"

Business models and open source

raven667 — Thu, 02 May 2019 17:54:14 +0000

> actually (according to RedHat) NOT allowed to have their distribution installed on a server where you do not have a subscription

While this has been discussed to death in the past, I believe what this actually means there is no law which prevents you from installing RHEL binaries wherever you like, copyright swat teams are not going to bust into your office like Brazil, but Redhat is under no obligation to support those installs without subscriptions, work on your tickets or continue to have you as a customer of their pre-built binary updates. Everything that Redhat works on is open source/free software, otherwise CentOS wouldn't exist.

Business models and open source

Klavs — Thu, 02 May 2019 09:52:37 +0000

She says that Red Hat uses the "Pure Open Source" model... but that is not true. You are actually (according to RedHat) NOT allowed to have their distribution installed on a server where you do not have a subscription. I have not tried to contend that - I've just recommended switching to CentOS.. (but generally recommend buying Red Hat licenses - just to support Red Hat - as they do a lot of great development) - as the redhat license management and mirrors are very troublesome - whereas CentOS repo mirroring is so very opposite and easy :)

Business models and open source

nilsmeyer — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 10:06:27 +0000

All the time many business models I see are based on selling the company to somebody else, I think that's already a fairly limited world view and while it works out great for VC it doesn't have great expected value for would-be founders. For every success story there are a lot of failures you never hear about. It also sells people on the idea that starting a company is a get rich quick scheme - become a multi-millionaire in a few years or be a failure...

Especially when developing software it's very difficult to achieve the sort of growth and pace that would be required since you can't just throw more people at the problem.

Business models and open source

mjthayer — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 08:36:37 +0000

> And I shouldn't have said open source android since almost all shipping versions of android except replicant include completely proprietary software by everyone's definition.

It seems to me that Android also contains a lot of software which is free by common definitions. To my mind (perhaps I am prejudiced, I work on VirtualBox), having software projects which mix free and non-free software is better than not having projects containing free software, and if the non-free parts make it financially feasible to create the free parts which would otherwise not have been created that seems acceptable to me. Perhaps it would have been possible to make it work without the non-free parts, but if the people involved did not know how that does not really help. Perhaps the partially free software prevented something fully free from being created because it was good enough. I doubt that is often the case but can't prove it.

I suppose in the end whether a free and non-free mix is better than nothing at all will depend on the point of view of the person deciding. I like free software, but I don't see it as a moral goal in itself, though I do see it as a potentially useful tool for achieving other moral goals. Other people may (and probably do) disagree.

Business models and open source

szoth — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 18:40:04 +0000

"As O’Reilly put it in 2010, 'the art of promoting openness is not to make it a moral crusade, but rather to highlight the competitive advantages of openness.' Replace 'openness' with any other loaded term—say 'human rights'—in this sentence, and it becomes clear that this quest for 'openness' was politically toothless from the very outset."

-- Evgeny Morozov
The meme hustler https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler

Business models and open source

IanKelling — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:14:48 +0000

And I shouldn't have said open source android since almost all shipping versions of android except replicant include completely proprietary software by everyone's definition.

Business models and open source

IanKelling — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:09:03 +0000

It's not just connotation. There a billion or so computers running open source android that is not free software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-poi...

> Second, and more important in practice, many products containing computers check signatures on their executable programs to block users from installing different executables; only one privileged company can make executables that can run in the device or can access its full capabilities. We call these devices “tyrants”, and the practice is called “tivoization” after the product (Tivo) where we first saw it. Even if the executable is made from free source code, the users cannot run modified versions of it, so the executable is nonfree.

> The criteria for open source do not recognize this issue; they are concerned solely with the licensing of the source code. Thus, these unmodifiable executables, when made from source code such as Linux that is open source and free, are open source but not free. Many Android products contain nonfree tivoized executables of Linux.

Business models and open source

tchernobog — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 09:41:53 +0000

> "I suggest that it is only an open-source business model if the customer ends up with software freedom"

Wasn't this what Stallman foresaw when he said that the terms "Open Source" and "Free / Libre Software" really have a different connotation, and we should pay attention not to mix things together? Recall the old diatribe with Eric Raymond?

Maybe we should stop for a moment and think about all the times some of us were dismissive of the distinction, and decided to forego explaining that distinction to others considering it immaterial.

I am not surprised business staff hear "open-source" (like any other current buzzword, say "blockchain") and they get dollar eyes without really understanding why the people of the community might feel betrayed by their soulless marketing spiel.