I don’t get why big companys are afraid of open source software.
I know that monetizing open source is hard but in exchange they would have 8 billion programmers ready, for free!
Even if they do like redhat , as controversial as it is right now, they would be better off than just closing the source.
I would be willing to pay to have the license to modify my own software even if I couldn’t redistribute it afterwards.
Because that’s not how professional software development works. You don’t actually get free programmers because most of the time your customers are not techy people.
E.g. if I develop some special software for dentists or whatever, and I open source it, all I get is that someone else builds the code and distributes it for free so I can’t easily sell it anymore.
if I develop some special software for dentists or whatever, and I open source it, all I get is that someone else builds the code and distributes it for free so I can’t easily sell it anymore.
Are there a lot of industries that would accept a piece of software that comes without techical support and/or liability?
What would happen is not dentists installing your software themselves, without support.
What would happen, and already happened countless times is that you see companies appearing that will sell services to install and maintain your open source software. It will be done by software developers just like you, except they can spend their whole time working for their customer instead of working on improving the software itself.
You will soon realize that you make money from the same activity as them, except you also have to maintain the software (and spent time to build it in the first place).
Of course you can use shady techniques to make it harder for others to understand your code, or release the open source version with a delay, but if you play by the usual rules of open source, with open development, third party developers will be able to acquire as much knowledge as you about the product.
Acquiring knowledge about the product takes time. Upstream has a better position just by being the one to create it and having all the knowledge about the product immediately, not after some time. Someone who decides to rebuild that would either have to fully maintain their own fork (and open source their work as well if the upstream has copyleft license), or upstream their changes, since reapplying bug fixes and new features requested by clients on top of the original codebase will take more and more time with each upstream change. Upstream can also restrict the use of their trademark, which would add a burden of marketing to downstreams as well.
Can someone rip your work? Yes. Is that really an issue? No. Just stealing the code changes nothing, the person needs to invest money to continue build it themselves. The original developers will always be at an advantage since they know the code base. The fork (the new version) also won’t benefit from any of the changes by the original developers, or they need to carefully copy them over. If the hostile fork is also open source then it doesn’t matter since you can just take their changes if they are good. Making it mutual.
You can also use licenses that forbid the closing of the source. Doesn’t stop real thief’s, but it gives you a tool to stop it and also anyone who ignores a license like that is also generally not very competent.
Not necessarily. The original developer might know the code base better, but the hostile fork needs no development cost.
The 3D printing industry is a really good example of something like that. Take for example Marlin. That’s the firmware that runs on the vast majority of 3D printers. It is open source and thus freely available.
Many 3D printer manufacturers just download a copy of Marlin, change the logos and slap it onto their printer. They are never going to update it, because Marlin is great as is and most customers won’t ever update it anyway. So the 3D printer manufacturer has a development cost of maybe 1-2h to dial in the config and replace the logos. Compared to the developers of Marlin, who spent whatever the time equivalent to 19691 commits is. Also, the 3D printer manufacturer earns money from the sale, the Marlin devs don’t.
Or take a look at e3d, who recently stopped open sourcing their hardware. They created the E3D v6 hotend, which is by far the most common hotend to this day. The issue is, most people don’t buy an original E3D v6, which costs ~€50-70 (the more common 1.75mm version), but instead they buy the cheap €15 copy from Amazon or the €5 version from Aliexpress.
Again, the copyists might not have the expertise that e3d put into their work, but they know the exact dimensions and the material that needs to be used, and they just make a perfect replica. No research costs, only manufacturing, and be done with it.
Open source is only sustainable if you get your money for developing, not for selling the product. So for open source to work, you need e.g. a Patreon or cooperate sponsorships to fund the development, so that after development is done (before any product is sold) you got your money.
expired
Because it’s a lot of work to check that repos contain no confidential information, and to sync internal and external repos if there is a need for some internal-specific stuff. Especially when most software is very specific - e.g. I work in data pipelines for accounting and our logic is specific to our accounting processes.
I think some industries like video games should absolutely do it though, where the turn-around time on products is much faster. The main objection is that it just helps competition (and asset-swap scammers, etc.) but I think that’s missing the bigger picture of more tooling and assets helping to grow the industry and labour pool as a whole.
I work in open source one of my products is. The benefit of open source is apparent when we talk about core technology and standardization. It’s not very helpful when it comes to specific implementations or customization.
Open Source requires sponsors, sponsors need to build on something to create capital to pay the developers behind the open source. I.e. Blender is open source, because people use it to make 3d models that they sell or get paid to build. So companies that use these models to make products like games and movies, pay Blender so that they can continue making it better and give them support. Also individuals and companies can add stuff to it. But really that’s neglect able. Open source is a promise.
In other words, Open Source is good for stuff you wouldn’t be able to sell anyway. Nobody pays more for the OS that’s running on their fridge. And hardly anyone cares about the software that’s running on anything beside maybe their PC or their phone.
So for all of these things, Open Source is great.
But the actual product that they are trying to sell, that’s not an open-source matter, otherwise you’ll have cloners in no time.
