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.
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Because they can make more money by walling the garden.
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.
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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.
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The issue is there are a few ways of doing open source wrong.
The biggest way to do it wrong is to try to sell the open source product while giving the source away for free. Because that means, there will be someone else who just takes the source and copies it with no or only minor changes (e.g. replacing logos and names).
The copyists always have an huge competitive advantage, since they don’t have to pay for development. Especially for software, development makes up almost all of the cost, so that essentially means they can give away the product for almost free and still make a profit. Or they are open source spirited themselves and give it away completely for free, like CentOS.
Sure, Red Hat can actually develop features that customers are asking for, which CentOS can’t really do, since they can’t influence Red Hat’s roadmap, but considering that Red Hat is asking for $350 for a server license, a free-and-good-enough alternative seems to be the better option for many.
According to Wikipedia, CentOS is much more popular (or at least was in 2021) than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
So to do Open Source right, you need to make money from developing it. This is e.g. how the Linux kernel works. They don’t sell the kernel, but instead many companies fund kernel development either financially or through dedicating developers to that project. There are e.g. a lot of devs employed by Microsoft who are working on the Linux kernel.
This gives these companies the ability to prioritize what features/bugs should be worked on.
But this model doesn’t fit every product and thus not every product can be financially viably done in Open Source.
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I personally think the best way to do open source is to do it as a hobby, and not hope for profits off of it. Open source is fundamentally programmers taking control of their field’s means of production, and the last thing I want to see is corporations co-opting that moreso than they have.
This is the main reason everything I release is AGPL unless there is a strong reason against it: Corporations won’t use it.
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