Open sources

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1. mikekcharDec 2017
   On the other hand, most larger proprietary software businesses devote a surprisingly small amount of their operating budget to development. In my experience it's usually around 10%, but it depends on the company. I certainly haven't heard of anyone spending more than about 30% and there are quite a few big names that spend in the low single digits.

   Potentially, if you can leverage the benefits of free software to pay for some of the things you would usually have to manage yourself, then perhaps you can reach some kind of parity even if the vast majority of users do not pay money for the software. Mozilla currently pulls in relatively huge amounts of cash (hundreds of millions per year), but when they first started it was considerably smaller. Because they were able to concentrate on development rather than marketing and sales, they were able to get quite a lot done with that money. Where they did spend on marketing (for example the famous New York Times ad), they were quite careful about it.

   There are other successful free software plays. For me the biggest example is Red Hat. When these kinds of conversations appear, I always point people toward Michael Tiemann's chapter in "Open Sources: Voices From the Open Source Revolution" [0]. Cygnus software went from $6K to being sold to Red Hat for $600M, and Red Hat went on to great success with essentially the same business model.

   My favourite quote from that chapter, talking about discussing his ideas for a free software business model: "I never got farther than 'It's a great idea, but . . .,' when I had my second insight: if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!" Even now, I think there is virtually no competition in Red Hat's space because nobody thinks their business model will work.

   In the end, I think that developing free software business models is where it has to go. You can't charge for the software. I personally feel that dual licensing is not really a free software business model because you don't actually make money from free software -- you are just using it as a loss leader for your traditional proprietary software. Like you imply, in the enterprise space you can probably do well (for example, by copying Red Hat, or by making a foundation like Mozilla or Apache). But there is a lot of other software out there. I think in those spaces you have to be a lot more creative about what you charge money for. People will clearly spend money -- just look at the horrible, horrible "free to play" game market. The trick is to allow them to do so in a non-horrible way ;-)

   [0] - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.htm...

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2. vram22Jan 2017
   >The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

   Had reddit :)

   That reminds me about the book:

   Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution:

   http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/

   It is free to read at the above link. I had read many of the chapters some years ago. Pretty interesting stuff.

   It consists of multiple chapters, each written by different well-known people associated with prominent projects from the open source movement, at a time when it was relatively new (1999).

   The paragraphs that I remember the most from it are from this chapter:

   Future of Cygnus Solutions

   An Entrepreneur's Account

   Michael Tiemann

   (Cygnus Solutions was a company which initially ported and improved GCC and its toolchain to multiple Unix platforms, and made a business out of it, before open source was a gleam in many people's eyes. They did well and were acquired by Red Hat some years later.)

   Here are the paragraphs:

   [ Again, a quote from the GNU Manifesto:

   There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction.

   Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.

   The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness.

   Heavy stuff, but the GNU Manifesto is ultimately a rational document. It dissects the nature of software, the nature of programming, the great tradition of academic learning, and concludes that regardless of the monetary consequences, there are ethical and moral imperatives to freely share information that was freely shared with you. I reached a different conclusion, one which Stallman and I have often argued, which was that the freedom to use, distribute, and modify software will prevail against any model that attempts to limit that freedom. It will prevail not for ethical reasons, but for competitive, market-driven reasons.

   At first I tried to make my argument the way that Stallman made his: on the merits. I would explain how freedom to share would lead to greater innovation at lower cost, greater economies of scale through more open standards, etc., and people would universally respond "It's a great idea, but it will never work, because nobody is going to pay money for free software." After two years of polishing my rhetoric, refining my arguments, and delivering my messages to people who paid for me to fly all over the world, I never got farther than "It's a great idea, but . . .," when I had my second insight: if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!

   -F = -ma Isaac Newton

   You'll never see a physics textbook introduce Newton's law in this way, but mathematically speaking, it is just as valid as "F = ma". The point of this observation is that if you are careful about what assumptions you turn upside down, you can maintain the validity of your equations, though your result may look surprising. I believed that the model of providing commercial support for open-source software was something that looked impossible because people were so excited about the minus signs that they forgot to count and cancel them.

   An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. Victor Hugo

   There was one final (and deeply hypothetical) question I had to answer before I was ready to drop out of the Ph.D. program at Stanford and start a company. Suppose that instead of being nearly broke, I had enough money to buy out any proprietary technology for the purposes of creating a business around that technology. I thought about Sun's technology. I thought about Digital's technology. I thought about other technology that I knew about. How long did I think I could make that business successful before somebody else who built their business around GNU would wipe me out? Would I even be able to recover my initial investment? When I realized how unattractive the position to compete with open-source software was, I knew it was an idea whose time had come.

   The difference between theory and practice tends to be very small in theory, but in practice it is very large indeed. Anonymous

   In this section, I will detail the theory behind the Open Source business model, and ways in which we attempted to make this theory practical.

   We begin with a few famous observations: ]

   And here is the full chapter by Tiemann:

   http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.htm...

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3. riffraffApr 2013
   I seem to remember the famous "Diligence, Patience, and Humility" bit by larry wall as reported in the "Open Sources" book was originally a speech. If so I'd vote for that.

   Otherwise, at some time I really enjoyed Guy Steele's talks while he was working on Fortress, e.g.

   How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Program...

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4. colortoneNov 2008
   I read non-fiction related to business strategy, sociology, economics, and technology constantly. In fact I went down the the LA public library and picked up 10 stellar titles just this weekend, I highly recommend all of these:

   - Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software [MIT] - Prisoner's Dilemma [William Poundstone] - Thinking Strategically [Nalebuff] - Co-opetition [Nalebuff] - Cluetrain Manifesto [Searls] - Open Sources 2.0 [O'Reilly] - Innovator's Dilemma [Christensen] - Net Worth [Hagel] - Democratizing Innovation [von Hippel] - Fooled by Randomness [Taleb]

   Other books I always keep around are "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" (a history of DJ's and electronic music), The Singularity is Near, and some Calvin and Hobbes ;-)

   All the reading is most definitely worth it, if you don't feel that way you're not reading the right stuff.

   The best book I've ever read is probably Anna Karenina (Magarshack translation, not the Oprah version, which is ironically much drier). Other very influential books on me include The Wealth of Networks, Shaping Things, and Free Culture. In fact, all 3 of those were given to me at different times in my life by the smartest person I know (a family friend of my parents)

   Maybe the key to the non-fiction reading is having an agenda. I always feel like I'm downloading knowledge that is going to help me make bank and/or help people so that keeps me riveted (beyond the intellectual stimulation, which I'm a total whore for, too ;-)

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5. mikekcharJan 2017
   From the chapter by Michael Tiemann in Open Sources:

   "At first I tried to make my argument the way that Stallman made his: on the merits. I would explain how freedom to share would lead to greater innovation at lower cost, greater economies of scale through more open standards, etc., and people would universally respond "It's a great idea, but it will never work, because nobody is going to pay money for free software." After two years of polishing my rhetoric, refining my arguments, and delivering my messages to people who paid for me to fly all over the world, I never got farther than "It's a great idea, but . . .," when I had my second insight: if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!"

   I still find it interesting how many people dismiss Cygnus's business model out of hand when entering the open source market. (Cygnus was acquired by Red Hat for $600 million and Michael Tiemann is still VP of Open Source development IIRC) What is interesting to me is that I've never heard of anyone else even trying it. No successes. No failures. As Michael Tiemann said, no competition. And Red Hat enjoys that competitive advantage even today.

   I highly recommend reading that chapter for an alternative view on how to approach open source development.

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6. obersteinNov 2015
   "The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker.... I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."

   -- Richard Stallman (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates) https://github.com/llimllib/personal_code/blob/master/python...

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