It isn't necessarily but I think it often qualifies. IMO (approximately) activism describes motivation while drama is a characteristic of an action. Thunberg for example is undoubtedly very dramatic.
This is not a hot take, but uninformed one. They sold a game with PSN requirement in the countries where PSN was not available at all. You would just lose access to your game after 4 months, how is that a slight inconvenience? It's a pretty big legal mess they almost got themselves into.
There are probably times when you could make an argument like this, but this isn't one of them. A company pulled something very anti-consumer, and the review system was instrumental in holding them accountable.
>You would just lose access to your game after 4 months, how is that a slight inconvenience?
Unless you were physically unable to make a PSN account, this is the exaggeration I fear from such review bombs. And yes, I know PSN supports less countries than Steam, but how many people on the internet really reside in one of those non-supported areas? I would bet it is less than 84,000 people.
>There are probably times when you could make an argument like this, but this isn't one of them.
I don't think it's a good thing to only point out a systematic issue when it's inconviient. That's how these "but it worked here" sorts of issues become abused. I'd rather point out how this snowball is rolling before it becomes a boulder later on, especially when boulders have already formed and gone not nearly as mentioned.
>A company pulled something very anti-consumer,
Pet peeve: "anti-consumer" has lost all meaning. Paying $10 more was "anti consumer", downloading a store of your own preference is "anti-consumer". Now making an account you don't like is "anti-consumer"? You see how this word has gotten diluted in the gaming community, no?
I miss when inconveniences were just that, inconvient. Not a declaration of war for capitalism.
>And yes, I know PSN supports less countries than Steam, but how many people on the internet really reside in one of those non-supported areas? I would bet it is less than 84,000 people.
It was delisted from 177 regions [0]. This apparently includes the CIS region [1], which has a population of nearly 240 million. You might be underestimating a bit.
There's so many confounding variables that there's no way to know if that's true or not. People often speak English on the internet, despite it not being their first language. Not every one of these regions may have heard about this in the few days it was active and so may have not participated in the reviews. And some people will just suck it up and say oh well, despite being affected. Regardless of the number affected (which is not insignificant), it completely prevents them from using a product which they purchased, and that's simply not acceptable.
>Regardless of the number affected (which is not insignificant), it completely prevents them from using a product which they purchased, and that's simply not acceptable.
I'd agree with refunds on a core level, yes.
I think my main issue here is that people who very much can access PSN are the ones making the most fuss. So it feels like a deflection rather than a core inability to play from players.
Also, the fact that this isn't the first time these regions had to deal with PSN. I bet some of them simply made accounts on a nearby, supported country. I'd bet the number of accounts being banned for such situations is multiple magnitudes less than the review bomb.
I don't think there's any evidence that this is the case, but even if it is true, so what? If anything, it's good to see American gamers standing up for those from other countries. An injury to one is an injury to all, and solidarity is the only way you can make large companies pay attention.
> And yes, I know PSN supports less countries than Steam, but how many people on the internet really reside in one of those non-supported areas?
Countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Åland islands (a part of Finland) are excluded from PSN for some technicality.
As is the whole country of Philippines. (110 million people).
I'm kinda suspecting this is some weird Sony thing where they want to have a legal entity in each country with PSN and don't want the hassle - or more stupidly don't want to offer service if it's not translated to the native language.
>And yes, I know PSN supports less countries than Steam, but how many people on the internet really reside in one of those non-supported areas? I would bet it is less than 84,000 people.
I don't think it's a very good point to make. "I'm a consumer, but it doesn't affect MY bottom line, so it's not anti-consumer". Well, sure, I guess.
>I don't think it's a good thing to only point out a systematic issue when it's inconviient. That's how these "but it worked here" sorts of issues become abused. I'd rather point out how this snowball is rolling before it becomes a boulder later on, especially when boulders have already formed and gone not nearly as mentioned.
That's how you appear tone deaf. You're making your "hot take" under a legitimate case of review systems working as they were intended, it's not part of the systematic issue.
>Pet peeve: "anti-consumer" has lost all meaning. Paying $10 more was "anti consumer", downloading a store of your own preference is "anti-consumer". Now making an account you don't like is "anti-consumer"? You see how this word has gotten diluted in the gaming community, no?
I miss when inconveniences were just that, inconvient. Not a declaration of war for capitalism.
I'm not sure what war you think anyone is declaring, this is merely a bunch of frustrated paid customers voicing their opinion. There are many things in gaming, and well everywhere else, that are indeed anti-consumer. I think it's why it may appear to you that the word is diluted. Ultimately, it's down to communication between the company and their customers: if the market views something anti-consumer as "acceptable", then those things would not cause a negative reaction of this scale. I'm not saying Sony was unjustified in requiring a PSN link, but it was communicated poorly and after the game has already been sold to people who would be losing their access a result of it. It's not a new practice either: many games do require you to create an account with their or someone else's service to enable different online features, like crossplay. It's not really a problem until it's handled in a way that it becomes one.
We can't really define economic philosophy in this fashion.
>That's how you appear tone deaf.
So when a broken clock shows the corect time and you point out how the clock is broke, you're "tone deaf"? Maybe others need to widen their perspectives instead of cherry-picking the times it happened to work in their favor.
As far as I'm concerned, if you support a review bomb now, you support it when people use it to pretotest pro/anti-Taiwan, or when bigots protest some LGBT game, or when some personal drama happens and fans retaliate. It's all "their opinion", right?
But I've seen dozens of these and gamers pretend they can pick and choose when to open and close pandora's box. They chose poorly.
> There are many things in gaming, and well everywhere else, that are indeed anti-consumer. I think it's why it may appear to you that the word is diluted.
It's diluted because no one can even define what "anti-consumer" means. That's how buzzwords become created. If you use the same word to define needing an account to play on an online server and literal fraud, you only dilute the latter meaning by comparing a trivial issue with a serious (and illegal) one.
>if the market views something anti-consumer as "acceptable", then those things would not cause a negative reaction of this scale.
Yeah, because the market is a really good arbiter of morals. So what I get out of this is that releasing a broken game without promised content isn't "abti-consumer" because enough people bought it anyway. Aka "becsuse it's still fun".
If you don't understand how the above can happen and why I'm frustrated by how fickle the market is, we won't see eye to eye on this issue. I know nothing here will change with Steam or review bombs or the next gaming drama. But if they can rant on a place that impacts user decisions, I can rant at the bottom of a social media post on a technical forum, one that used to have more nuanced discussions of such issues.
Their behaviour around llama.cpp acknowledgement is very shady. Until the very recent, there was no mention of llama.cpp in their README at all and now it's tucked away all the way down. Compare that to the originally proposed PR for example: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/pull/3700
Do you know maybe what are these alternative engines they're talking about? Or is it just a way to evade the fact that at the end of the day it is just a wrapper around llama.cpp?
It was mentioned in another comment to the parent. There are no alternatives currently, the whole thing has been built upon llama.cpp since its inception.
The title is misleading. The author changed their open source project into a commercial product with source available. It's not a business built around an open source project as the title implies, it's a license switch.
The image of another tower used in the article is pretty confusing. This <https://apnews.com/article/radio-station-tower-stolen-am-fm-...> one apparently includes the real one, which I think makes the theft appear more within the realms of possibility.
One of my earliest memories of something in the newspapers was, as a teenager, finding out a picture in The Guardian was of any entirely different conflict, more than a decade earlier, albeit in the same country.
The media did not really care much about accuracy then, and its even worse now.
This is more and more a problem, not just with images. Even most of the higher quality (better researched) Youtube channels are fast and loose about using irrelevant stock footage to go along with their narration. Of course the channels with AI voice-over are universally terrible at this. I know a lot of this is content creators have limited access to good visual content. A naval historiographer I follow will show, for instance, ship photos or archival video that is not exactly the ship or event he is describing. He's probably a solo creator and I'm sure constrained by archival access, and frankly time.
One notable exception I have found is this channel https://www.youtube.com/@wildwestfaces The narration is often of first person memoirs of historic events and the images are relevant and sync well with the narration.
>> A naval historiographer I follow will show, for instance, ship photos or archival video that is not exactly the ship or event he is describing.
It isn't about money or resources. Even the biggest budget Hollywood productions regularly pass off incorrect ships in full understanding that most viewers cannot tell a sloop from a brig. Sometimes it is about cost or practicality, but more often it is about which ship comports with audience expectations.
Which, in my books, invalidates either as a learning resource.
I mean, as a viewer, if I spot a naval historiographer routinely using wrong footage, then how certain can I be they're not also playing fast and loose with what they're saying? After all, the only piece of clear evidence that I have points towards them not caring.
As for what "comports with audience expectations", maybe this is an extreme position, but to me, intentionally choosing something incorrect but more recognizable is gaslighting at scale - it reinforces the misconception in those already exposed, and introduces it to those new (usually young) to a topic.
Like in Master and Commander when they swapped out the American ship for a french ship as american audiances dont like seeing american ships as the bad guys.
The real Master and Commander story, https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Cruise-CLASSICS-NAVAL-LITERAT..., is from the American perspective and is way better than the fictional one. To do it justice it would have to be done as a mini-series because it would be too long for a movie.
Drachinifel is pretty darned knowledgeable. I imagine its not that easy to get enough footage of some American WWII destroyer that is NOT a Fletcher class, (as a made up example), to fill out an entire 45 minute narration. And there's a shit ton of work that goes into a video that long for a solo creator.
Now, the abysmal nature of name brand corporate history videos is another matter.
acoup typically shows whatever image he can, and then states how close it is to the actual thing he was trying to talk about (and where it deviates) in roughly a single sentence — I’m not sure it’s actually that hard to fit in. In a video format, I’d probably expect it as a text-disclaimer on the image for anyone who cared.
Not doing so is exactly the same as the Hollywood thing; focusing on the narrative rather than the actual teaching, which seems to me psychotic behavior for anything purporting to teach. If you’re misrepresenting the image of the object for narrative convenience, the immediate question is how much of the other material has been butchered for that same convenience? The priorities are out of order.
It’s a violation of viewer trust, and it’s only acceptable in the sense that the viewer often doesn’t know they’ve been tricked… because they were viewing it for the precise reason that they don’t have the knowledge to differentiate between a truth and a lie on that subject
A single example of one inaccuracy many years ago is not evidence for (at least as far as the Guardian is concerned): "The media did not really care much about accuracy then, and its even worse now."
To say that, you would also need to know the actual accuracy rate of media over time. I don't think anyone really knows that without perhaps having done a PhD thesis on the topic.
They will correct things like that when pointed out. On the other hand, honest mistakes of the wrong photo is not that uncommon. In this case, I think the resource was looking for just a stock photo. I did not read the article and immediately think, "Oh yeah, random tower in the middle of nowhere USA, this is for sure a picture of that tower". Perhaps just me..
Regardless, on wrong image, I've certainly noted that a few times - for example reading protest signs that are clearly for a different time/issue than what is being documented (EG: protests in Russia in like 2010s and the news was running images from things that happened 15 & 20 years earlier).
Articles should not have images that are misleading or confusing, but I do understand why most news articles have something when it comes to imagery. Most news website designs are optimized for at least one image per article, and social media sharing almost requires it if you expect any kind of engagement at all. But it’s not a problem the media world should have to solve at the expense of the reader experience. (Disclosure: I’m a journalist and digital editor who spends way more time than I’d like trying to pick the least harmful stock or file image in the cases where we just don’t have a good image for a story.)
Maybe a practical compromise is to use whatever image you can find but actually explain in the caption that sausage making process in what the image is and why it was chosen. For example, recently on YouTube a video had footage of go carts but they used an F1 analogy and explained that F1 footage is hard to come by and expensive.
I think this is hypercritical. If there is a story about some dolphin, if there is a picture of 'any' dolphin to give context, is that then the "wrong one" and suddenly a ding against the newspapers accuracy worthy of running a correct? Particularly when there is a context line stating "this is just a random dolphin to give you an image of a dolphin."
> Better to use a wrong one apparently.
Humans are very visual creatures - in some ways - yes. Even conceding that the picture is the "wrong" one, which again I think is a hypercritical judgment.
this captures a meta-observation very well.. a "PhD" worth of knowledge is needed to discern, but publishing a stock photo for a news item is incentivized to be a moment's decision. Compare and contrast to "any idiot can ask hard questions that take days to reply correctly to" .. there is a power asymmetry at work in the public eye. Guideropes and economic assumptions disappearing into a sand-storm of digital information.
basically, not looking good for the future of reliable media
I think a PhD study would be needed to know accuracy rates of media over time across many outlets before such a generalization can be made that "media accuracy has gotten worse".
How does one even measure accuracy? Number of corrections might indicate it, but who is to say that all of media is forthcoming with corrections. How does one control for digital vs non-digital distributions? Is the rate of accuracy different per medium, and how would that roll-up for the overall organization?
I think the meta-observation still holds. The response to "media organizations are all inaccurate and this has gotten worse!" - is asymmetric compared to the effort to make the statement. Happily hacker news has a culture where statements are assumed to be opinions (unless otherwise presented with a citation or somethign), and opinions are generally not held to be worth much in this discourse.
> In this case, I think the resource was looking for just a stock photo. I did not read the article and immediately think, "Oh yeah, random tower in the middle of nowhere USA, this is for sure a picture of that tower". Perhaps just me..
Yeah, I'd assume it's just you. My default assumption for a photo next to a piece of text is that the two are directly related, in particular the photo being the subject of the text.
Okay, so maybe they wanted to have a photo, but there's no way to frame this that makes the journalist or the outlet look good. Intentionally or not, choosing a wrong photo is still screwing with readers' perception of reality.
I'm skeptical it would be just me given there is some prominent text right below the image that says "not the radio tower".
> Okay, so maybe they wanted to have a photo, but there's no way to frame this that makes the journalist or the outlet look good. Intentionally or not, choosing a wrong photo is still screwing with readers' perception of reality.
Doing a search for how other news websites reported this story, only the CNN used the "correct" image. A few others used different images without even giving context it was a different tower. A few of the other ones are certainly more egregious, not labelled at all..
> Okay, so maybe they wanted to have a photo, but there's no way to frame this that makes the journalist or the outlet look good. Intentionally or not, choosing a wrong photo is still screwing with readers' perception of reality.
Choosing a "wrong" photo that is CLEARLY labelled, I don't agree with this opinion. I find that hypercritical. Seemingly we simply disagree.
The Guardian never publishes a link or an academic reference to the source of scientific articles it pretends to quote.
As you say, it also waits until a reader notices factual mistakes, the other ones just slip through. Last point, you don’t have any backing to conclude that their mistakes are honest, and not the result of intent of bias. Given their bias is always in the same direction, I do not believe for a second that The Guardian isn’t putting its thumb on the scale when they only reproduce the part of scientific studies that goes in their editorial direction, conveniently leaving the rest unsaid.
> When Attwood first identified EoE in the late 1980s, it was vanishingly rare, with estimated rates of less than 10 per 100,000 people. But just like food allergies, which are also mediated by eosinophils, EoE has become increasingly common in all age groups, from young children to the over-70s, for reasons we do not fully understand.
> Estimates from the British Society of Gastroenterology suggest that it now affects approximately 63 in 100,000 people, which Attwood says is sufficient to make it technically “a common disease”.
> As you say, it also waits until a reader notices factual mistakes, the other ones just slip through.
I don't believe I said that. My impression is that they certainly do pro-actively correct mistakes and do not rely on just readership. At the very least, the 'corrections' section is discoverable from their home page. I can't find the corrections part of some other news websites.
Please provide evidence that the Guardian does not do any of their own corrections.
> Last point, you don’t have any backing to conclude that their mistakes are honest, and not the result of intent of bias.
I don't think you have any backing for that either. Though, what backing would anyone need for any kind of slant for "we published a generic picture of a radio tower" (with clear context note on the image) - how is that a slant due to bias?
> I do not believe for a second that The Guardian isn’t putting its thumb on the scale when they only reproduce the part of scientific studies that goes in their editorial direction, conveniently leaving the rest unsaid.
I would ask you please provide backing for this assertion/opinion. (It's going to be difficult to determine whether it's your bias in reading something to think an extraneous assertion is an omission compared to something you think that is related but is either unrelated or incorrect. But, if you have a good resource that has done the systematic research, and relies on reproducible science, that would be an interesting read)
One last response.. I think we should take a step back.
A clearly labelled image of a radio tower for a sensationalist story that a radio tower in Alabama was stolen, that.. that clearly labelled image is evidence of "left wing bias" and the "the guardian... putting its thumb on the scale." I don't think this is the story to choose for that particular hill to die on.
Why is that infuriating? It’s accurate, acknowledges the suboptimal photo choice (or availability), and has some humor. As an editor, given this as your only photo choice, what caption would you write?
A picture is worth a thousand words. 200 feet tall and how thick are the bars? How many? Could I do it with a hacksaw or would I need a more intense torch? I want to visualize perpetrating the crime.
It's hard to correctly visualize something when the provided visuals are abhorrently wrong, though, isn't it?
There's a world of difference between an old free-standing Long Lines tower and the straight-and-narrow guyed tower that actually disappeared, just as there is also a world of difference stature between Roseanne Barr and Gwen Stefani.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but each of those thousand words has negative value when they're simply wrong.
Yes, and what the wrong photo does is fuck with your sense of scale entirely. The included tower is more of an industrial installation; the real tower is more like something a couple drunk metal thieves could salvage in an evening.
How and where would you source it from? The tower is gone, there's likely no public domain images of it, no stock images of it, so where do you get a picture of it?
See, that'd be my job as a photo editor. To know the answer. That's the job. That's what makes it a real job when actually done right. Any high school age intern can find a picture of a random radio tower.
If you can't meet that standard, don't run a photo, or don't run the story. The world won't come to a standstill because a partisan rag from a provincial backwater didn't run a filler item about a wacky heist halfway across the world.
It doesn't matter how practical it is. What matters is, the only honest course of action is to not include a photo of a wrong tower if it's not practical to find a photo of the right one.
Sure, for high profile things. This is the daily news and a mild curiosity which is hardly worth the resources. Show a picture of a similar model tower, annotate it as such, and I have now have a sense of the difficulty in cutting it down.
Building a company inherently carries a risk of failure with it. You seem to be taking it the wrong way, you really shouldn't be building your company based on a few opinions of HN comments, nor it's their responsibility to outline the full extent of risks involved.
The point is that Open Source, by design, drammatically increases the likelihood of failure.
It's already hard to build a successful business. Odds are already thin for you to succeed. Why choose a model that worsens it?
Open Source was not created as a funding source to for-profit ventures. That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source.
> That's what these businesses are doing: raising labour funds for free to fund a profitable product. That's not the spirit and the purpose of Open Source.
You are misguided. Here's what the company that employs me does:
- develop an open source product. Open to contributions, but most of the dev is done by employees.
- sell support and consulting on this product
- sell pre-packaged open source extensions to this product, with support
Totally withing the free software / open source spirit. The world gets great open source software for free (not open core: truly and completely open source), and the business behind it is sustainable as well. We also donate to some open source projects that we use, chosen by employees.
At some point, if you want open source to take over, you need it to grow and strive, and having it supported by business is a great way of getting this. The world probably cannot be run only by side projects.
Not saying that all open source companies behave this well, but it's not an impossible outcome.
I think for many “open source companies” there’s some underpants gnomes business planning going on:
1. Open source product
2. ???
3. Profit!
Open source isn’t a magical bandaid though it may get you some early traction, the same you can get by having a free plan.
If you develop it appropriately and plan it out, it CAN be successful. But you have to think it out and choose an appropriate license, etc.
Most successful open source companies would have been successful as closed-source; and you rarely can take a closed-source product and make it successful by going open source.
> Open source isn’t a magical bandaid though it may get you some early traction, the same you can get by having a free plan.
I'm with you on this. You need to carefully plan. I also strongly believe you should not go with VC money. That excludes "burning money and we'll figure it out later". Your open source project will therefore probably start as a side project and/or with government help dedicated to business creators.
> Most successful open source companies would have been successful as closed-source
I believe this too. Now, there are more and more things that require open source products. Open source companies, including the one I work at, have received funds from openDesk [1] to develop a complete suit of open source tools. More and more research labs, universities and public institutions require open source. So there's a dedicated market that's growing.
You may succeed as a closed source company, probably more easily than as an open source company. But the story is not that clear cut, and it also depends on what you want to build and whether you really want to build that awesome product as closed source.
At some point the incentives become misaligned, though, we've seen this happen over and over.
Someone proposes and sends a PR making huge quality of life improvements, it's shot down because it would reduce consulting revenue (the rejection reason is officially not this or not even stated at all).
Someone proposes and sends a PR implementing advanced functionality that the core company sells as part of a paid extension, the PR is rejected (for obvious but not mentioned reasons).
A cloud provider starts offering a service based on the software, the license is changed to non open source.
Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.
All these have not happened in 20 years though. Not a single contribution have been rejected because of these reasons.
Of course I would indeed expect a contribution that:
- tries to disable our licensing mechanism in our paid extensions
- tries to copy our paid extension code to our product or to a community extension
To be rejected upstream. But isn't it fair game? They can still fork the code and go start something on their own, it's one of the important features of open source. One can start a new extension repository and convince users to add it to their config, or even fork the product and provide this by default. But this is work, they'll have to maintain this, and will probably depend on us, in the end.
Most likely, we would welcome significant contributions and QoL improvements, we are only so many people for that much work to do, improvements would allow us to focus on something else. If someone outside the company is willing to maintain some feature that we currently offer for a price, it probably actually grow / improve the ecosystem and it would probably be welcomed, letting us focus on other things our customers want. People maintaining extensions or feature for our product would likely be friends. Of course you can't just dump some code and go away, that's not sustainable.
> Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.
That may be true. My company reached 60 people this year. Nextcloud is around 100. But not everyone wants to become too big. There are a lot of advantages in staying small-ish. For the CEO, a big company is also not the same fun as a 50 people company.
for good software consulting revenue is not a function of how many bugs/bad UX there are- you consult on setup, integration,maintenance,etc. If the software improves the need for this does not disappear.
If you communicate clearly what the proprietary parts of the software are, it also shouldnt be an issue. If someone wants to implement and especially maintain and test them themselves without paying, they are free to fork and do that.
You mention proprietary parts, note that in our case, our paid extensions are also open source. You can clone their git repositories and modify them under the LGPL license :-)
It works because companies are actually willing to pay a few bucks for some convenience and support.
IME when you dig into the project and financials for companies like yours they're not software companies but service companies. This is not an insult; the economics are much different, and typically don't get the scalability that made software so ridiculously profitable.
Can you develop on this? I'm interested by what you mean by this.
Income is mostly from support and consulting. These two things still pretty much rely on the actively developed product, so a big part of the company is dedicated to this. I'd say we are both a software and service company. I believe this is one nice way of developing open source software.
I'll join the no-insult-intended train. I offer up the following not to disparage your company (since its clearly working for now) but to explain to others why this is a terrible -business- model.
The problem you have is that the barrier to entry for a competitor is zero. Equally the costs for a competitor are always lower than yours.
As long as you are small and niche, it's OK. But if you "prove the market" you basically allow company-B to do what you do, literally exactly what you do, but without the development overhead. Indeed company-B will likely be founded by an ex-employee of your company.
Let's say you charge $100 for support. $50 goes to the support tech, $50 to the development team. Sooner or later a support technician figures out he can charge $75 per hour, and keep it all.
Equally because you currently charge only for services, not licenses, the day support stops coming in is the day the company closes. There's no reoccurring income, so the developers are the first to go.
Clearly the model -does- work, especially when the project is new and things are moving fast. But it's hard to grow.
Naturally there needs to be some incentive to keep the support staff in-house. Hence various non-Open-Source tweaks to the license to try and take other companies from taking over your turf.
> Clearly the model -does- work, especially when the project is new and things are moving fast. But it's hard to grow.
The market is proven (and we have closed source competitors). The project is 20. It grows slowly but does grow. It also doesn't need to grow too much. Not every company wants to become very big. In the end, the company is (increasingly) profitable, employees get paid and customers are happy.
> Naturally there needs to be some incentive to keep the support staff in-house
The company, while not paying incredible salaries, pays decently and offers awesome working conditions. They perfectly know that we could get paid more elsewhere so it compensates by making it enjoyable to work at. And it works, many people have been there for a long time. Some of the first ones are still here.
More critically, the support team heavily relies on the product team for specific questions, and also supports custom projects built on top of the product, so it's not like they can just leave and create a competitive support business. The expertise in the finest details is with the product team and the infra team.
> But if you "prove the market" you basically allow company-B to do what you do, literally exactly what you do, but without the development overhead.
If someone can out-compete you by simply cranking the infrastructure handle on your source-code, doesn't that indicate that you're not using your built-in advantage of owning the feature backlog well enough?
Or, put another way, if the entire value of your business is in your source code, and the only thing I need to be able to compete is your code and some commodity infrastructure, then don't give away your source code?
> I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean by "owning your feature backlog."
If you're stewarding the project, you have the sole authority over over which features land when. You can prioritise and drag (or even reject) PRs to suit your business case and your customers. Everyone else has to accept features when you choose to release them, or fork.
This is a massive competitive advantage, if used effectively.
In a consulting and support business, the economics usually require a relatively low fixed overhead cost. You can build such a business around any existing piece of software. That you develop the software in-house doesn't change the nature of the business but it does make for a poor implementation of this business model.
Deliberately incurring a high fixed overhead (product development) in a well-understood business model where profitability is highly dependent on minimizing fixed costs is creating the conditions for failure. To make this work you can no longer survive by being merely average at executing the revenue side, you have to be exceptional at the revenue side and most people are not exceptional.
Success in this model requires two separate miracles instead of one. Good startup opportunities are single miracle companies, and you focus all of your attention on creating that miracle. Companies that require two miracles to be successful are poor investments because you now have to solve two hard problems that split focus.
I'm not saying it's bad or impossible, just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind. If you want to use it that way and it works for you, great.
The thing is that support services aren't scalable. Many software businesses want a scalable source of revenue, that's why they go for cloud services.
They don't want to compete with copy cats, though, because they want monopoly-level margins.
Then they complain that Open Source won't let them have those astounding margins.
> just that Open Source was not designed with your employer use case in mind
Yep. Free software was designed with user rights in mind. Open source was then designed to sell the idea of free software to companies, removing the "user rights" parts, which sounded frightening to businesses, focusing on the development model, targeting developers and not users. Free software is defined with the famous 4 rules, open source is based on the open source manifesto, basically a copy of the Debian Free Software Guideline (from the Debian project, which, coincidentally, was closer to the Free Software Spirit at the time, probably still is). They are both about the same set of software and licenses, for the most part.
There's nothing in those texts / philosophies about doing business, for or against (only that free software was explicitly designed to allow selling software, because why not - and at the time, to distribute software, you probably had to copy it to floppy disks and give them, so you had some copy cost to absorb). It's indeed up to businesses to figure out the business model around FLOSS.
Sure, just don't complain about Open Source licenses after you chose it for your business. And don't claim it to be open source when open source doesn't work for your business.
You choose open source or you don't. Either way is fine. Just take responsibility for your decision.
It's simple, really. I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business... It's not meant for that.
> I don't understand why so many business owners complain so much that open source doesn't protect their business
Well, life is hard, things are not always easy, running am business is difficult and stressful, looking for ways to make open source profitable is noble, and also investors who "gave" an absurd amount of money want it back plus some more, of course.
You're right that it's no one on HN's responsibility to outline the full risks of starting a business, but no one is claiming otherwise.
Presumably jraph's goal in writing their comment is to convince us that starting an Open Source company is a good idea -- but they haven't succeeded, for the reasons mentioned. If they want to convince more people, then they should come up with counterarguments to the top level post's arguments (and if they don't want to convince more people, that's fine too).
> but they haven't succeeded, for the reasons mentioned
No, I haven't succeeded because I haven't tried yet. However, I am surrounded by open source companies that succeeded.
The comment I responded to obviously reasons theoretically, and confuses some things. I will answer two aspects of it:
> Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage
That's not true. You can't just take some open source program developed by someone else and make money out of it. Let's say I develop open source product P. I offer support and consulting. Let's say you want to compete with me on P. You initially lack the expertise and the notoriety. If Alice and Bob want to get support or consulting for product P, they'd better turn to P experts, which is the company that builds P, me. For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing. But while you are spending time on this, I am too. You will also fatally need to contribute improvements to the product you are selling to make your customers happy. Actually, if you start contributing, it's a win for both of us and our companies can even be friends.
I'm not making this up. That's actually where I work.
> This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source
So we just countered this. I'm not saying there's no risk. but that's not "by construction".
> There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures.
And now we are confusing development methods, not "open source vs not open source". You don't need to be organized in "bazaar" to build free software. Look how, for instance, SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy. They are profitable. They have a "first mover advantage".
> These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.
Well, they can.
But my biggest argument is that you don't need to believe me. Many "actually open source" companies have succeeded. So, what gives?
I don't need to actually build an open source company to prove my point. Others have been doing well. Maybe me in the future, that's not completely excluded. Thing is, being employed also has advantages.
>For you to get customers, you need to prove the world that you are an expert. It takes spending time with the code, and also on marketing.
I agree with this, and that the makers of P likely enjoy a big (and genuine) advantage in being considered the authority in all matters P. But for a competitor (me, in your example), spending time with your existing, working code is much less time and effort than writing brand new code, and that difference in my effort levels is the disadvantage, for you, of going Open Source vs. closed-source.
>SQLite, as open as you could dream, manages very well with their non contribution policy
I wasn't aware that SQLite was a profitable enterprise. I have to admit that this is a very strong example for your case, given the competition in this area from other FOSS software (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
The real potential competitors are current staff. The risk is not that -I- want to invest all the time and energy, its that a small group of existing experts aka your current staff, decide to do it.
There's also possibly a small % of users who end up knowing enough to end up doing "mostly supporting others". They can end up becoming competitors as well.
So yes, this model can work, as its currently doing for you (and others). But it certainly is a lot harder to build, and keep such a business going.
Being an employee of such a business is great. You still get a paycheck every month, so the model is irrelevant. Owning such a business though is precarious - basically the staff can walk anytime, and effectively take all the customers with them.
> basically the staff can walk anytime, and effectively take all the customers with them.
I suppose something like the ownCloud / Nextcloud breakup could happen.
You need a big enough set of employees with all the skills required (product & customer relations) such that these employees will be collectively more efficient than who remains to be willing to leave at the same time and still want to work on the same thing, and an important set of customers to be willing to switch to the new business.
Given how we like each others and how nice it is to work there, I believe the company would need to fuck things up big time for this to happen. What caused this at ownCloud is a political change (from true FLOSS to open core, maybe other things) and it took a co-founder + a big bunch of core contributors to leave.
I would say, if this is the biggest risk, the company is probably okay :-)
I agree with you on the fact that it is probably hard to achieve this though.
And still, ownCloud is still alive. I don't know how relevant they are and why people would choose them over Nextcloud, I'm somewhat amazed they are still there.
Oh, making a profitable company, of any kind, isn't easy :) . Most businesses fail. (90% within 5 years, something like 1% make it to 10.)
Of course there are successful examples of just about every model under the sun. If you can find a model, and a business which allows externalities like Open Source then that's fantastic.
And yo be clear I'm not saying companies fail because they are Open Source. Mostly they'll fail for the same reasons every other model folks- they don't generate enough cash to pay the bills.
Indeed Open Source can be an attractive start. There's at least a chance of free labor. There's some marketing milage.
The problem is not the start. The problem is when the money starts flowing. When you're "surviving" no-one is really incentived to muscle in. When you start "thriving" then suddenly your space looks really interesting to others.
And licensing one's product seems to amplify that risk.
> based on a few opinions of HN comments
What if someone does do that? As a HN commenter I can't bypass the possibility that somebody takes my comment at face value without conducting proper research and analysis.
HN comments (and really all content on the Internet in general) should be written responsibly. I am not saying that GP didn't write their comment responsibly.
> nor it's their responsibility to outline the full extent of risks involved
But then you can't raise complaints when somebody does outline the full extent of risks involved.
> I can't bypass the possibility that somebody takes my comment at face value without conducting proper research and analysis
Someone not conducting proper research is doomed to fail at building a company anyway.
You should be careful in writing HN comments but you should not feel responsible for a business failing. Someone reading should also read comments from anyone, one's writing does not go unchecked for long on HN.
YT went too far from being fair for consumers personally. Google cuts off monetization almost randomly at times, creators then have to embed the ads directly into their video, bypassing Google's ad platform and inconsistent monetization terms, the consumers now have to watch through Google's ads and creator's ads. I'm paying Google for YT premium to get rid of its ads, there's no alternative to get rid of shit the creator decides to sell out for. And there should be no sponsorship deals in the first place, since Google should be paying them. So I feel justified to use SponsorBlock.
Everything builds upon Wine, but when it comes to games it alone wasn't doing so well outside older dx9 titles.
It's mostly DXVK/Proton's VKD3D that actually allowed a lot of games to work on Linux with little overhead, both are funded by Valve. So I don't think calling upon Pareto principle in regards to Valve is fair either.
And yet none of it would be possible without all the emulation of all the other parts of the OS. You need more than emulating DX10/11/12 to get games to run. Valve is standing on the shoulders of giants here. The original comment didn't even mention Wine, which I think is criminally unfair. I do think Valve has made insanely valuable contributions, I just don't want anybody to forget that they're not the sole reason why any of this is possible. Wine and all its contributors deserve to be mentioned.
I don't think anybody is attributing it solely to Valve, but it's hard to deny that Valve is currently the main driving force behind gaming on Linux, hence they're getting lots of praise. The Linux gaming stack consists of quite a few open source projects however, and I don't think it's that criminal that they aren't being mentioned in a comment to an article that does mention them :)
