
Open Source is losing,  SaaS is leading,  APIs will win… - vr3690
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/open-source-is-losing-saas-is-leading-apis-will-win-663648d9c8d0#.cbwjwb2dg
======
tmbsundar
Not quite.

If I want to start a project in, say R, I don't think I will start by
searching "Open Source". I will search for "R". Here is the trend:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API%2C%20R&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4)

So, this analysis is not accurate. Someone searching for "Open Source" might
have been prevalent when the OSS movement was nascent. Now I think people will
look for specific technologies rather than blanket terms.

~~~
mavhc
I use "open source" when searching for Windows applications, to avoid the
trialware etc

------
nzoschke
> Today, the CTO of a company can spend engineering resources to build their
> search solution with Elasticsearch or buy speed with Algolia’s SaaS.

I think OSS has the long term advantage here.

Everyone needs log storage and search. The combination of OSS and highly
competitive IaaS will drive this part of the stack towards commodity pricing
and little total cost of ownership (setup, and operations)

It's already happening. Elasticsearch is quality software. You can provision
an Elasticsearch cluster on AWS with a click of a button. You can also store
all your logs in CloudWatch forever.

This stack costs pennies to run compared to logging services like Splunk.

Yes configuring it takes some time but an end state for this container
generation is much less config.

Now you own your logs and data and search. Not some SaaS vendor.

Disclaimer. I'm working on an OSS platform, Convox, with the goal of helping
the CTO get cost effective and reliable private infrastructure without big
setup burdens and huge SaaS bills.

~~~
jandrewrogers
The big disadvantage of OSS versus (competent) infrastructure SaaS, is that
open source software tends to have very poor operational efficiency. A major
component of the infrastructure SaaS business model and defensibility is
arbitraging the OpEx between open source and a properly designed SaaS
implementation, primarily by radically reducing resource requirements to
deliver a given level of scale and performance.

The rule of thumb for most infrastructure SaaS like databases, big data
platforms, etc is that you can get a 10x reduction in hardware requirements
versus OSS, hence the OpEx/CapEx savings, with a well-engineered
implementation of the same functionality. As someone in the business of doing
exactly this, I can tell you that this is simple to achieve. OSS may be "free"
but if it requires an order of magnitude more hardware to deliver the same
performance and scale as my cloud implementation of the same thing, it makes
the OSS much more expensive to the end user.

This dynamic would go away if OSS infrastructure software was designed with
performance and efficiency as a priority, but in practice that has been pretty
far down the list of priorities for most popular OSS software. But I think
most people are surprised by just how inefficient OSS software actually is
compared to other implementations. I have been telling people for some time
that without an increased focus on absolute performance and efficiency in OSS,
it will be increasingly marginalized in usage because the CapEx/OpEx of
deploying it is far too high compared to the alternatives.

~~~
nzoschke
This is a really great perspective.

You're totally right, SaaS companies have far more motivation to maximize
performance and operations to reduce the cost of keeping their services
running.

OSS often doesn't have the need or the expertise to do this.

But I do see some of this shifting...

Some OSS projects are now built by folks that have lots of performance
expertise and goals.

There's also more funding or sponsorship for OSS development which will help.

For example Redis is ridiculously cheap and easy to run on your own.

antirez is a world class engineer with high standards and he has sponsorship
to work towards his goals full time.

AWS offers it as a service through ElasticCache which removes what challenges
remain about configuration, replication or failover.

So I wouldn't build, integrate or bet on a SaaS "cache" platform/company any
more. It's been commoditized.

I see signs of the same thing happening to more parts of the stack. ELK isn't
the most performant log analysis platform, but it's close to Splunk in my
experience, with the added benefit of the possibility of anyone, Elastic or
the community, contributing performance improvements.

Yes there is lots of wishful thinking here...

------
norea-armozel
This smacks of a complete misunderstanding of SaaS and FLOSS. How did this
person even get into software development? Seriously, because to me if a SaaS
is using a FLOSS licensed library and regularly contributes to it on its
github repo then it's clearly not a matter of FLOSS in decline. It's just that
FLOSS as a whole has become the ordinary of software development (just like
CAD/CAM is the ordinary of aircraft manufacturing).

Also, using Google Trends to prove a point on something that requires you to
see actual participation just proves my skepticism is right on this point.
Google Trends doesn't look at git commits. Google Trends doesn't look at
symposiums or standards organization contributions (cash, research, code,
etc). All it does is look at search words. Wow! You found out that people
aren't searching that much on the subject anymore, WTG! /s

------
AndrewUnmuted
This whole article is predicated on the wrong measurement.

When you search Google Trends for Open Source Software as a type of Software
Industry [1], you get a much different picture.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F01pjyj&cmpt=q...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F01pjyj&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4)

~~~
andrewstuart2
100% agreed, but for different reasons. I recently realized that I've been
mistaking google trends as accurate feedback on the popularity of a subject.
It is not.

My current thought is that it much better indicates a lack of consensus (or
foreknowledge) of the proper source for information about a search term. If,
for example, you know that godoc.org is the best place to search for golang
libraries, you'd probably just type godoc.org. If not, you'd probably just
google "golang rest library" or some such term, adding to the results for
golang.

Once those sources become well-known and begin being passed around on side-
channels (outside the reach of google searches), then google trends is no
longer accurate. For any given suject, it's impossible to get a gauge on how
much traffic is just going directly to bookmarks or links.

Unless you're collecting anonymous usage statistics from a market-leading
browser. For example. :-D

------
StavrosK
This article feels like it's saying "measurements show that the sky is
actually yellow!". No, it's not. I can plainly see that open-source code is
99.999% of my stack, with a tiny bit of proprietary code (mine, and even much
of that is open-sourced by me in library form) on top. If your measurements
show that OSS is losing, your measurements must be wrong.

~~~
uptownJimmy
anecdotes != data;

~~~
StavrosK
That's another fallacy. Anecdotes are data, they're just an extremely weak
form. A million anecdotes may be better than a single data point.

------
donpark
I disagree. While SaaS blinks in and out, requires maintenance, and most
fading away over time when interest or business model dwindles, open source
projects lives on even in orphaned form. Time is on open source's side.

------
sethish
If you add a trendline for the term 'Software' you will see that it has been
steadily decreasing at the same rate as 'open source'.

------
vr3690
Came across this article on Medium and wondered the people here on HN think
about it.

I am not sure about the author's methodology for comparing OSS with SaaS APIs.
Looks very pseudo-sceincey. But if there's any truth in the conclusion (that
people are leaning more towards SaaS APIs than OSS), I am worried over time it
will increase the barrier to entry for building new software thus resulting in
fewer awesome stuff unless you have deeper pockets.

------
justinlilly
The three trend graphs at the tops are disingenuous. Here they are in relative
comparison to one another:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4)

Software as a service is a completely flat line by comparison.

~~~
justinlilly
adding "saas" makes a bit more of a difference:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=software%20as%20a%20service%2C%20open%20source%2C%20API%2C%20saas&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4)

~~~
vr3690
I did the same thing just before you replied. The difference with "saas" is
super trivial though.

------
cyphar
I don't agree that the free software business models are failures. Many large
companies need actual enterprise support and licensing to fulfill their
business requirements. Just because most start-ups (which is clearly the
author's circle of friends) aren't big enough to need such support doesn't
mean that it's "failed". Support is a real value add, because it means that
you have developers on call that can maintain the system you based your stack
on. The fact that the code is free software doesn't make a practical
difference to you (aside from moral differences I won't go into here).

------
cies
> Open Source is losing, SaaS is leading

And what are these SaaS apps mostly built with?

Open source software. They usually build on a mix of technologies that can be
called an "open source web technology stack".

I even believe the current effort of M$ to open source some of it's
technologies is geared at making sure those do not become irrelevant in the
SaaS-age.

------
flohofwoe
Eh, the search term Open Source is becoming less frequent simply because it
has become the default and software that is _not_ Open Source has become the
exotic case. Just search on google trends for 'github' which has basically
become a substitute word for 'open source' and you see a nicely growing curve.

------
notacoward
Maybe one of the reasons people don't search for "open source" as much as they
used to is that it doesn't need explaining any more. Anybody who has reason to
care has already been exposed to the concept by now.

------
mchahn
> The increase in development speed is driven by the innovation of re-using
> existing blocks. Basically, developers don’t need to reinvent the wheel
> every day.

In the 60's, when TTL integrated logic chips appeared, the digital hardware
world took off. Anyone could design at a higher level of abstraction. For many
years people said that there needs to be a TTL of software. It seems we might
be getting there.

------
elcapitan
It rather seems to me that software that has been successfully established
feature-wise as service will eventually get copied as a off-the-shelf OSS
software (see the discussion about cloning Slack)? Basically like
commoditization of other goods, but in the information economy with zero
marginal costs obviously being a free commodity.

------
tryitnow
There's some good points in this article, but those are lost in the false
comparison of OSS/SaaS/APIs.

That's not even like comparing apples to oranges, it's like comparing apples
to apple trees.

------
aurora72
What does Microsoft do these days? Open source many of its software! And OSS
is preferred not because it's free & open, because it works and it gets things
done!

~~~
cyphar
> What does Microsoft do these days? Open source many of its software! And OSS
> is preferred not because it's free & open, because it works and it gets
> things done!

I prefer free software because of the fact it respects my freedom. Even if
there was a "better" proprietary editor then Vim I wouldn't use it. Stop
spreading the wrong message, practical convenience is a side-effect of freedom
allowing innovation.

------
drivingmenuts
"All this has happened before. All this will happen again." \-- the writings
of Pythia.

------
yarrel
This is why digital humanities education is important and useful.

It stops this kind of mistake.

------
sklogic
I find it quite annoying that recently web hipstors apparently hijacked the
term "API", and now everyone assume that by default "API" means something
totally different from what it used to.

~~~
goldbrick
"Hipstors" didn't hijack shit and "API" is correct usage here. The fault is
with the (hypothetical?) morons who think "API" only refers to web services.

~~~
sklogic
When was the last time when somebody used the words "web API"? When web
monkeys say "API" they expect anyone else to understand it as the new default
hipstor meaning. It is extremely annoying.

