
Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018) - akulkarni
https://blog.timescale.com/blog/open-source-demise-of-proprietary-software-a49f73f54165/
======
kazinator
Open source isn't eating _all_ proprietary software.

Open source is enabling proprietary software to be more profitable, because it
makes free all the commodity pieces that are needed to make proprietary
software work.

Customers would otherwise have to pay for these things (in an ongoing manner)
leaving less of their $$$ to spend on your payload.

Open source powers SaaS which is so closed and proprietary that the user
doesn't even get to execute the binary code on their own hardware.

Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools,
databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten
your business.

~~~
fierarul
> Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools,
> databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten
> your business.

I agree with what you said. With the caveat that some lucky few companies do
seem to do well in this space too. Recently learned JetBrains (makers of
IntelliJ) had $270M revenue/year and $100M net income in 2018.

~~~
Edmond
It shouldn't be surprising that JetBrains is doing well.

Even with sectors like developer tools, there is a lot of room for creating
value-added solutions that are proprietary, and that customers will happily
pay good money for.

~~~
jjeaff
I think it is surprising, especially considering the free open source options
available that are not far behind intellij offerings like VS code.

------
Edmond
The conclusion is simply not backed by reality. There are certainly realms
where open source has supplanted proprietary counterparts and they all mostly
fall under infrastructure type software.

We all use these infrastructure open source software products because they
serve needs that practically anyone doing technology work will find themselves
to have.

The larger universe of commercial software is HUGE and most of it is
proprietary and will remain that way.

~~~
robenkleene
The irony of open source is that its biggest success is closed-source web
apps, which, since your data is now hosted in the cloud, means you've lost the
one thing you actually had control over, your data. And you still don't have
the source code.

------
fierarul
This is a decent article that could stand on its own.

It is also a PR piece by TimescaleDB which has all interest in convincing
people/investors that an open-source company is a good deal:

> (Disclaimer: Our company TimescaleDB is an open-source time-series database
> startup and shares investors with several of these companies, including
> Elastic, MongoDB, Hortonworks, Confluent, and Databricks.)

There were more paragraphs, but I only picked 2 to comment:

> If you are an individual, your project (or your contributions to someone
> else’s open-source project) will get you visibility and help your long-term
> career. If you want, you’ll travel the world, deliver talks on your work,
> and meet like-minded people along the way.

I doubt this is still the case. With GitHub/Universities promoting open source
contributions all over the place, it offers much less leverage. Maybe a very
popular project helps the career but otherwise I think it's just a work out of
passion. Might even hinder your career.

>Some think that open-source foundations should fund open-source projects
directly through stipends or fellowships. But these foundations are not money-
making machines: e.g., the Apache Foundation barely made $500,000 in 2011.
Perhaps these foundations can fund individual developers, but are extremely
unlikely to be able to support open-source projects at scale.

True. But some foundations do fund specific areas in need, eg. FreeBSD
Foundation. Apache is a bad example as they don't fund _anything_. What do
they need $500,000 for is unclear to me since infrastructure for projects
can't cost so much (and nowadays it's offloaded to GitHub, etc).

~~~
akulkarni
This comment is really funny. The way we (TimescaleDB) try to convince people
(and investors) is with our product, not blog posts. But we write blog posts
to transparently share our learnings with the rest of the world. That's just
the open-source way. :-)

Btw for others who are reading - contributing to open-source is still very
much a way to build your career, travel the world, etc. I personally know
people who are living their best lives because of this. It doesn't happen for
everyone, but if you are early in your career then I very much recommend it.

~~~
fierarul
It's not funny if you think that
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)
is more or less mandatory reading on HN.

I would like to see some data point towards the success related to open source
involvement. I'm sure outliers exist just as there are people doing really
well with their solo AppStore app or with their niche website.

And I'm saying this as somebody involved in open source: better to see it as a
hobby done out of passion. Any other benefits are random/luck and except if
you get to feel some passion for a highly sought out niche (hello Machine
Learning) you shouldn't expect anything out of it. Entering into it with the
expectation of building your career, traveling the world, etc is going to lead
to disappointment.

------
tonyedgecombe
_Given how open source is eating into the proprietary software market, this is
something everyone in the industry, from developers to operators to investors,
should be closely watching._

I suspect the biggest change to affect proprietary software is the shift to
SaaS rather than open source.

~~~
mikece
True; throught a SaaS model a cloud company could make extensive changes to
Linux and deploy it to their datacenter on which their services are sold, but
without the obligation to give back any of the code because they haven't
_distributed_ the code.

I'm not saying this is actually happening, and experience with companies who
build on FreeBSD show that upstreaming their changes helps keep the diffs
small when pulling down updates around their proprietary code.

------
akulkarni
Hi, author here. I wrote this over a year ago.

I think I still agree with most of the points in the article, but if I were to
write this today I'd emphasize the role of Cloud and SaaS even more.

I think it's pretty clear that Cloud has become the dominant way to consume
open-source for new projects.

It's also true that SaaS is already replacing traditional proprietary "on
premise" software.

But I think there's a wrinkle here: open-source software can still build
larger communities (and as a result, reduce reliance on a single vendor) than
a SaaS company ever can.

For example, look at Elasticsearch. Even if you don't want to run
Elasticsearch yourself, you can choose to run it on Elastic Cloud or on AWS.
So now you have at least two different companies who are invested in making
Elasticsearch better for you. Compare this to Sumologic or Splunk, where you
are clearly beholden to that vendor.

In other words, SaaS is the new proprietary software. And I still believe that
open-source is poised to "eat" it.

------
codr7
I don't really buy into the political debate. The arguments for open source as
applied to non-technical users don't really work as advertised from my
experience. Sure, you could potentially find someone to maintain it if the
version you depend on goes bottom up. But the contexts where that's the
preferred solution are few and far between.

More important in my mind is that open source software is strictly higher
quality from a technical perspective. Because it's not prostitution most of
the time, it's passion and wider perspectives such as sharing knowledge. And a
higher quality foundation means better software, because whatever commercial
cruft someone adds on top it will still work better.

I recently reinstalled a laptop that was running Windows 10 with Kubuntu for a
non-technical friend, which is not an excellent example but still applies
since Canonical is semi-commercial. And it's a total win, because Windows is
simply crap from the bottom up.

Android is another example, as is macOS.

~~~
ken
I'm not sure what these are examples of. Is Android "open-source"? Is macOS?

I tried to compile Android from source this year, and spent weeks reading
about it, finding distributions and tools to help, downloading packages,
verifying signatures, and eventually running an enormous build command. I was
ultimately unsuccessful. No matter what I fixed, there was something else that
didn't work. Everything had the classic open-source excuses: it's being fixed
soon, that's the wrong branch, you need to upgrade your tools, the docs are
out of date, ...

Android today is not anything like Andy Rubin's "the definition of open" from
2010. As far as I can tell, it's basically SAAS for smartphones. A corporation
gets the benefits of open-source, but users don't.

~~~
codr7
They are examples of successful software consisting of proprietary code and
commercial polish on top of an open source foundation. Which was my point,
that even if it's not all open, it still results in higher quality software
overall. So we still win, even if it's not the total domination RMS keeps
insisting on.

------
GnarfGnarf
There are more Open Source projects than there are programmers with the time
to collaborate.

Some types of software lend themselves to Open Source, others don't. I once
saw a disparaging comment in a forum attempting to create an open-source
accounting package, "who would want to work on that boring stuff?"

See [http://progenygenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-open-
source...](http://progenygenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-open-source-
mirage.html)

------
throwaway49872
More like:

Proprietary software reinvents itself as corporate-driven Open Source with
SaaS Lock-In

~~~
pyuser583
Bingo.

Look at Microsoft. Used to charge an arm and leg for software. Then ran up
against competition from Apple and Google.

2000s were not good for Microsoft.

They’re getting their act together now. But for a while they were very much
old tech.

~~~
ken
They realized there's a lot of technical people who like open-source software,
so they found a way to insert themselves into the middle of that.

~~~
throwaway49872
The whole SaaS industry and most of "tech" companies are little more than
middleman between open source software and end users.

------
jpalomaki
I think the ”original idea” behind open source was to enable collaboration. If
two companies both need accounting system and they don’t see accounting system
as something that would bring them competitive advantage, why not build the
system together.

In many other fields this collaboration is enabled through government.
Companies pay taxes, taxes are used to fund infrastructure such as roads and
railways.

If I remember right for example Apache Software Foundation had a requirement
that core team for project should not come from just single company.

One way to categorize open source projects is to check how many companies
really collaborate on the project. Is it a true joint effort or is it in
practise dependent on one entity.

------
gnufx
I'm not sure about the general thesis, but some of the history is
questionable. For one thing, I assume gumby would disagree about Red Hat being
"the first company to build a successful business on top of open-source
software" (for values of "open-source" equal to "free"), even if though became
successful enough to buy Cygnus.

------
smitty1e
I take the syncretic view that the GPL/apache/proprietary categories of
licenses are greater than their components.

These three categories cover the spectrum of motives for doing software.

What's key is to respect these motives and protect the legal regime that
supports their creative tension.

------
1996
Ah, timescaledb. They are funny. I tried them really hard. I was rooting for
them. Then it bit me: death by a thousand papercuts

One of the many papercuts was actually more serious, to the point it was
funny: I remember how in their stable versions, they had a humorous bug: if
you did \copy instead of insert to a timescaledb, the timestamps looked right
when you eyeballed them with a select, but acted wrong when you used them in a
query.

Theefore it passed tests, but took down production whenever than happened.
Ouch.

To their credit, they preserved this bug very well for several stable versions
- for far longer than my patience with broken software.

That's quite bad for a database that intends to do timeseries - something so
basic you won't ever see in proprietary software.

Then before there was pipelinedb which also had its fair share of bugs before
going under. Some of them took a production database offline. But it was such
a CPU hog that it had been anticipated.

Still after that timescaledb bug, I banned the use of third party postgres
extensions.

~~~
akulkarni
Hey there, glad you think we are funny, but sorry to hear you are having
problems.

This problem you mentioned is new to me - have not seen it before. Did you
file a Github issue for this? Happy to chat more there (or feel free to ping
me directly - ajay (at) timescale.com).

~~~
1996
As timescaledb is now banned with all third party extensions, I don't have a
server where I can reproduce that. But it was 100% reproducible on a very
simple routine scenario (add many records to an existing timescale db)

Just try to do a massive '\copy from' into a table that is already a
timescaledb, using a tsv source with at least a few million records, make sure
the dates are well spread out. Then use windowing functions to count the
records per time unit. Compare date_trunc to time_bucket and select. Unless
the issue was silently fixed, I'm sure you will be laughting too - but I
recommend you wait until after xmas to have that good hearthy laugh, as it may
cause you to want to fix the issue ASAP :)

Once of the field was defaulting to NOW(), maybe that's what caused the funny
bug but I didn't investigate much after that. It was the straw that broke the
camel back. Thousand papercuts. Not worth the time investment.

~~~
akulkarni
Cool, we'll take a look. First we've heard of it so really curious what might
be going on. Thanks!

~~~
1996
So did you take a look?

------
sys_64738
This is a natural progression that wasn't available during the software crisis
of the 1970s.

~~~
zabzonk
Really, there was no "crisis", at least none that I ever came across. Perhaps
you could post an example? The 1970s saw the development of UNIX, VMS, CP/M
and other enormously successful products.

~~~
synt4x1k0
[http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/NATOReports...](http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/NATOReports/index.html)

~~~
zabzonk
That would appear to be about the 60s.

------
ossworkerrights
Would be interesting to research how open source affects indie development.

------
Data_Junkie
It's not eating business logic, it's enabling it. Grace be to God.

------
rstuart4133
He is wrong. Proprietary software is near impossible to escape. Try running
exclusively open source is impossible (sadly, for those of us who like to keep
prying eyes out of our hardware). It's in the firmware blobs we load, embedded
in ROM's in things like SSD, in the digital thermometer on my desk, the
monitor my computer is connected to, the IP phone I use, in the modems in my
mobile, in the batter control chip in my laptop.

But to a programmer, I guess it may look like open source is replacing
everything else. That's because we programmers have gradually have replaced
everything we use with open source - compilers, editors, web servers,
libraries for just about everything. Even stuff we use play with rather than
get paid for is replaced - like photo and video editors, 3D printers, model
plane piloting software.

It's easy for us, and cheaper in the long run, and given enough time the end
result is better quality than the proprietary stuff because we all pitch in to
knock off the paper cuts.

But it really is a case of "scratching itches", so if a programmer doesn't get
itchy about something then it usually won't have an open source version. It's
not hard to find examples. There are some usable PCB design tools out there -
but 3D mechanic drafting tools weren't a thing until 3D printers tickled our
interest in that area. Anything that requires specialised hardware is going to
be out of reach - so you won't see open source MRI scanners, but I have no
doubt you will see devices using 2 cheap web cams to do SLAM in the not too
distant future.

This has had the accidental effect of making us more efficient. Any tool we
can conceive of that allows us to do our job done better is free. The tools we
already constantly get better - for free. In any other industry this might be
a problem as supply overwhelms demand, but we seem to be in the odd position
of the world demanding what appears to be a near infinite amount of software.

I am constantly amazed by how the demand for good programmers never seems to
tail off. Even where I live (Australia) which has very high wages by
international standards, and in the face of huge numbers of programmers coming
out of low wage areas, _and_ in the face of jobs being some of the most
transportable on earth, anyone competent programmer who wants a job gets one
within weeks. I think we partially have open source to thank for that.

But step outside of what programmers want, and we are as mercenary as the rest
of them. We are more than happy to develop nice new shinies we use and give
them away for free, but we know who butters our bread. We don't write code for
them for free. And since we are all getting paid, that must mean most of the
code we write isn't available for free.

