On Tuesday, 6 January 2015 at 22:37:40 UTC, anonymous wrote:
On Tuesday, 6 January 2015 at 19:46:51 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Tuesday, 6 January 2015 at 19:06:27 UTC, anonymous wrote:
[...]
I don't know of any commercial support model where you only
pay for the fixes you need at any given moment and the fixes
that others paid for are provided to you for free.
I'm not knowledgeable about any of this business stuff, and I
don't mean to pretend I am. I just wanted to clarify what I
think Joseph meant there, as I understood it.
As far as I know there are companies that employ developers to
work on open source software, with their patches open-sourced
immediately. I'm assuming the employer can direct where exactly
the effort goes. That's essentially it, no?
A few companies may do that, but he referred to paying for fixes
you want right away but getting patches other companies paid for
for free. I don't know of any commercial support model where
that happens.
I presume you're referring to support subscriptions, where you
pay a monthly fee to subscribe to an stream of ongoing fixes
and pay extra for fixes you need right away. But that's not
"free," you're paying a monthly fee for that ongoing
subscription, which subsidizes the cost of those fixes that
others paid for first.
No, I didn't have that in mind.
Well, unless either of you can articulate exactly what model you
have in mind and who's using it, it's irrelevant.
[...]
My point was that he's wrong that the patch's value doesn't
change if others have access to it. Just because that patch
doesn't clearly differentiate your product on a spec sheet
doesn't mean those patches in aggregate don't differentiate
your time to market and cost of making the product, which will
all affect your bottom line.
So, the point is that competitors can't leech off my paid
patches, right? I mean, sure, that's a thing. I'm definitely
not business enough to put a number on it. Seems like the
number you put on it is higher than the one Joseph puts on it.
Yes, _anything_ you pay for is a competitive advantage for you.
He seems to think only the direct features of your product are
your competitive advantage, but indirect costs like this also
affect the price and overall quality of your product, at least
relative to other products in the market, which are just as
important.
There is no disadvantage to paying for the patch in this
model, because otherwise you don't get the patch. You are
paying someone to write the patch so that it exists in the
first place. Otherwise, you can hope that some OSS dev gets
to it someday when he gets some spare time.
The counter-proposal is not to rely on the free (as in beer)
devs, but to hire someone to write OSS patches. This would of
course allow your competition to leech off of you. But if
others do the same, the benefits may be greater than if
everyone is protective of their stuff. Again, I don't want to
pretend to know what's best business-wise.
Businesses generally don't sink money into stuff that provides
them no competitive advantage. Therefore, the counter-proposal
is pure fantasy.
[...]
It _is_ win-win, that's the whole point. It's even
win-win-win, to crib a term from The Office, ;) because the
OSS project eventually also gets the patch after a delay.
I don't think the "win" for the customer is so clear. The "win"
that your competitors have to pay, too, seems rather slim to me
(remember, not a business guy). And if competitors would buy
patches collectively, eliminating the need for an exclusive
access period, they could be better off than when each of them
pays for it separately. But this may not be realistic, of
course.
The win for the customer is that they're getting a patch that
would not otherwise exist, not sure what's more clear than that.
As for competitors, let's say you pay for a bunch of patches
which you open-source right away and your competitors use those,
then don't pay for any patches of their own. So they save a
bunch of money that you're spending, then release their product
cheaper than yours. Which company do you think is going to do
better?
I'm not sure exactly what you by mean by competitors buying
patches collectively. If you mean that all the companies pool
together and fund OSS development, how do you keep some outlier
from not contributing any money, using the resulting OSS code,
then undercutting you on price? It is difficult to coordinate
companies this way, though I have sometimes pointed out
non-profits like Linaro, which are funded by various companies
and do something similar. What I think you're describing is
possible, but can never garner as much investment as a paid
business model.
I don't know who this hypothetical competitor is who provides
"immediate-access-for-everyone" and is cranking out a ton of
patches. They currently don't exist.
Neither exists at the moment for D. It's all hypothetical.
Right, but the hybrid model exists elsewhere and is highly
successful. His preferred alternative doesn't really exist, at
least he certainly hasn't listed anybody, and to the extent it
does, is _significantly_ less successful.
Even if some of the existing OSS devs wrote some paid patches,
the D OSS project exists because of the generosity of Walter,
Andrei, Kenji, and a couple dozen other volunteer contributors
who give away their work for free under an OSS license. To
suggest that they are therefore bound to always provide future
patches for free is frankly ridiculous. They could all just
stop working on D tomorrow, they have no responsibility to
keep providing all this free work.
Similarly, they have no responsibility to not sell some
patches to paying customers, simply because some spoiled
handful will throw a hissy fit because they're not getting
_everything_ for free anymore. If they really want those
patches, they can pay for them or write them themselves.
It's not so much about responsibilites, definitely not legal
ones. It's more about keeping good relations with the
community. I'm also thinking more about minor/occasional
contributors, like myself, not so much about pure consumers (or
potential contributors ;) ). Right now, D is communism as usual
in OSS. If we switch over to capitalism, that doesn't attract
the same crowd, and may push away the current one.
OSS is not communism, it's volunteerism, and to the extent that
companies like Facebook and Sociomantic are already using it,
it's already got some capitalism. I don't know what the
minor/occasional contributors think, so who knows how they'd
react to such a move, but D could well afford to lose them if it
gets several paid devs and some new OSS contributors from the
resulting larger D community in return. :) The cost-benefit on
that is a no-brainer, you have to go paid.
But if a third party starts selling patches, and merges them
into D proper after some time, I think that's a whole different
story. They didn't write the bugs they're fixing. And they
can't let down a community in which they haven't been active.
It could still mean that "open D" becomes second class. And
that could throw existing contributors off. But I see much less
friction than when current core developers started doing it.
Since no core dev has expressed any interest in this thread, that
is the likely route. But even if they did, no other member of
the D community has any claim on their time. Their contributions
to D are donations of their time. For a member of the D
community to say they can't also sell some of their D-related
time to willing buyers is utter nonsense.
