Corporate Open Source is Dead

Nobody likes being rugpulled. But lately, it's going around like a virus.

Why are so many former open source darlings selling out or relicensing? And is there anything you can do to fight back against these anti-open-source practices?

Resources I mentioned in this video:

#opensource

Contents:

00:00 - What happened
00:34 - The rot sets in
02:01 - The year open source dies
02:47 - CLAs considered toxic
03:52 - Free vs open
04:31 - Opportunity knocks
05:48 - Freeloaders

[purpleguy]

It strikes me as weird when companies do this kind of thing. Linux and open source is virtually built on pooling resources, adapting and bringing in new ideas. It feels like it's just a matter of time for users of the rug-pulled software to move onto something different.

[JellyLancelot]

Freeloaders though have indirect revenue benefits which are often ignored. The same people that will be running home labs are the same sort of people that will spend time in technical forums and implementation at large organisations. You are winning hearts and minds the same way that Adobe used to give out free software to education institutions. You familiarise your product base and the people who will be making implementation decisions at companies with your product so that when the enterprise money rolls around you’re the top pick. By making the nerds hate you, you’re not gonna do well.

[eldibs]

The whole thing about "freeloaders" reminds me of a bit from Extra Credits back in the day. An exec at an MMORPG developer had asked him "How many players who aren't paying us do you expect me to pay for server capacity for?" The answer was "As many as you can get, " because those games live and die by their community. Open source software is the same. If nobody wants to use or work on the software, it dies.

[ulbuilder]

They complain about freeloaders yet won't offer minimal support plans small businesses can afford.

[Watchandlearn]

The problem is corporate America has this very weird trend lately where every year there must be double digit growth on numbers which is not sustainable. So we are in a period where they are firing people, rug pulling open source software, and doing other nasty business moves to try and squeeze every last drop of revenue they can to satisfy that double digit growth. The problem with this strategy and this mindset of always seeking double digit growth is that it isn't sustainable at all. You can only lay off so many people until you have no one left to run the business and you can only squeeze so much money out of people before they go find another product (or a free fork of yours). It'll only be a matter of time before this mindset gets turned upside down and they start looking at hiring a bunch of people and looking at long term revenue again. Then of course, the cycle will repeat itself...

[MikeButash]

My current customer wanted to look at at an enterprise LDAP solution to replace OpenLDAP, and was interested in Redhat Directory server, and their whole IdP suite. Reaching out to sales, it took almost 3 weeks to even setup a technical call to demo the product, and then the engineer that was do demo didn't bother to show or setup anyone else to do it. After that I literally just never heard a word from sales again like we weren't worth bothering with.

Apparently they really don't like to sell things, so why do they bother buying anyone?

[nbnetrum]

I blame Amazon. They built AWS on top of these open source projects and never contribute back anything.

[KGJYS]

It's a good thing you let us know you were Jeff Geerling at the end. I thought for a moment I was watching Louis Rossmann.

[Bigs]

About the 'just make your software proprietary' argument at 6:20: that's the thing with the bait and switch: these projects would never have grown as fast had they not been open source. Open Source instills trust in users (and business decision makers who think it's free), which is abused through CLAs and rug pulls.

I never batted an eye at CLA's before because I didn't understand the implications. Thanks for educating us, Jeff!

[MCRuCr]

"And they're not even a pointless AI company"

love you man

[TallTexasGMan]

Makes me glad to know that I haven't a clue how to code even this sentence. I helped with the testing of a piece of ham radio software many years ago, it went from being free to users to paid to use and all that work that all of us volunteers did meant we had to pay for it to use it. Sucked.

[flaskdjango]

I'm going to the comments section, tell mum I love her.

[hamcha]

Big FOSS projects should openly advertise adopting DCO instead of CLA or just generally not having a CLA. It's a poison pill and it should be loudly called out every time. My own rebellion is using AGPL for everything I make in my spare time.

[dfs-comedy]

Any time greed gets involved, things go south. I never trust corporate open-source.

I actually ran a software company for 19 years. We published some free software (GPL license) but our commercial product was not open source. We didn't pretend that it was; it was proprietary from the start and people went in knowing that.

[phpnotasp]

Valkey became an official Linux Foundation project as the OSS fork of Redis. It maintains the original BSD license and has support from many well-known OSS-friendly companies.

[sirdeboben]

You can't go back once you're open source!

[Technopath]

To the multi-billion dollar corpos, you're freeloading off contributors, so calling people who use your stuff is hypocritical. If you want people to contribute, you need to contribute back, it's that simple.

[bumblingwelshman]

I work for a large global MSP which unfortunatly (much to my distaste) uses alot of open source products but dont give back to the projects, a few of us within the company are about to put a plan together to try and get the higher ups to either joine the linux foundation or create a team that's dedicated to giving back. I try to give back where I can mainly in issue creation (I'm more of the Ops in DevOPs at the moment). It frustrates me and I can see in large meetings in the office when open source products are mentioned alot of eyes dart to me cause they know the record is about to play again but it is starting to work and hopefully will have good news on that soon.

[gorangagrawal]

The way corporates and media are using "Open-Source" term makes me afraid, that one day it too will have negative sentiment similar to term "Hacking".

[Tommy-the-coffee-addict]

Id rather a company rug-pull an open source project that can be forked, rather than see a bad decision ruin the software forever. Better there be a clean break than constant abuse.