Hmm. Am I the only one who immediately jumps to the thought that any VC backed "open source" tool is just using open source as a cost of customer acquisition, and will soon find a way to pay-wall necessary features? The majority of the effort will be in the paid SaaS product, not the open source stuff.
Maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but that's not really the spirit of open source.
> Both Zai and I care a lot about FOSS — we also believe that open-source business models work, and that most proprietary devtools will slowly but surely be replaced by open-source alternatives. Our monetization strategy is very similar to Supabase — build in the open, and then charge for hosting and support. Also, we reject any investors that don't commit to the same beliefs.
YC does an 'open source panel' every batch where people come to hear from founders of successful open-source startups in order to learn the ropes. I've attended 4 of those by now (I think), so I have a sense of what gets said about this stuff from within the YC space at least.
I haven't heard anyone talk about ways to "pay-wall necessary features" or otherwise exploit users into paying. On the contrary, there's a lot of talk about how critical it is to be transparent and fair with your community. The consensus is that things tend to go well if you do that and badly if you don't.
The focus for these open-source companies is finding a natural way to carve out the free vs. paid parts of the space. By 'natural' I mean something that is a good fit for the domain and that both sides feel is fair. The free users know it's in their interest for the company to make money because that's how the whole thing is sustainable. People just need to feel that the paid product is one that it makes sense to charge for and that it's a fair exchange.
The most common way to do this is to open-source the product and offer a paid cloud offering. There are other approaches which I remember I found rather interesting, but unfortunately I forget the details because thanks to HN I never remember anything anymore!
But the main thing is no, not only are these founders not looking for ways to screw their open-source users, the seasoned ones are advising the junior ones to shy away from the slightest trace of that. The model by which an open-source company is making money needs to be as transparent and unimpeachable as possible.
One downside is that it's hard to get this right from the beginning, and changes can be messy. From what I've heard, the consensus is that if you keep a good relationship with your community at every step, and preserve transparency as an invariant, then it's at least possible to explain why a change is necessary and get through a messy phase that way.
While I do take your word very seriously and believe it’s 100% honest, it seems incongruent with most things I’ve seen and experienced over the last decade or so. There’s to me a very real crisis or at least dilemma for businesses that would love to do FOSS but can’t or won’t for unfortunate reasons.
Products are frequently over-complicated so self-hosting is difficult. There are often outright rug-pulls or dark patterns, keeping basic features behind their cloud offerings. The mega corps sometimes swoop in and take all the candy from the kids. Products are designed suboptimally, eg kubernetes native when they would be much better as a library. Then you have honest well meaning players who lose customers to self-hosting, because they need on-prem for security reasons, or simply because they want better debugging and logs.
Some varied examples off the top of my head include Docker, Hasura, Redis, Hashicorp, Benthos. My point here is combining small-medium sized businesses with a core FOSS product is full of perils, risk and unhealthy market dynamics. I’d assume the iceberg is also much bigger than these prolific projects, from companies that chose not to do FOSS in the first place.
You should evaluate the FOSS software features AS IS and ask if you're okay with the current feature set if all future features are behind an "enterprise" tier. If you are, and the hosting of the current version is manageable, then the product is good for both sides. I've often found running the numbers for paying the vendor for cloud vs amortizing devOps costs comes out in favor of the cloud version. I see this as a win-win for both the customer and the company.
I think COSS is great, it makes the code more secure and auditable and makes sure the developers get paid to fix security vulnerabilities. Volunteer OSS is great in theory but it sometimes leads to overworked developers being exploited by foreign intelligence services https://www.techrepublic.com/article/xz-backdoor-linux/. Supabase & Nextjs are part of the so called VC backed open source and they are great.
My opinion is that Supabase is one of the best models for OSS business we have seen. Do they get everything right? No, but they embody the spirit and adjust slot based on community feedback.
Vercel on the other hand, not so much. They’re closing the loop on multiple open source avenues and have been making features Vercel hosted only for awhile now. It’s getting harder and harder to properly and easily self-host Next.js for example.
> Am I the only one who immediately jumps to the thought that any VC backed "open source" tool is just using open source as a cost of customer acquisition
Same here. I’d rather them be transparent with the price and just undercut them. Last ‘open source’ YC project I reviewed almost felt like a hidden trap paywall. If they could cut my bill in half I’d switch, there is no reason Auth0 should charge so much. On the contrary another YC project just cut their competitor pricing and we are using them.
FYI it seems ChatGPT could have answered this for you.
> The book you're describing sounds like "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. In this near-future sci-fi novel, set in 2025, one of the subplots involves a project called the "Library Project," where the UCSD (University of California, San Diego) library decides to digitize its entire collection. The process is somewhat as you described: books are destructively scanned by being shredded into tiny pieces, which are then scanned and digitized, with the text being reconstructed from the scans. This process is a part of the broader themes of the book, which include the effects of technology on society and the concept of "wearable computing" and augmented reality. Vernor Vinge, a retired San Diego State University professor of mathematics, computer scientist, and Hugo Award-winning author, is well-known for his works in the science fiction genre, especially for exploring the concept of the technological singularity.
I'm not surprised ChatGPT can answer it - I'm not sure why, but _Rainbows End_ is one of the most commonly-asked about SF books like that. Everyone remembers the book-tornado doing shotgun sequencing, but they can never remember its name or anything else that happens. I guess that's the problem with having a technology whose mental image is so compelling but also mostly disconnected to the rest of the book. (I know I can't tell you much about the rest without rereading the WP entry.)
I'm definitely in that camp, I read it ~10 years ago, and honestly can't remember anything about it but the book scanning.
Similarly, a friend recently read Ghost Fleet and I decided to pick it up and read it. The first chapter seemed familiar, and every once in a while there were "scenes" that I absolutely remembered having read years prior, but I had no memory of the overall plot.
Rainbow's End, and Vernor Vinge in general, probably also fall in that category of referenced often, yet not actually read. Somebody actually reads the book, finds the one cool quote or example everybody likes, that idea gets repeated a huge amount, and most people don't actually read Rainbows End. Yet you hear about it so much tangentially, you feel like you have (or must have).
It wasn't able to for me, I put it into ChatGPT 4 before I posted this and it was pretty sure I was talking about Diamond Age, and then went on to floss me about how "literally shredding and scanning books isn't a part of the book, but it fits the vibe" (my summary of it's answer).
Aside: I remembered search history so I went over to make sure it was in Chat GPT and not Perplexity, but I've looked at both of those and can't seem to find a record of asking either one about shredding and scanning books. I could have sworn it was GPT 4. Now I wish I could find out. I did just ask Bard and it provided a list that included The Diamond Age, but did not include Rainbows End, though I'm quite sure that isn't where I looked before.
But yeah you're right for the most part. Turns out pretty much any database can be written in terms of transactions of KV pairs, which is what foundationdb gives you, so it means you can write your database query layer as a stateless, scalable service.
There have been attempts to write a SQL RDMS layer for it but it isn't maintained.
The Enabler team type is outward looking, evaluating and bringing new tech and concepts into the business and training other teams. They will collaborate with other teams often in order to help train and transfer knowledge.
This is different to platform teams which are meant to mostly build internal services which other teams use with self service, meaning they don't directly interact with members of the platform team (allowing both teams to operate independently). That said, platform teams may occasionally collaborate with steam aligned teams when building out new features or to better understand the problems the stream aligned teams are having.
Formally verified, bug free software exists. It just costs a LOT to produce, and typically isn't worth it, except for things like cryptographic libraries and life or death systems.
As the discipline has evolved, the high integrity tools are slowly being incorporated into typical languages and IDEs to generally improve quality cheaper. Compare C++ to rust for example, whole classes of bugs are impossible (or much harder to make) in rust.
Technology marches on and menial jobs get obsoleted. That’s just the way it is, even if you enjoy being a ropemaker, basket weaver, keypunch operator or, in this case, an illustrator.
You know that there's nothing stopping an open source project funded as a not for profit from doing the same thing right?
If something is hard, that's an argument for making a standard not for profit version of it, so it becomes a common good instead of platform rent seekers keeping out competition by saying it's "too hard".
Not the OP, and this isn't something I'm dramatically invested in, but...
Rent seeking would be designing a product for collecting rent (not a one time payment) for a product (e.g. SaS) that doesn't wear out or has separate maintenance costs. Like a house that is rented the value comes from the income stream and it likely is adjusted by something like inflation.
Not renting would be selling a product for a one time fee, perhaps even if there are many customers (you still get to play ticket pricing games like the airlines so different people pay different amounts at different times, but not as variable as rent). Making the product non-transferable blurs the rent line a bit. Also not rental is the maintenance or improvement on the product (or the house) since that is new work that is being done.
It used to be that only physical objects were rented and services were inherently work and required new effort/ingenuity to be solved each time. However, with the introduction of art reproduction (visual, audio, physical) and copyright/patent, as well as, non-perpetual licensing of software this is no longer the case. It's possible to hold a piece of intellectual property and collect perpetual rent with little or no future investment.
It does create a different incentive structure that can be quite customer hostile.
Rent seeking is trying to create a legal/regulatory structure that means you can farm people. E.g. coming to the UK from some countries you need to prove you can speak English. Assuming you can, and you need a waiver on the test, there is a sole organisation you can pay hundreds of pounds to to send them your degree certificate, and for them to say in some government UI "yes, this probably means they can speak English".
It's not just general and optional recurring payments.
Regulatory lock-in is certainly one method of guaranteeing rent. I'd argue copyrights and patents are as well. Microsoft and Google get accused of rent seeking because of their near monopolies, but I don't think most of their income is particularly based on regulation. You find other forms of lock-in can come from network effects in social media (Facebook), or B2B lock-in due to outsourcing of basic business operations (IBM, Oracle, Salesforce).
I think the accusations can be divided into several categories:
- actual rent-seeking (as you say, not really true for companies such as Microsoft and Google, except where you see e.g. government documents needing to be submitted in Word. But that's very likely incompetence on behalf of the bureaucracy rather than Microsoft)
- having a dominant market position due to having a very high quality product, or set of products that work together well
- a random grudge phrased as rent-seeking, because the Twitter user in question doesn't know what rent-seeking is, but has seen their friends accuse companies of it
I don't know what the proportions are, but I suspect the former is minimal to nonexistent for e.g. Google.
You mean a SAS? The monthly payment goes towards support, maintenance, and further development. Or you could rebuy essentially the same thing every couple years.
>Why do you think that collecting evidence from experiments leads to truth though?
I don't, but I find that it produces results that are instrumental, and I assume that the past behaves analogously to the future, and similar situations behave similarly because this has generally been true in my experience.
>Why should we undertake it?
I'm religious, so certain science is useful to me in accomplishing my goal of attaining heaven.
>These are questions of philosophy, no experiments can answer them.
My understanding for the reasoning behind this is that they don't want apps to have to ship the runtime stuff to avoid downloads and app sizes getting large.
That could be fixed by just shipping an updated shared library to all phones similar to how Google play services works on Android, but I guess they figure if you're updating anyway you might as well just update the whole OS.
Maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but that's not really the spirit of open source.