deleted by creator

Okay, here are a few thoughts:

• Companies like blame someone when things go wrong, if they chose open-source there’s isn’t someone to sue then;
• Buying proprietary stuff means you’re outsourcing the risks of such product;
• Corruption pushes for proprietary: they might be buying software that is made by someone that is close to the CTO, CEO or other decision marker in the company, an old friend, family or straight under the table corruption;
• Most non-tech companies use services from consulting companies in order to get their software developed / running. Consulting companies often fall under the last point that besides that they have have large incentives from companies like Microsoft to push their proprietary services. For eg. Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack. To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy;
• Microsoft provider a cohesive ecosystem of products that integrate really well with each other and usually don’t require much effort to get things going - open-source however, usually requires custom development and a ton of work to work out the “sharp angles” between multiple solutions that aren’t related and might not be easily compatible with each other;
• Open-source requires a level of expertise that more than half of the developers and IT professionals simply don’t have. This aspect reinforces the last point even more. Senior open-source experts are more expensive than simply buying proprietary solutions;
• If we consider the price of a senior open-source expert + software costs (usually free) the cost of open-source is considerable lower than the cost of cheap developers + proprietary solutions, however consider we are talking about companies. Companies will always prefer to hire more less expensive and less proficient people because that means they’re easier to replace and you’ll pay less taxes;
• Companies will prefer to hire services from other companies instead of employees thus making proprietary vendors more compelling. This happens because from an accounting / investors perspective employees are bad and subscriptions are cool (less taxes, no responsibilities etc);
• The companies who build proprietary solutions work really hard to get vendors to sell their software, they provide commissions, support and the promises that if anything goes wrong they’ll be there. This increases the number of proprietary-only vendors which reinforces everything above. If you’re starting to sell software or networking services there’s little incentive for you to go pure “open-source”. With less companies, less visibility, less professionals (and more expensive), less margins and less positive market image, less customers and lesser profits.

Unfortunately things are really poised and rigged against open-source solutions and anyone who tries to push for them. The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

expired

Because that’s not how professional software development works. You don’t actually get free programmers because most of the time your customers are not techy people.

E.g. if I develop some special software for dentists or whatever, and I open source it, all I get is that someone else builds the code and distributes it for free so I can’t easily sell it anymore.

The issue is there are a few ways of doing open source wrong.

The biggest way to do it wrong is to try to sell the open source product while giving the source away for free. Because that means, there will be someone else who just takes the source and copies it with no or only minor changes (e.g. replacing logos and names).

The copyists always have an huge competitive advantage, since they don’t have to pay for development. Especially for software, development makes up almost all of the cost, so that essentially means they can give away the product for almost free and still make a profit. Or they are open source spirited themselves and give it away completely for free, like CentOS.

Sure, Red Hat can actually develop features that customers are asking for, which CentOS can’t really do, since they can’t influence Red Hat’s roadmap, but considering that Red Hat is asking for $350 for a server license, a free-and-good-enough alternative seems to be the better option for many.

According to Wikipedia, CentOS is much more popular (or at least was in 2021) than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

So to do Open Source right, you need to make money from developing it. This is e.g. how the Linux kernel works. They don’t sell the kernel, but instead many companies fund kernel development either financially or through dedicating developers to that project. There are e.g. a lot of devs employed by Microsoft who are working on the Linux kernel.

This gives these companies the ability to prioritize what features/bugs should be worked on.

But this model doesn’t fit every product and thus not every product can be financially viably done in Open Source.

Microsoft is afraid of OSS because it would literally kill them if people knew just how much better it actually was. They admitted as much in the halloween documents.

They did a long campaign in the 90’s and 00’s of convincing businesses that OSS was illegal, too. And it worked pretty well.

Because they can make more money by walling the garden.

I work in open source one of my products is. The benefit of open source is apparent when we talk about core technology and standardization. It’s not very helpful when it comes to specific implementations or customization.

Open Source requires sponsors, sponsors need to build on something to create capital to pay the developers behind the open source. I.e. Blender is open source, because people use it to make 3d models that they sell or get paid to build. So companies that use these models to make products like games and movies, pay Blender so that they can continue making it better and give them support. Also individuals and companies can add stuff to it. But really that’s neglect able. Open source is a promise.

I’m not sure they are. I bet lots of them use Linux servers, Solr, several open source databases and so on. I think it’s mostly the small and medium companies who are afraid of missing support and stuff.

The big companies just don’t like selling open source to their customers. Or getting them too close to the concept of it.

Open source software doesn’t generally have a company behind it that you can obtain support from via a contract. Some do, but a small, but dedicated library that your entire company relies on? Probably not.

Additionally, there’s some perception that paying for software results in a better product than paying zero, which is an intuition from the adage “you pay for what you get”. Programmers and users of open source software generally believe the opposite, but executives and middle managers are in a completely different headspace from the workers that produce and use these products.

There is one aspect of that which is true: If upstream breaks your product, you have to figure it out. You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) just yell at some company upstream and hope they unbreak things. So, the support costs become the company’s costs, and who knows how much those costs actually are if you aren’t ready to track such thing?

Big companies make their money selling things that they exclusively have the ability to sell.

The whole concept of open source flies in the face of that mindset.

Nobody has mentioned one of the top purely technical reasons companies are reluctant to open source things: support.

I worked for a company that opened a UI design framework and people loved it, but the moment you have an outside audience, you can’t just make breaking changes or pivot the direction. You have to be sure your thing is completely stable before you open it up.

They felt they couldn’t move fast enough while supporting the open one, so they forked it and just maintained the public one so the private one could change faster.

There are costs to support. I’m not saying companies shouldn’t do it (Google does, all the time), bit smaller companies may not be able to afford it.

deleted by creator

I’m just here to marvel at how effective the corporate world has been at steering the conversation toward Open Source, and away from Free Software

Because it’s a lot of work to check that repos contain no confidential information, and to sync internal and external repos if there is a need for some internal-specific stuff. Especially when most software is very specific - e.g. I work in data pipelines for accounting and our logic is specific to our accounting processes.

I think some industries like video games should absolutely do it though, where the turn-around time on products is much faster. The main objection is that it just helps competition (and asset-swap scammers, etc.) but I think that’s missing the bigger picture of more tooling and assets helping to grow the industry and labour pool as a whole.