Open Source. Company.

These are two pretty distinct concepts, and the (traditional) motives for those two things don't merge terribly well.

Over and over we see the same story playing out. Companies need to make revenues to sustain the employees. Open Source makes "competing" with an existing company trivial, but with none of the invested costs. So the first mover, the program author, is always at a strategic disadvantage.

This is not an accident- it is baked into the very point of open source. There's a reason that very few people in the bazaar actually make decent money. There's a reason the cathedral has treasures.

My recommendation is this - decide if you want to make a company, or if you want to make Open Source. The number if places that have succeeded in both is vanishingly small.

Take operating systems as an example. Unless you have very specific needs, Linux is probably good enough. That's true across most of the industry. Most device manufacturers at this point default to using Linux. Why bother building your own OS when the commodity option does the job. It doesn't make any sense to want to compete with free and OSS. Apple and MS seem to continue to resist this notion but they are increasingly exceptions.

So, open source companies are a bit of a contradiction in terms. You invent something, and then immediately turn it into a cheap commodity by releasing it for free. And then you expect to get money for that. Investors get attracted by rapid growth. And giving something for free can produce some rapid growth.

So, they've repeated fallen into the trap of investing in what proved to be worthless commodities. Some outlasted their IPO at least, which makes for happy investors. But those quickly turn into niche products. Because they are at that point commodity software providers competing with perfectly good OSS ones.

Most new closed source database products out there only have a short while before their differentiating features are absorbed by open source ones. Twenty years ago there were lots of new database products. Most of those were OSS. Several of those then transitioned to closed source. But at this point postgresql does most of what used to make those products interesting. And if it doesn't, just wait five years.

The finance model for OSS is very simple. You need OSS to produce closed source software. It's not optional. You can't compete by doing everything in house. So, most OSS software projects are financed by those companies using them the most. Those projects don't fix themselves. So, there are a lot of companies spending money on the commodity stuff they've built their business on. For example, Oracle keeps on pooring money into Java. Even though it is open source. They make money from it elsewhere. Same with IBM. MS is a big OSS contributor. Google too. Every big software company out there. None of them are driven by idealistic motives. This is economically necessary for them to do.

1. Prusa is blaming the Bambulab OSS situation, but the reality is that they struggle a lot in innovation, recently. I'm a Prusa Mini and MK4 owner, so I'm kinda of a fan of them, but still... They had struggled to move raise the bar, happy enough to innovate very slowly, with their huge delays with the Prusa XL, and exploiting the fact that other companies were just doing terrible copies. Bambulab before anything else saw that from the POV of technology there was too much left on the table.

2. Prusa itself based its work for PrusaSlicer on an existing open source slicer (written by an Italian guy, btw). While they continue to release PrusaSlicer as a free software, as the license requires to do, what they did renaming the software "Prusa Slicer" is a form of ownership appropriation. PrusaSlicer is a great software that can be used with many non-Prusa printers, my point is just that different ethical perspectives may lead to different conclusions. One could argue that Bambulab created their own slicer instead of just contributing to PrusaSlicer because the naming and the setup of the project makes it hard to do so.

3. Bambulab is also being cloned. The fact that their hardware is not open source does not mean people can't copy the design. The general ideas that make Bambulab printers great can't be patented or copyrighted. See the Creality K1... it resembles Bambulab printers a lot.

4. After Bambulab showed the 3D printing community that it was possible to build better printers, the whole 3D printing landscape became immediately much, much better. They raised the bar. Maybe Prusa will struggle and even fail in the next years (that's my prediction: they will fail, but slowly, since the management is too lacking), but the 3D printing world will be overall much better. In just two years, the average 250$ FDM printer jumped from terrible to totally ok, and this is some kind of value that Bambulab provided, regardless of licensing.

5. One thing that is killing Prusa is in some way they don't use OSS software enough! The future is Klipper, but still they continue with their not-invented-here syndrome to develop their Marlin twist.

6. Finally: using open source does not make you ethically required to open source your stuff. Open source licenses have terms: you just need to follow those terms. If you open source stuff, you are great, but failing to do so does not make you terrible. Remember that in the 3D printing ecosystem there isn't any cloud-companies situation like in the SAAS scenario, where there is a monopoly that allows only a few to exploit OSS value.

(licenses in that family: BUSL, FSL, Common Clause)

Anyone has suggestions?

Are we totally out of touch? Let my explain myself, the idea that if the drivers/firmware were open source it will make the bet on some hardware safer sounds like this to me, "Someone could get it working and share the code in case the company goes out of business in a few years", emphasis on the someone part, here is the thing, the people capable of doing that is pretty small, I ask myself, for the time it would take to deal with that, I could earn more money in that time that I would save 'fixing' the drivers instead of just buying a new one from another brand or the second hand market.

I know people love the romantic idea of free software, open source, etc, I just want my shit to work well, which usually is open source stuff because in most cases it has a zero monetary cost and people use it, so it gets bug fixes from their own users that are trying to make their thing work. I'm equally happy when the software is propietary but works well, case in point the nvidia drivers, it just work well for my use case, the amd drivers are open, well, I can't use their gpus without ending with a headache every few days, doesn't matter if is open source or not, it needs to work well.

Back to my point, even for the power users, how many people will actually fix the drivers/firmware of some hardware they bought? We are in a position in life that is cheaper to just buy new hardware and use that time to learn new things that will pay more in the long term and I personally find we, the linux community are out of touch most of the time with what most people care about.

Also, I find amusing when people get the pikachu face when some big corporation uses OSS and makes profit off of it, isn't that the whole point of the OSS? When I use it on my pc I'm also making profit for myself, the corporations are just doing the same but at scale, and if your goal is to make profit, who wouldn't use all the tools available? They don't have to like OSS, don't have to share the values of the OSS, don't have to 'give back', but OSS allows anyone to use it, so why wouldn't they? Do you want to be a company that is 100% OSS? That's cool, just don't make the pikachu face when another company enters the market and use what have build and shared.

The FSL is interesting because it correctly assumes the existence of parasites, ie 'harmful free-riders'.

There are ofc too many projects doing what is in effect free R&D for larger entities... these free riders having zero interest in the health or longevity of open technical ecosystems, so game theory is the right lens, I think.

I'd be very interested to learn of any other proposed structures along the lines of the FSL: particularly if anyone here has opinions on/ direct experience with them!

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Earlier incarnation/s of this approach are mentioned on the FSL page.

Open Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model BUSL https://mariadb.com/bsl11/ FSL https://fsl.software/

Do you really think that Prusa going with non-free firmware is going to dissuade Bambu from undercutting them? The point isn't the firmware is free or non-free, hell, 3D printer firmware is rather easy to make. Prusa's was already GPL'd and there's no evidence that Bambu used it in their product, so making it non-free is pointless. The material issue is that Bambu is undercutting them on hardware costs. Now that Prusa is non-free, they have lost both the price, the hackability, and the moral advantage. It's an utterly braindead move. If Prusa were smart they would be looking for ways to reduce production costs to get down to similar price points, investing in usability improvements, and doubling down on the free software approach. Let's face it, Prusa got complacent and someone at their lunch.

You can monetize free software without breaking the social contract. I'm quite fine with your licensing approach with FSL, but it's not free software nor open source, and it does not align with the social contract, and that's all well and good so long as you can acknowledge that -- and live with the consequences, such as heavily disincentivizing third-party contributions. But you can make money with genuinely free software, social contract and everything, if you're smarter about it than barking up the VC tree and promising infinite growth and monopolization using a tool (open source) which is not suited for that purpose by design -- that was Sentry's mistake. Honestly, I'm glad that FSL is working out for you, but by no means does it justify some call to action to water down FOSS nor is it indicative of some fundamental problem with FOSS.

I would argue that was always inevitable, Prusas are laughably overpriced and it's not like they're open source in the sense that you can build your own. They took the RepRap idea and commercialized it with an insane markup, benefiting from open source much more than Bambu probably did. For the longest time their PrusaPrinters model hosting site only supported .gcode files for their printers which was just a large fuck you to anyone with any other printer. Hence why Thingiverse ran circles around them with a half broken site.

There is a lot more community value in providing hackable low cost hardware like Creality did with the Ender, becase then people that have time but not money can you know... buy it. And then develop open source software or make models for it with that time.

That's what most users care about. That it just works and it does that at an attractive price point.

The rest is ideology and politics, which is fine if it's what you are into, but most people won't care.

If you call yourself an "Open Source Company" and you are not an Open Source Company, then yeah, people will criticize you for it. No, that's not a sign that the world is evil to you or that Open Source does not work or anything else. It's just that you lied to people, and you're not getting applause for that. Deal with it.

Ultimately, all of these stories come down to this: There's a company that really would like to get the positive image of Open Source, but on the other hand, really would like to have a business model that's incompatible with Open Source. So they want both, they can't have that, then they try to have both, and then they complain that they can't have it.

In my personal encounters there are usually tons of confusion between FOSS, OSS and source available. My gut feel is that there's some degree of exploitation of the mix ups and most turn a blind eye to the underlying issues.

Firstly finding the point of leverage (was distribution, now is?)

Secondly looking at Game theory, the Tit for Tat approach is simple and consistently useful and well understood - so some ability to "hit back" is very useful. This of course depends on common legal frameworks which is part of the problem but ...

When you get started in open source, it's a great way for a small team to get the word out. Conversely, when starting as proprietary software or SaaS, you're looking at advertising, websites, sales calls and so forth. If an open source company is lucky enough to be successful, the next phase is having users and perhaps even funding. When the team grows and/or others put their own money or career into the company, they want an outcome. It becomes hard to ignore that there are thousands of people using the software and inevitably it becomes an exercise on how to claw back from the group of "free" users. There is also the fear that a big company will undercut the open source company by offering the software as part of a cloud service. This is my opinion on how we got here with confusing licensing changes.

Most don't have the means to accept little to no income from their work. But there shouldn't be a "fixed pot" mentality. In order to be a successful open source company, one has to see the "free" users as beneficial. Think of it as a big wide open world and that while some will never pay, if you add value in other ways on top of your open source offerings, there will be significant income opportunities. Could be consulting projects, hosted/cloud/SaaS versions or specialized components.

One should also look at operations. There will be a new wave of companies, especially in the AI space, that are lean and using automation to build great things with a very limited amount of resources. Perhaps they don't even need funding and can build a profitable company without it. In those cases, they won't have those internal pressures and hence likely to be more competitive. Something to watch in 2024.

Most consumers are price sensitive instead of closed/open source sensitive.

If Meka was cheaper, they would win.

I think the key point is that the FSL is necessary when profit is required. The GPL is a philosophy of social distribution more than a way to build a capitalist enterprise. Using GPL software ensures that software stays socially distributed instead of privately; but that can lead to issues for private profit.

A little bit helps the sand stick together. Too much and goodbye castle.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that trying to build a capitalist open source company is like trying to build an ant hill out of insecticide. FOSS software, at least in my eyes, is a tool to help achieve the ultimate goal of toppling capitalism. I love it when people try to make it compatible with capitalism, since it helps further the goal.

If you want to work at a truly open source company, it should probably be a non-profit foundation of some kind.

If you grow up programming, you are privileged: you are intelligent enough to create something complex, useful, and are probably competent enough to get a job whose starting salary is likely twice that of the average person. As an intelligent person, you may believe in a world run by logic and merit. The code either works or doesn't, has bugs or doesn't, looks clean or doesn't. You write good code, you get paid lots of money.

On top of all this, as you write code, you learn that there is a collection of people on the internet who have certain values and principles, and that you are actually using their work, for free, basically out of nothing but good will. This is inspirational, so you decide you will dedicate your life to the same. However, making something for free and giving it away means you can't pay for Mountain Dew. So you decide to make a company, so you can make and give away the code, and still make money.

There's a problem, though. So far you are still thinking like a privileged programmer. But [capitalist] business requires a different mindset. The values and principles of business are not those of the noble engineer. Business values profit, and its principles are based on solving a problem for a customer. But more than anything, business demands the will to compete, at any cost. This is dog-eat-dog. There's no room for generosity, unless you're already winning, and the generosity is ensuring you'll keep winning.

An "Open Source Company" is, by definition, nonsense. It's trying to combine two completely ideologically separate things, having both cakes, and eating them too. Sure, you can have a business that also makes open source. But your business can't be dependent on that open source to make a profit. If it does, then eventually you will have to come out from your shelter and get wet, or you will lose the business, and possibly the code too.

Most of the people in the world don't care about the values and principles of open source. They care about solving the many problems they have every day, so they can feed and shelter their families and still have some leisure time. Most people don't care about your software license. They just want to use a product that makes their life easier. And that's what a business is supposed to do. Open Source is a distraction from that aim. If you really want to solve someone's problem, do that first. Later, once you are very rich and successful, and have many different aspects of the business that generate profit, then you can release your code for free, without it becoming a distraction.

The people who value open source code may not like that your code is closed. But they will respect your honesty, and a product that solves a problem well. And you get to make something you like making, and solve problems, and feed and shelter your family.

I can't think of anything that is less commodity like than software. Commodities are raw materials than can be easily substituted. For example Ukraine is invaded so we all switch to American grain. Try switching SQL Server for mysql or changing your Python code base to Ruby. Software is sticky.

Exactly. A 71-line python script https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/commit/3c2e87573d3bd16f6... was groundbreaking when it came out and the fact that it springboarded into a startup is commendable. But 15 years later and Functional Software Inc. d/b/a Sentry has to support 100+ (according to their marketing material) platforms as well as adding new verticals in UX session replay, web performance, backend profiling, CORS error monitoring, code coverage etc. just to keep the growth machine going. That's not OSS' fault.

I din't think resisting is the correct word: Linux could be perfect from the user perspective but not the device one: battery handling in a notebook, good support of certain devices, etc. Linux does not replace the whole needs of users or organizations and that is why MS and Apple continue to exist. They existed before Linux either! The business is not the OS.

That's another side of open source: if you don't rely on it to make a living (though it did help in getting my first job as a developer!), there's that pure joy in seeing your software get picked up and used by others. This little discovery made my day.

Prusa is a standard bearer of the open source 3D printing community and has done a lot of things right and has a lot of goodwill. But they required a competitor to shake things up. Prusa appeared to not be very good at incorporating community contributions, but I haven't really investigated that in-depth, so I may be wrong. In any case, I hope Prusa step up their game in competing and do not fail. They are an example of an open hardware company that shows that Free and open source and commercial activities are not inherently incompatible.

Nonetheless, I bought Bambu Lab's X1C and AMS combo for my business, because I can't really afford to wait on Prusa to deliver their MK4 MMU3 kit. I still purchased two MMU3 kits from them. The irony is that the Bambu Lab printer failed to work out of the box and hadn't worked out a solution thus far, but that's just my individual experience and partly my personal failing.

In the future, I hope my business becomes successful so that I can fund true free software and open source projects so that more of what I used for my business are open source. I don't really want to use a Bambu Lab product any more than I have to. I'll readily jump on open hardware solutions that meet my business requirements.

Bambu Lab may deliver a better product, but at what cost? Always be mindful that these companies are not our friends, especially business that are more transactional. They don't necessary care about the ecosystem at large. If they can get a monopoly, they will.

If you're an open hardware company, be hungry. Don't rest on your laurel. The open source community can only take you so far if you have an inferior product. Not everybody cares about you being open source.

Now, you will hopefully have a lot of community goodwill from being open source. They're your biggest fans and often your biggest customer. If you are open source without being an open source company, you're not really taking advantage of the resources available.

We should fight hard against patents and anything that might threaten democratic 3D printing and manufacturing. Support companies that support the OSS spirit embodied by RepRap. Tell people why this is important.

Let us not forget that the 3D printing business and hobby got started by the expiration of patents and the work of RepRap, the original gangster 3D printer.

If you cannot answer this question for yourself you definitely should not start or participate in an open source project. Is there someone saying you should? GP isn’t.

That doesn’t mean you should agree with him, but when he says “ those crying how horrible Open Source is simply should not gone with Open Source to begin with” it does have a different meaning if you know where he comes from.

Not all software is easily monetized or particularly valuable. The value of standardizing on an interface and outsourcing the maintenance and security to others provides more value than the software itself.

That is the point of Open Source, but it is not the point of Free Software. Specifically -- and I know this was addressed in the article -- this is why AGPL should be what programmers are using. It doesn't discriminate, but it does make sure that any entities that use Free Software contribute back to the commons.

This bears repeating again and again; this is why copyleft exists.

> The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term.

Source: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Assuming you meant Linux kernel specifically, I think you are out of touch how "the linux community" works. Absolute majority of participants are paid by corporations and do what their managers tell them to do. Nobody is just looking to randomly (and for free) improve things average Windows normie would care about.

How on earth is anyone supposed to compete with near slave labor in China?

I don’t have an opinion on that. I know that Prusa is clearly keeping some firmware closed (for now?) that they previously developed in the open. They also talk about their disadvantages of being open. Does it change the undercutting? Probably not, but I don’t believe that many more Open Source players will enter the race now.

> But you can make money with genuinely free software, social contract and everything, if you're smarter about it than barking up the VC tree and promising infinite growth and monopolization using a tool (open source) which is not suited for that purpose by design -- that was Sentry's mistake.

Our funding did not motivate the license change. I can say this with clean conscience. I understand that I have biases here but I also do not want Open Source to turn into something that is exclusively for plumbing.

I don’t want Sentry to be my last adventure and I also don’t want to give up on Open Source. But I don’t know a better way either. When I start something new I’m not sure I’m any more the wiser when it comes to balancing Open Source and commercial interests.

Income is mostly from support and consulting. These two things still pretty much rely on the actively developed product, so a big part of the company is dedicated to this. I'd say we are both a software and service company. I believe this is one nice way of developing open source software.

No insult taken :-)