Because of anti-customer features. Hard to implement those in a FOSS project, without a fork undermining you.
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Not only anti-customer features. Any kind of product monetarisation becomes much harder in a FOSS project.
Say, you built this cool piece of software/hardware/product.
You can either keep it closed source and sell it. Anyone who wants to clone it, needs to put in a similar amount of R&D to what you did. If you have patents, you can even stop them from copying your stuff all together.
Or you can open source it. That means, you need to spend more money to get your product open source ready. The design files need to be good enough that someone other than you can use them. You need a good documentation, so that others can actually replicate your work. All that is not cheap. And then someone else will come along and copy your stuff. Since they have no R&D attached to it, they can easily sell the product cheaper than you did (or even give it away for free, see e.g. CentOS).
If they are super anal about that, they even add your Github page as the place to put feature requests/bug reports. Happened e.g. to a game console cartreader project where I contributed.
Do the math: Which option gives you better return on investment?
Tbh pirating closed source software is as easy, as installing forked code. Maybe you could add a non-competition clause to a new open source license, so that the original FOSS software company has the legal high ground over anyone that undersells them.
It doesn't matter how hard pirating closed source is. It's illegal and thus no major company will do it. While a lot of companies will take FOSS and sell it in their product.
For example, my car's media display runs on Linux. They just took some light-weight Linux distro, slapped the FOSS disclaimer in the "about" section of the UI and be done with it.
They would have certainly not pirated Windows to do the same thing, because as soon as anyone found out, they'd be in serious legal trouble.
For the non-competition clause, that would probably not really work. So the approach many projects take in a situation like this is a non-commercial clause, but then again why even open source if you do non-commercial?
I mean the source code of Windows got leaked multiple times, but the teams working on Wine and ReactOS would still rather continue to reverse engineer the Windows APIs and never touch Microsoft's code, in order to avoid violating Microsoft's copyright. Most FOSS licenses are made to be easily (ab)used.
Linux especially does not want to adopt newer more "hardcore" versions of GPL, in order to keep professional Linux widely used everywhere. We now live in a situation where huge for-profit companies are actually among the biggest contributors of Linux (both money-wise and code-wise).
I do think you could run profitable businesses through selling open source software. Most open source licenses are just not made with this in mind. I don't see any reason why a non-competition clause would work worse than a non-commercial one.
Well you could, but then it wouldn't be open source anymore. You could still call it 'public source' though. The threat of competing forks is one important mechanism keeping FOSS projects on the straight and narrow, imo.
If they are super anal about that, they even add your Github page as the place to put feature requests/bug reports. Happened e.g. to a game console cartreader project where I contributed.
I see this happen a lot. Another in the same vein, Shattered Pixel Dungeon which is a popular rogue-like mainly for mobile (but has a PC version as well) got flagged for a security issue on F-Droid. The sole developer doesn't upload to the F-Droid store, but always gets flooded with tickets every time something like this happens for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
Maintaining FOSS is actually expensive, costs tons of man hours, you give up control and FOSS advocates can be rather demanding. It's only really cheap for the users. I'm pro-FOSS but lets not deny the inherent difficulties of running a FOSS project.
Totally. I am really happy whenever a FOSS project crosses my path, and I try to give back with contributions. But, no illusions here, FOSS is super difficult and FOSS devs earn hardly any to no money at all for their work.
That's why I personally only FOSS on hobby projects where I don't expect to see a cent from them.
It's not always easy to combine the different requirements for those companies.
Some companies have trackers/advertising in their software. In that case, puting them open source would mean that everyone would see the code and be unhappy about the adverts.
Another issue is pirating. Open sourcing the code could maybe allow easier pirating, either by removing the trackers/adverts or by just not buying the software.
Managers can also not know, or not care about open source.
Another issue is that open sourcing it in a way where someone can modify it, may create issues with some people trying to redistribute the software, even if the licence doesn't allow that, which would create more legal work for those companies.
Understandable
It is easier to exploit users when it is closed soutce that's why
Businesses have a core mission. If you open a piece of software then you would need to have someone to support it internal to the company, it increases company liability, it increases distraction, and to justify all of those downsides it would have to have a clear upside.
The other problem is that companies are short term. Even if you could demonstrate all of the above, this could not be sustained for very long. Priorities would change and personnel would be reassigned or move on. Keep in mind head count costs are very high for companies. Moreover often head count is harder to get and maintain then the $ it represents to the company. By this I mean you might think head count is just $ on a project, but generally in terms of getting resources head count and $ are totally separate things.
I was going to respond, but you said it so much better than I could have.
The tension between liability and control is real.
Yes there is the control end too. To develop software internally in a company you have to show there it gives you a proprietary advantage that other companies do not have and cannot buy. So that leads one down the confidentiality path. Every stupid thing then gets justified based on confidential and proprietary even if it is a stupid argument (not saying it is always a stupid argument). Imagine then saying let's open the software. Might even be the correct thing to do but then you'd have to admit your proprietary arguments were BS.
Then even if you did that, you would have to do a deep code audit to remove anything that could potentially be an issue. Then you'd have to run that all through legal and up the flag pole to executive level. Then they would ask, why are we doing this. You had better have a good answer.
To add to another comment, my company is not really afraid of it, but the amount of overhead needed to contribute to OSS projects is very high here. Basically, we have to ensure that we are releasing clean, well documented code, with proper contribution guides, that a person here can “own” with updates. Any code beyond bug fixes we push would have to be approved beyond our normal code review process. We don’t want to have our Junior Intern Dev start pushing code publicly that makes our code look bad…. Or our senior devs hah.
Finally, GPL makes things tricky for us, as we take the license seriously. We tend to release code in a more permissive license for that reason, and actively try to use MIT/BSD for that purpose. So we have to be careful, and it is much much easier to just not release code into the wild.
Oh and for new projects, we have to justify why we should make them publicly OSS - will it actually benefit the community in some way?
I don’t get why big companys are afraid of open source software.
Some definitely have a legitimate fear - incorrectly linking their closed source app with a GPL 3 project can put them in a place where they need to disclose their source to an end user. Some people refer to GPL as "poisonous" for this reason.
The RHEL issue one is definitely an interesting beast, though. It will either improve their sales or piss off enough people in the community into not maintaining RHEL support and telling their large customers that RH/IBM are no longer trustworthy. This could be Oracle's time to actually give something back to the community and shepherd a new 'open' enterprise standard distribution, but given their track history....
Redhat grew at a nice, sustainable pace through open source software for many years. A few years ago they were purchased by IBM who now wants to see fast, less sustainable growth so they can make some money from their investment. The fastest way to do that is to force some of their open source users into paying.
Good luck capitalizing a non permissive licensed software.
Its actually simple they can't do it. They are only interested in the €€€
Didn't we move past "everything should be OSS!" Like 15 years ago?
I'll just leave here the response from obsidian. If you can extract truthful reason from this corp double speak, please share
Because our political class sold its backbone, tongue, and soul for a fake and hollow silver trinket. Despite all the developments, business has remained the same over the millennia. Sell, sell more, keep selling more is pretty much all there is to business. Add the self inflicted legal obligation of having to deliver profits to the shareholders.
The above three came together, and RedHat caved in. Off handed, I could think of an alternate model they could have built, alongside the per copy subscription model. Charge per XYZ number of support tickets or queries. This way, if their claim that Oracle and other freeloaders are merely rebranding RedHat's work is even half true, the queries would have eventually found their way back to RedHat. At this point, RedHat sales could have begged those querying only customers to subscribe, even if at a discount.
If I, having never worked on sales or business side, can come up with the model above, professionals steeped in business should be able to come up with more. Instead, RedHat chose to wade further into the grey area towards the illegal territory, in the hopes that no one would dare suing.
Business is merely refusing to work with a new item which in this case happens to be open source. Right to repair movement exists for similar reasons. Business has become our impediment. Taming their sizes would have been possible had our political class did not sell itself for dime a dozen.
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