Bad Voltage Season 2 Episode 54 Has Been Released: Well Baffled

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and myself present Bad Voltage, in which we only get the bad bits of Neuromancer, apparently “stank” is a noun, and: [00:01:13] More and more companies are going for some sort of “open core” business model approach to software distribution: parts of the software are open and parts are closed, or there’s a licence which prohibits its use by cloud providers without paying, or you have to pay for the branded version. We take a look into the different approaches here, and what it means for open source in general and the direction of the industry [00:27:50] This past weekend has seen a bit of dancing about whether Ubuntu will drop 32-bit libraries from the archive, ending up with a statement from Canonical about it saying they aren’t going to (and Valve have responded saying that they’ll continue to support Steam on Ubuntu, although that was after we recorded the show) [00:44:17] Facebook have released a cryptocurrency, Libra. What’s the deal here? We have some thoughts, not surprisingly

Curious what LQ members think about the current trend in open source business models and Libra.



--jeremy

I'll start by saying, I'm no expert on "business models", and I'd never heard of "opencore" until seeing this thread and looking it up...

To talk about Red Hat, and as an example, there (as pointed out in the podcast) is a clear difference between RHEL and it's other offerings. Fedora for one is free, but it's also "bleeding-edge", whereas CentOS is basically RHEL, but you know you would have to support it yourself, and if you want paid support, then clearly you would go with RHEL itself. So I agree that's a clear line. I think as far as Red Hat is concerned; they've got a smart "business model" in the sense that; you are not really paying for the software itself, you're really paying for the support and to maybe a lesser extent, updates.

But with a true "opencore model" (from what I understand) it's basically an open-source project, that's open-source at it's "core", with some proprietary bits and pieces added on. I tend to agree based on both the little I do know, and what you guys said in the podcast that; it's the "expectations" that are critical if the "core project" is open-source and you want to build an open-source community around it. I think the Google Chrome web browser is probably not a bad example of this kind of model, in that there's the open-source version, and the Google Chrome version that has some proprietary bits and pieces added on. I think that's a good example of why the like's of Google are best placed to use an "opencore model", and Microsoft is more or less jumping onto the same/similar bandwagon. So I think while if it's done right it could work well for the big players; I don't think it would be easy for smaller players to be able to use that model and become the next Google.

As far as the industry is concerned; I think at least that "type" of model seems to be the way things are going, and will go in the future. But my question would be; who gets the most benefit? Is it the developers working for the "company", who's getting paid by that same "company"? Is it the "company" itself? Is it the open-source "community"? Or is it the industry? I don't think that's clear, and would depend on both the model and "company" concerned. Or at least it's not clear to me anyway.

To my way of thinking Red Hat's model is probably the best, and least "risky".