author:tison
Open source software doesn’t come out of nowhere, and developing open source software is hard work. Behind each open source software, there is at least the input of the original author, and the joint efforts of the open source community composed of thousands of people. However, the source code of open source software is always freely available, and open source software agreements always do not restrict the user’s form of use.
Users who complete work and even build profitable businesses based on open source software are not always those involved in software development.““Hitchhiking” behavior is always referred to in the country as“White prostitution”, so that the latter is called a hot word in the circle. Then, does it exist in the open source world?“prostitution”, in the eyes of different characters“What exactly is free-rider behavior? This article will discuss it a little bit.
01 users“free-rider behavior
From an economic point of view, “free-rider” behavior means taking advantage of others at no cost. Since the ethos of the open source movement includes making the source code of open source software freely available and not restricting anyone from using it for any purpose, we can say that “free-riding” is widespread in the open source world. .
In fact, when we compile a C program, it is likely that we are relying on free software GCC or open source software ClangAs a compiler that implements compilation. Most programmers have never been directly involved in the development of these two compilers, so anyone who has done so can be considered a “free rider” for the two software.
However, the foundation of the free software movement is Richard M. Stallman’s pursuit of software freedom, that is, he believes that software development should be like academic research, the results of which are open and transparent and allow others to interpret.In the open source movement, the aforementioned “source code for open source software is freely available and does not restrict anyone from using it for any purpose” isopen source definitionpart of and a veteran member of the Apache Foundation Ted Dunning in documentaries Trillions and Trillions ServedIt was also mentioned that when he stopped worrying about other people’s use of the software to make money, but completely authorized the use of the open source software developed by himself using the open source software agreement, the vitality of the software and the feedback and reputation rewards he received instead increased.
That is to say, users who purely use open source software will not chooseWar as a developer in the spirit of free software or open source.soThe “free-rider” behavior ofWhen a developer chooses the corresponding open source software agreement, it is regarded as a corresponding commitment, which also means that the developer should be cautiousChoose an open source software license.
On the other hand, Wu Sheng, the author of Apache SkyWalking once said“What really hurts open source is the developers themselves“.Judging from the description in the original text, the responses I got from visiting several open-source software maintainers, and my own experience as an open-source software developer, when developers denounce users’ “free-riding” behavior as “white prostitutes”, they often Refers to a situation like this:
One is that developers, especially Chinese developers, believe that it is only right for software authors to help others, because you wrote the entire software, so when I ask you questions, you should answer them. If you don’t answer, you are considered to be putting on airs. Instead of considering that because the software author used his own time to provide the service, it should be appreciated.
In short, it is the use of open source software for free, but no respect for the great effort investedProducers who develop open source software take it for granted that these producers should provide all kinds of support.
On this topic, Wu Sheng and I are on Twitter #open source anecdoteThere are many examples given above.
Among them, I am most impressed by You Yuxi, the author of Vue.js, who pulled the black provocateur.case.This user thinks that a certain library of Vue.js is too difficult to understand in TypeScript, so he complains that the author should not take care of pure JavaScript users (in other words, especially“I”) mood? You Yuxi’s reply can be called a template, and it also clearly explains the nature of this behavior in the eyes of the defenders. Here’s a simple translation quote:
Hey, no one is forcing you to use this library, and you don’t need to pay to use it. As a user, you should at least engage in constructive communication in a respectful manner, but you don’t.The complex types in the source code are meant to be useful for everyday use.For better hints, this is an obvious trade-off.You take your own frustrations with TypeScript out on the library author who is producing for freeOpen source software and try to help you. You are a typical open-source software “free rider”, please get out of your way and never use this library again.
PS you have been blocked by all vue.The project under the js organization is permanently blocked, please don’t try to reply again. In fact, I believe you can stop using open source software and write everything from scratch, it will be better for you!
This template was quickly reused by some other maintainers of open source software (laughs).Of course, the library itself is still open source software, and the blocked person can still download it for freeto the source code. But from this case, we can see that the “white prostitution” behavior that open source software authors are most disgusted with is this kind of legitimate request.
Wu Sheng also encountered many such cases in the course of running the SkyWalking project for many years.
- common open source userswrong idea: Bring the company’s needs and customized needs to the community, and expect the community to spend human time to solve it.
- questioner here, which typically confuses open-source development with closed-source in-house functional development. He asked an open source community developer for scenarios he would not encounter.
- would rather wait a weekask a question repeatedly, and do not want to put the keyword in the official website search box and press Enter.
I’ve also seen several typical cases on the mailing list.
One is the software supply chain of a companyAuditors “request” ZooKeeper explained the positioning of its software and the risks of using different versions. This is to treat the ZooKeeper open source software community as a software provider that has signed some kind of contract with its own company.
The other is that on the Flink Chinese list, more than one user will always throw their own work problems to the mailing list like the case Wu Sheng saw above, and they will always agree.Anxiously waiting for someone else’s answer, once no response was received, he would complain rather angrily, “Is this question unanswered?!” Of course, throwing questions on the user list is the right of users of the software. But the Apache open source community emphasizes that every community member is a volunteer, and if someone helps you out of a sense of community responsibility, enthusiasm, or to answer questions and train yourself, it’s worth thanking. But you are the employee who is being paid to do the work, and no one else is obliged to answer questions from your own job. Maybe your boss is in a hurry, and you are in a hurry, but don’t worry, you can solve the problem with the help of the community.
Finally, I would like to advocateYes, if other members of the community help you, I personally want to hear thanks instead of “hard work”. Because when I don’t feel hard,Second, I don’t think it’s an obligation.I didn’t work hardDo what I do for you, and don’t think I’m doing it hard for you. Don’t be surprised if I reply “out of hours” or in the wee hours of your local time. Don’t use your level of commitment to it to speculate on why someone else would do it at this time in your local area. In many cases, he does not do it for you, but acts out of the aforementioned motives of community responsibility, enthusiasm, or answering questions and training himself. As for when others want to do things, you don’t need to make judgments, and you subjectively feel that others have “worked hard”.
02 Cloud Factorycommercial“hitchhikingfor
Another is often brought up for discussionThe “hitchhiker” line ofIt is an example of a cloud vendor using open source software to package it into a cloud service and sell it for profit.
Why does MongoDB Inc. say cloud vendors are hurting the MongoDB community, with Elastic, Cockroach Labs, and Airbyte close behind?
These four announcements, I am in“The Freemium Business Model”also mentioned.
I think the statement “free-riding by cloud vendors hurts companies that make open source software” is due to different motivations for open source.
These commercial companies that manufacture open source software first developed open source software because they saw the potential of open source software to spread in the technology circle. Starting from their thinking mode, if other companies want to replicate the same business value, they will inevitably be eliminated from the market because they cannot keep up with the R&D capabilities of the core team. Since the deployment and operation and maintenance of distributed systems are complex enough, as long as open source software can maintain the right to speak in the MySQL era, it is possible to win customers who lack maintenance of these distributed systems. In other words, the basic appeal of commercial companies is profit. When MongoDB Inc, Elastic, CockroachLabs and Airbyte choose open source full-stack technology, the business model they consider is freemium market strategy + maintenance costs caused by software complexity willingness to pay.
However, cloud vendors have powerful software deployment optimization capabilities on the cloud. Cloud vendors do not need to develop high-level software with generational differences in business competition with the above-mentioned commercial companies. As long as the packaging and deployment work on the cloud is completed, the internal network, storage and machine resources of the manufacturer are allocated, and the sales team all over the world is mobilized. The combined punch in the enterprise service market is enough to earn more than the original factory by directly using the above open source software. profit.
All of a sudden, the companies that make open source software don’t do it.
You haven’t heard Kubernetes authors accuse Alibaba Cloud of hurting their interests by selling Kubernetes distributions, nor have you heard of litigation experts Oracle cracking down on other JDK providers, and the maintainers of Linux, Spring, Netty, and many other open source projects don’t care about others How vendors package and sell solutions. Because the operation of these manufacturers does not conflict with their profit channels. However, companies in the MongoDB Inc. genre are based on the abacus of selling software services on a large scale to make profits, and the behavior of cloud vendors is a real conflict of interest.
On the other hand, although some open source software authors are angry that their efforts are not rewarded, the purpose of a large number of high-quality open source software development is to solve the author’s own problems or for reasons such as Because I can. These authors have different demands than starting a company to sell standardized software, and are happy to see cloud vendors use their technology to build their own product solutions. On the other hand, companies that manufacture open source software actually pay their employees to develop the software, and in order to return the cost and make a profit, they expect to sell the software and services to make money, and there is no other idea.The money that cloud manufacturers make under such a model, even if they leave some profit space for themselves, is something that these commercial companies who are dreaming of becoming a Microsoft-sized company cannot accept it.received.
As mentioned earlier, “the source code of open source software is freely available and does not restrict anyone from using it for any purpose” is part of the definition of open source. This means that the packaged sales of open source software by cloud vendors are within the scope of the open source license.Business companies that manufacture open-source software angrily denounce cloud vendors for “whoring” and “sucking blood” because they regard the open-source software they manufacture as proprietary software, and do not want to.Expect others to be able to compete commercially with them.
In this regard, even if Elastic can win the trademark lawsuit with AWS, within the scope of the open source agreement to protect intellectual property rights, AWS will be forced to rename its ElasticSearch service as Amazon OpenSearch Service. License to re-license their own products can be seen.
From the wording of ELv2, we can see that the main demand of these manufacturers is to prohibit commercial competition. ELv2 does not restrict commercial use without providing homogeneous services. For Elastic, if the user has the corresponding skills, or the user company has paid its engineers to operate and maintain ElasticSearch’s internal use, then it is not their own. target customers. This is also the choice of Airbyte and Starrocks. Cockroach Labs uses the Business Source License + Cockroach Community License to achieve the same effect.
The main disadvantage of this model is as stated by Eric S. Raymond in “The Magic Pot” in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”:
Closed terms often limit peer review participation.
From another point of view, when the open source software that organizes employees to participate in the development of, may be directly used by cloud vendors or other competitors, how should commercial companies understand and invest resources in the direction of open source?
We can categorize discussions from the relationship between the community and the company.
If it is a company-dependent relationship, that is, a company like MongoDB Inc. discussed above, employs employees to develop software, then as long as cloud vendors or other powerful competitors participate in business competition, re-licensing with ELv2 or BSL is basically a foregone conclusion. Perhaps the appearance of an open source license can only be maintained when the software developed by oneself is not yet prominent and competitors find there is no value in direct copying. GPL and AGPL can prompt downstream software authors to expect the entire community to work in a common context, but cannot resist commercial competition from cloud vendors that does not change one line only to enhance deployment implementation and sales teams.
If it is a community-dependent relationship, that is, the relationship between RedHat and Linux and Kubernetes, the open source community canTo survive and develop independently, then commercial companies should not have the experience of “whoring” or “blood-sucking” from other manufacturers, because they are also the beneficiaries of the powerful productivity of the community. Such companies need to understand the operation of the open source community that is closely related to their own business, and form their own business value by making distributions or package solutions.The code that forms the latter capability is proprietary, so there is no “free-rider” problem. For example, Tetrate.io makes Istio distribution and application network governance framework. Although it uses open source software such as Istio and Apache SkyWalking, it also has a lot of internal code. Alibaba and Tencent’s Kubernetes distributions have similar logic.
If it is an interdependent relationship, that is, the project is not owned by the company, but the community needs the company’s input and support, the project generated in this situation is often not produced for sale as a commodity at the beginning. For example, Apache DolphinScheduler is currently an important basic software on the technology map of Beluga open source company, but its startup phase is completed within Analysys. The same software also includes Apache Pulsar and Apache Doris, to name a few.
for any of these examplesThe company, because there is no “this is my software” obsession and softwareIn fact, almost 100% of it is the background of the company’s investment in development. In terms of operation, it can refer to the community-dependent approach. At the same time, it can strengthen the original brand, actively build community partnerships, and make it more difficult for other competitors to capture the positioning.
When companies choose the open source route technically, they should follow the nature of open source itself as a collective intelligence that crosses organizational boundaries and look for solutions that already exist. For example, in order to improve its DataOps pipeline, Beluga open source company did not choose to develop a data pipeline from scratch, but joined the original Waterdrop community to incubate the Apache SeaTunnel project. For example, some of the members who participated in the recent resurrection of the Apache Ambari project have backgrounds that hope to use Ambari in the company’s big data suite products. Join the open source collaborative environment from the very beginning, and there will be no setbacks and contradictions that are not rewarded after spending a lot of energy for the purpose of profit.
Of course, while it’s unrealistic to gamble a company’s entire revenue on a fully open source technology stack that sells, that doesn’t mean a business can’t develop an open source software from scratch.
The ready-to-use software mentioned above is developed as a basic support service within a commercial company. Since the company does not need to rely on them for profit, the open source collaboration promotes quality, ecological construction and reputation. Accumulate and other advantages, open source the code. This is actually part of the reasoning in The Cathedral and the Bazaar as to why it should be open source, and in these cases, open source doesn’t hurt the company’s interests.
In the end, the participants in the production of open source software are still specific engineers. Not everyone has to start a company, and not every company has to be as big as Microsoft.
You Yuxi, the author of Vue.js, once revealed that his income from donations and other means through Patreon exceeded his income in Meteor and Google in 2016. The exposure and donation habits of the front-end circle are worth learning. You can take a look at the Sponsor situation of several of them.
Among them, due to the heavy use of @squidfunk’s work Materials for Mkdocs as the website framework, I found that some key functions are only available in the Insider version, the author has implemented it well, and I have no time and energy to make the same good on the open source version. change, which prompted me to become a member of those 407 sponsors too.
Most of the original Apache members have formal jobs. The core members of Linux have been allocated a considerable amount of shares by taking advantage of the VALinux and Red Hat listings. The two core authors of Netty, Trustin Lee currently works at Databricks, and Norman Maurer currently works at Apple. Open source experience can be a solid foundation for your career. If you have a similar investment in the community like You Yuxi and actively maintain funding relationships, produce peripherals, or accept advertising, the reputation of open source can also provide you with additional income or even become a main income.
the existence of these examplesIt shows that “open source” and “cloud vendor” are not naturally antagonistic.In fact, the reality is that some commercial companies package and sell open source-based software on the cloudThe solutions are profitable, and cloud vendors compete with some of these profitable commercial companies. Open source itself is an inclusive concept. You don’t have to put yourself into the perspective of business owners and participate in their public criticism on the basis of many assumptions.
About the Author
tison, Apache Member & Incubator Mentor, StreamNative Community Manager
WeChat public account:“Book of Night Sky“
Follow open source communitydevelopment, dedicated to answering the question of “how to build an open source community”.
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