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Ask Slashdot: Can SaaS Be Both Open Source and Economically Viable? 49

Posted by timothy from the no-that-is-impossible dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The CTO behind Lucidchart, an online diagramming app, recently cited the open source rbush project as an invaluable tool for helping implement an "in-memory spatial index" that "increased spatial search performance by a factor of over 1,000 for large documents." My question is this: what risks does a SaaS company like Lucidchart face in making most of their own code public, like Google's recent move with Chrome for Android, and what benefits might be gained by doing so? Wouldn't sharing the code just generate more users and interest? Even if competitors did copy it, they'd always be a step behind the latest developments.
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Ask Slashdot: Can SaaS Be Both Open Source and Economically Viable? More

Ask Slashdot: Can SaaS Be Both Open Source and Economically Viable?

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  • Capitalism is not viable. Workers revolution is our only hope. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat can open the door to the communist future. Otherwise we are condemned to barbarism by the death agony of capitalism.

  • The GNU Affero General Public License version 3 [gnu.org] was designed to preserve user freedom and flexibility [gnu.org] even when software runs on a leased server. It ensures that users can obtain and improve the software that they are using even when they are currently running it on someone else's computer [gnu.org]. That way, if a particular service goes out of business, its customers can spin up an instance on their own servers with little interruption.

  • If you open your source, and leverage the community so they feel they have a voice, it can lead to better code, and wide adoption. If you lock down submissions so you can have a paid tier, then welcome to fork town.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      If you lock down submissions so you can have a paid tier, then welcome to fork town.

      Seems that MySQL did quite well even while obtaining ownership of most submissions so they could have their paid tier help fund further development. The forking didn't really start until Oracle purchased the software, and that was over a decade after open source developers had been contributing the a project with the type of license you seem to think can't work in the open source community.

      • And now that mariadb is a fork of mysql, monty can't close any part of the DB. Of course, no one should be using mysql or mariadb as they are horrible pieces of shit.

  • Software has zero intrinsic value. It doesn't generate a single cent (unless you've written a BitCoin miner, I guess).

    Customers, on the other hand, can generate lots of value if they use your software. Customers and the potential for more customers are usually the reason small software firms get acquired for Rockefeller money by the Google's and IBM's of the world (the other reasons are usually acquiring patents or the talent of the development team itself.) The software itself is rarely the target.

    Open

    • Even if someone got a copy of their code and decided to try their own business, are you going to trust them over the original creators when it comes to your job security?

      MariaDB is a fork of Oracle's MySQL. I guess people are trusting MariaDB in part because Oracle has done an excrement job of security, especially with its Java virtual machine. (Excrement is the opposite of excellent.)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Excrement is not the opposite of excellent no matter how much you want it to be and using it as such just sounds puerile.

      • As someone who owns a web hosting business, and recently migrated all of their servers from MySQL to MariaDB. It was the easiest transition we've ever performed. On our cPanel boxes it was done in just a couple of clicks.

        MariaDB really is a drop in replacement for MySQL. They have done an awesome job ensuring its a dead simple upgrade.

        We are currently looking into upgrading our DNS network. We are toying with MariaDB Galera, and PowerDNS. Our initial testing has been very positive.

    • Software has zero intrinsic value. It doesn't generate a single cent (unless you've written a BitCoin miner, I guess).

      Video games generate 20+ billion a year and downloadable ones are comprised entirely of software.

  • It depends on the code (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Saturday May 23, 2015 @02:04PM (#49759571) Homepage

    Google's Chrome would be a good example. Google's business is not selling browsers. Their business is selling advertising. Many of the services they offer to attract eyeballs (and data) for their business require a good browser. So they don't lose any revenue by giving their browser away and letting other people build browsers based on the code, in fact the more modern browsers out there that're all compatible the better for Google. In that situation it makes sense to open-source their Chrome code. For any business, if the code's utility code that's necessary for the business but not a significant part of the parts that separate your offering from everyone else's it'd make sense to open-source it. You don't lose anything, you gain brownie points, and you may be able to use the bug fixes and enhancements others make without having to spend your own resources on them.

    You don't, however, see Google open-sourcing the details of their analytics algorithms, or the exact code that drives PageRank, or the other things that set them apart from other search engines. Those things they need to keep secret because if they got out Google would lose a competitive advantage. Open-sourcing code like that would cost a business revenue, so it shouldn't be open-sourced.

    • Google's Chrome would be a good example. Google's business is not selling browsers. ... they don't lose any revenue by giving their browser away

      There was a time when browsers were sold on store shelves where I worked; namely Netscape. Today we live in a world where people are accustomed to getting them for free. This is not necessarily better as one can see trying to use Chrome without sending private information to Google.

      • It's not that big a deal to set Chrome up to not send data to Google. A couple of minutes on the settings page does the trick. Of course if you go ahead and use Google for search or the like then all the tweaking in the world won't keep Google from getting your requests...

  • Sell the Sevice (Score:3)

    by davydagger ( 2566757 ) on Saturday May 23, 2015 @02:09PM (#49759587)

    Its simple, you use somthing like the Affero license so no one can make changes that you can't access. Since anyone can try, whatever good ideas other people have you can re-incorporate, so you can potentially have a far bigger unpaid developer base. If your product is known to attract hacker types as customers, they can act as force multipliers, easily. As compared to a closed program, you'll have more eyes on the code. Its also your code, and you know it better than anyone else.

    Then you simply focus on having the best quality of service. You can copy software, you can't copy quality of service.

    Combine these two, its not as easy as you think to compete against someone else with their own software.

    You also have your brand name and reputation. which is built on that quality of service. Despite the fact that CentOS is given away for free, people pay good money for RHEL subscriptions, and RH is an economicly viable company.

    The support is where the money is. The actual product is a loss leader.

  • Once the novelty of free and open source has worn off the only advantages I can see would be user goodwill and perhaps some modest community contributions. Disadvantages include enabling competitors, devaluing software production, and risk of community backlash should one change models or they disapprove of the license choice. My guess is such companies hope to overcome any competitors by executing well and retaining a first-mover position in the market. They are probably unaware of the macro effects of FO

    • My guess is such companies hope to overcome any competitors by executing well and retaining a first-mover position in the market.

      Well, yeah. Isn't this what any company is supposed to try to do?

  • They provide support and hosting both of which you can do yourself. Some schools host it themselves for legal data reasons and some do it if they are in a geo location that Instructure does not provide support in. They explicitly that their business model is providing better support than you or someone else can. SO far they are doing pretty well and because you can host your own copy it is much easier to both test and build integrations. It is also helpful when trying to debug something.

    • Ah, not quite. The version you can download from their git repo is NOT the same as what is running if you have a hosting contract with them. And of all of the schools I know of that use Canvas (I'm the Canvas admin for the college I work for) none of them are using a self-hosted version. Not even the schools that have the resources to do so (University of Florida, UCF, etc - and I know the admins there too).

  • Yah, let me write the code, install it, host it, attract customers, maybe charge for it, give away the source code, watch my market share erode, then try to pay for tech support, or try to add value added features or "in service" purchases. Sounds like fun! Or you could do all of the above and not give your source code away. Hmm.. let me think about that.

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