this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
70 points (94.9% liked)
Open Source
31128 readers
379 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Open source software doesn't generally have a company behind it that you can obtain support from via a contract. Some do, but a small, but dedicated library that your entire company relies on? Probably not.
Additionally, there's some perception that paying for software results in a better product than paying zero, which is an intuition from the adage "you pay for what you get". Programmers and users of open source software generally believe the opposite, but executives and middle managers are in a completely different headspace from the workers that produce and use these products.
There is one aspect of that which is true: If upstream breaks your product, you have to figure it out. You can't (or at least shouldn't) just yell at some company upstream and hope they unbreak things. So, the support costs become the company's costs, and who knows how much those costs actually are if you aren't ready to track such thing?
False, many open source projects have companies behind them that provide enterprise hosting amd support. MongoDB, Android, Chromium, Hashicorp, GraphQL, Kubernetes and many many more.
I think that the above companies/projects speak for themselves on this point.
A lot of the time, if companies are to rely on upstream code, they contribute to the upstream. None of the companies that I have ever worked for do major upgrades before stable candidates are out. My company presently doesn't move to a new release until SemVer x.2 (at a minimum, unless there is a critical vulerability that has been patched).
Take a survey of all open source projects. Then find the proportion that have a company behind them trying to sell an enterprise solution. To make this easier, only look on something like the npm repository.
You'll find "generally" is accurate.