Is it wrong to make money with FOSS4G technology?
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| Number of Parts | 351 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/69176 (DOI) | |
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| Production Year | 2022 |
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00:00
HexagonTablet computerExponential functionExt functorDigital photographyComputer animation
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SoftwareComplex (psychology)Computer hardwarePoint cloudFreewareOpen sourceParity (mathematics)Term (mathematics)Point cloudSoftwareOnline helpVirtual machineOpen sourceMultiplication signEquivalence relationComputer animation
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Open sourcePoint (geometry)Enterprise architectureSoftwareLevel (video gaming)Commitment schemeSystem callBroadcast programmingOpen setDatabase transactionOpen sourceRule of inferenceElectronic mailing listMeta elementTwitterGeometryFacebookComputer animation
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Analytic setProgramming paradigmOpen sourceOpen setChief information officerOpen sourceSpeech synthesisSlide ruleComputer animation
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Open sourceService (economics)Variety (linguistics)Open setProduct (business)Enterprise architectureOnline helpImplementationComputer programmingDesign by contractAddress spaceSquare numberLattice (order)Scale (map)Total S.A.Server (computing)SoftwareExtension (kinesiology)Text editorComputing platformSoftware maintenanceComponent-based software engineeringComputer networkInformationMaxima and minimaUsabilitySpherical capRevision controlPoint cloudCore dumpSoftware developerStrategy gameCodeSource codeGUI widgetBuildingTwitterPoint (geometry)Meta elementCapillary actionDaylight saving timeGoogolAndroid (robot)Formal languageLevel (video gaming)Data managementSelf-organizationProjective planeOpen sourceComputer programmingStrategy gameBitConnectivity (graph theory)Pay televisionMultiplication signTerm (mathematics)Stack (abstract data type)Online helpCore dumpScaling (geometry)CASE <Informatik>InformationCharacteristic polynomialDatabaseFreewareService (economics)QuicksortStreaming mediaSoftwareInternet service providerCloud computingGoodness of fitFree productBusiness modelControl flowChaos (cosmogony)Open setMereologyCategory of beingEnterprise architectureMeta element1 (number)Text editorYouTubeSlide ruleDesign by contractOrder (biology)Product (business)Programming languageSoftware frameworkSimilarity (geometry)GeometryVirtual machineBuildingServer (computing)Android (robot)WebsiteSequelSource codeComputer animation
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Open sourceComponent-based software engineeringLevel (video gaming)Text editorOpen setMeta elementCore dumpGoogolDaylight saving timeProduct (business)Service (economics)Android (robot)Formal languageComputer programmingDigital photographySoftware frameworkVariety (linguistics)SoftwareTemplate (C++)BuildingComputer networkSoftware developerStandard deviationComplex (psychology)Set (mathematics)File formatMobile WebComputing platformServer (computing)FacebookInterface (computing)Library (computing)Scale (map)Point cloudData storage deviceMathematical analysisGroup actionQuery languageBit rateHybrid computerBusiness IntelligenceBlogMobile appNormal (geometry)Singuläres IntegralCodeSoftware frameworkCartesian coordinate systemMultiplication signMereologyProduct (business)WebsiteSoftwareAnalytic setSoftware developerService (economics)BitScaling (geometry)Computing platformNormal (geometry)Open sourceTwitterQuicksortBuildingFacebookVariety (linguistics)Set (mathematics)Visualization (computer graphics)Slide ruleBlogAndroid (robot)Point cloudUser interfaceWeb applicationFamilyLibrary (computing)Template (C++)1 (number)Different (Kate Ryan album)Goodness of fitWeb browserDataflowInheritance (object-oriented programming)Block (periodic table)Transformation (genetics)Open setStandard deviationCore dumpContext awarenessView (database)CodePay televisionTheory of relativityEvent horizonQuery languageTransmissionskoeffizientWeb 2.0FlowchartComputer animation
18:32
FreewareOpen sourceProduct (business)Different (Kate Ryan album)Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Hello? OK. We good? So expanding on this, even when something is free of charge, there can be long-term costs.
00:21
That's the free puppies. I have a free puppy that I got 13 years ago, spend lots of money on their food, take her to the vet last week. It was fairly expensive. We buy her equipment and all these other things. So what's the equivalent in the phosphor gene community?
00:41
Even if you get the software free, you need some kind of machine to run the software or a virtual machine in the cloud. You need your time to learn about it, get trained, install it. And sometimes that's not enough, and sometimes
01:01
frequently people pay money to have help in setting up their open source initiative or their tooling or bringing it into a new company. And open source has proven itself to be big business. This was kind of the mother of all open source transactions. In 2019, IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion.
01:23
There's clearly a lot of commerce going on in the ecosystem. And even if we look at something like a phosphor gene conference, there's a lot of investment being made. Every one of the people on the sponsor list here is paying money that they have to either promote
01:41
themselves or show their support for open communities. And it's interesting. There are some very large companies that have invested, Google, Meta, Facebook, Planet. But there's also an interesting trend where some of the smaller companies are making bigger investments. Our platinum-sponsored Geocat is a relatively small company,
02:00
same with GeoSolutions. But there's generally a win-win for both. The conference gets support to promote open source. The business gets exposure to let people know what's going on. And they show that they play by the rules. They're willing to invest back in these open communities.
02:22
Another trend that I saw just before COVID when there were in-person conferences is I went to a conference that had Jack Dangerman speaking. And lo and behold, out of nowhere comes this slide talking about how much they
02:41
support open source. OK, that was a surprise. And then I was at another conference where General Electric, a very large company, was having a conference for all their partners. And again, in the keynote speech, Embracing Open Source Technologies, why are these big companies going out of their way to say we do open source stuff?
03:01
It's because people want it. It's gotten out there. CIOs are aware of it. And being aligned with open source helps their business. And hopefully they're doing it earnestly and fairly, and not just as a marketing spiel. So how do people actually make money?
03:21
I'm going to just tell a couple of stories of how things play out in this ecosystem. The big one, why was Red Hat worth $34 billion? They provide services and support to the Linux community. They helped enterprises adopt and deploy. And when needed, they can add new features
03:41
that may not have been in the software at that time, sort of contract programming. And there are a lot of other companies out there that do this. CrunchyData does it for PostgreSQL. They're companies that are very supportive of QGIS and help organizations adopt these particular kinds
04:00
of technologies. And then there's another example. My friend Randy Hale, who runs a one person company in southeastern United States, Tennessee. And one of his customers is Henry County with 32 residents. And he helped them move from an expensive Esri setup
04:21
to a very efficient, modern, open stack, basically doing what Red Hat does, but at a very small scale, more personal scale. And so he replaced his commercial Esri stack with Linux, QGIS, Postgres, GeoServer, and added one paid subscription to Fulcrum, which
04:43
has an open source component. And the Esri stack costs something on the order of $34,000. And then his new stack costs $360. But it was not free. They hired him.
05:00
And for the $6,000, he helped them choose the right things, get the right machines, install it. And then he now has a long term service contract. So if anything breaks or anything needs upgrading, he takes care of it. The other very common model is basically leveraging and incorporating existing phosphor
05:21
G technology into a product. So you build something. There's a lot of your own intellectual property. But you're building a foundation or using a tool that's available in the open community. And Geocat, our platinum sponsor, is a good example of that. I was checking out their website. And I was like, oh, this will be a perfect example for my talk.
05:42
They've launched a new service called Geocat Live. And it's powered by FOSS infrastructure. Their customers just pay for a service. But they use FOSS tools under the hood to keep that service alive and running without their customers worrying about it. They also do enterprise editions of GeoServer
06:01
and GeoNetwork. And this sort of goes back, it's a little bit more like Red Hat, where they basically have provided professional support to keep GeoServer, GeoNetwork working for other organizations. And then there's this one, which is a little trickier to describe.
06:22
It's called open sourcing your own commercial technology. So you decide, we have something cool. We're gonna make it open source. Sometimes you just do it for love and passion. It's fun. You created something cool. Other times you're hoping this thing will go viral and you'll make money. And of course, if you do offer something at no cost,
06:43
it can get adoption and create attention. And maybe it attracts new contributors. And then there's this thing called the freemium model, which article from the information in ezine that I subscribe to. And they pretty much wire it. So I'm just gonna read it. Their approach usually is to develop features
07:02
they include in a basic free product with the goal of attracting enough users that some would start to pay for advanced features. Fair enough. And then you have the MongoDB freemium and open source example. MongoDB was introduced, I'm not exactly sure,
07:23
somewhere in the teens. They're now a $24 billion company as of last Friday when I was doing my slides. And the question is, how open is open? And there's a sort of interesting feud between Mongo and AWS, where AWS originally took Mongo's free thing
07:40
and started building a service that they were charging people to use on Amazon that was similar to what MongoDB was doing. And Mongo comes back and sort of says, we don't think it's reasonable for a cloud vendor to come and take free versions and monetize it and not give anything back. Okay, that sounds fair.
08:02
And then it gets more complicated. MongoDB freemium strategy worked really well. They started getting lots of customers. And there's this great article from Tech Republic and the CEO, Dev Acharya of MongoDB,
08:23
comes out and basically says that we open source as a freemium strategy to drive adoption. That is a marketing effort and they admit it. And other people commenting on this article sort of say, we really appreciate it. CAOs are thinking about this. He wins for not bullcrapping everybody.
08:41
He's playing about what their business model is. And one part of their business model and why they're upset at Amazon is Mongo controls the source code. Contributors are not welcome to the MongoDB open source project. All the core innovation comes from its own engineering team. And in fact, in spite of the previous slide,
09:01
Amazon has asked to contribute and they were rebuffed by Mongo. So it's big business, big money, it gets complicated. But one of the key things that we'll elaborate on a little more is there's this distinction in open sourcing things about whether you're open sourcing something that's core to your business
09:21
or open sourcing something that's complementary to your business. And in the case of MongoDB, it's a big NoSQL documents kind of database. That is their business. So it makes sense why they're holding it tightly. And you know, they had a good strategy with going freemium and getting that viral growth.
09:42
But there are all kinds of other examples of large companies open sourcing things that are non-core and that have other characteristics. So Google was sort of infamous for open sourcing tons of things. Android, Kubernetes, the Go programming language,
10:01
the Angular framework, et cetera, et cetera. And Meta is similar. New sponsor for Phosphor-G, which is great. And they have been highlighting how they've taken some open source projects like the Rapid ID Editor and certain components of Mapillary, the Open SFM and Mapillary JS
10:21
and are nurturing those projects and trying to get more quality and more contributors. But be clear, Meta and Google do not make their core technology open source. No one's open sourcing YouTube streaming. No one's open sourcing their search. But they are open sourcing things that are on the outside that are helpful to them,
10:44
helpful to their customers. They support and contribute to open initiatives to provide tooling that's useful. And contributors participate. It was interesting to check out. Yes, indeed, the public, not just Google,
11:01
participates and contributes in Android. And some of these efforts, they're big companies, they can afford it, they have lots of code, are encouraging adoption of these frameworks and are building goodwill with their end users. And they're creating sort of the best of open source, which is getting lots of people contributing and having this sort of pooled innovation.
11:23
More gets done if it's not just your own coders. So in summary, let me just start with this. Does that work? So just to summarize, there's three things. There's the Red Hat model,
11:40
value-added services to support open source technologies. There's leveraging and incorporating open source ingredients to create your own products that are powered by open source. And there's open sourcing your own commercial technology and figuring out if freemium works for you or helps your business in other ways.
12:05
So one of the things, as I was putting this slide deck together, that I think is a really important trend and where big pieces of open source are going is this notion of open frameworks. So what is an open framework? Founded a good posting on this. An open source framework
12:20
is a template for software development that is designed by a social network of software developers. These frameworks are free for public use and provide the foundation for building a software application. And of course, part of that social network can be employees of big software development companies. But the benefits are if you have a nice framework that's open and available and doesn't cost you anything,
12:41
it accelerates your time to development. It increases productivity because there's not reinventing the wheel. There's websites do the same thing in all different contexts, but you don't have to have your own same thing. Wide variety of framework tools and specialties across that, you have spatial frameworks,
13:03
user interface frameworks, et cetera. And it leads ultimately to improved software quality. You're not reinventing the wheel, you're making your own software as best as it can because a lot of the open source frameworks are working under the hood. So apologies, I'm not trying to pick sides
13:20
on any of these frameworks. They have dozens and dozens of frameworks, but there's some good examples here. Angular from Google is a platform for building mobile and desktop web apps. Node.js is a framework for server-based JavaScript and building scalable networks. React from Facebook is a JS library for building user interfaces.
13:41
And DecGL, which is a really interesting thing that I'm following, I'm going to all the DecGL framework talks that are available here, had a great one just earlier today, was a framework that was open source by Google. And it's basically a framework specifically designed for exploring visualizing data sets at scale. Big data being analyzed in 3D on browsers.
14:05
Really cool. And then there's the highly related thing, GeoJSON, which is not a framework, but it's a standard. It's a simple standard. People who created it wanted to remain a simple standard, and it's widely adopted. So these are all nice building blocks to get you started.
14:23
So why do big companies like Google or Facebook make these investments? Well, they can do it partly because it's not core to their business. They're not giving away their own family jewels. They're building tools that they recognize lots of people need.
14:41
And they're productivity tools that many benefit from. Interestingly, Google, which makes its own framework, is adopting the DecGL framework for some of their 3D visualization stuff. Carto is leveraging this. So again, it's a nice base that others can build with. And you also start building the community behind these frameworks so these frameworks survive
15:02
and continue to grow and improve. And it fosters, again, goodwill with various communities because good stuff is available at no cost. And so in my view, the future is hybrid where there's more and more open source stuff
15:20
that's out there, that's available, that's good, that's supported, sometimes by big companies or just sometimes by strong communities. And it sort of hit me. Literally, I was flying over here on Monday and I do a lot of work with Google and got this blog using GeoJSON and BigQuery for geospatial analytics.
15:41
And it sort of helped me understand that open source is kind of everywhere. This wasn't an open source blog. Somewhere in this blog, they have this flow chart. And it's just done matter of fact. It's not about open source. But all these red things happen to be open source.
16:02
QGIS for processing to get the data ready. GDAL for doing transformations. GeoJSON as the transmittal standard. And Kubernetes, which is the cloud orchestration software. And no one's thinking twice about this. It's just normal that open source sits side by side with all kinds of commercial tools.
16:23
It's just the new normal. And so earlier, I said open source has some differences. And one of the differences is giving back and sharing and building community is inherently a part of doing commerce.
16:43
And some would argue that MongoDB wasn't playing nice in certain situations. That's another story. But all of us should try and adhere to these things. Understand and be part of the community. Don't be someone who just takes.
17:01
And in fairness, everyone's doing their part coming to this conference. Everyone's paying some money to support this conference. Or donating money to support people who couldn't come otherwise to be able to come to this conference. And there are many, many ways of giving back.
17:20
It's easy to think, well, I can only give back if I'm a coder. Lots of people contribute code, but contributing documentation is something that can be done. Contributing your time to the community, helping to organize these kinds of events, that's the way I personally support communities is by investing my time and convincing my company
17:43
to send me here to support these kinds of communities. And then increasingly, and we've heard a little bit of this in the keynote this morning, is just providing direct financial support. If you're getting value from it, hit the QGIS button. Give them $100. It makes a difference.
18:01
And the great talk earlier about all the volunteers, mappers, the community, youth mappers, hit their button.
18:21
Support their efforts. Super, super, super worthy. So with that, it's OK to make money. The commerce ecosystem is alive and well. There are many different ways people are pulling it off.
18:40
And remember, don't forget to not give back. Thank you. Thank you.