expired

Because that's not how professional software development works. You don't actually get free programmers because most of the time your customers are not techy people.

E.g. if I develop some special software for dentists or whatever, and I open source it, all I get is that someone else builds the code and distributes it for free so I can't easily sell it anymore.

The issue is there are a few ways of doing open source wrong.

The biggest way to do it wrong is to try to sell the open source product while giving the source away for free. Because that means, there will be someone else who just takes the source and copies it with no or only minor changes (e.g. replacing logos and names).

The copyists always have an huge competitive advantage, since they don't have to pay for development. Especially for software, development makes up almost all of the cost, so that essentially means they can give away the product for almost free and still make a profit. Or they are open source spirited themselves and give it away completely for free, like CentOS.

Sure, Red Hat can actually develop features that customers are asking for, which CentOS can't really do, since they can't influence Red Hat's roadmap, but considering that Red Hat is asking for $350 for a server license, a free-and-good-enough alternative seems to be the better option for many.

According to Wikipedia, CentOS is much more popular (or at least was in 2021) than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

So to do Open Source right, you need to make money from developing it. This is e.g. how the Linux kernel works. They don't sell the kernel, but instead many companies fund kernel development either financially or through dedicating developers to that project. There are e.g. a lot of devs employed by Microsoft who are working on the Linux kernel.

This gives these companies the ability to prioritize what features/bugs should be worked on.

But this model doesn't fit every product and thus not every product can be financially viably done in Open Source.

Microsoft is afraid of OSS because it would literally kill them if people knew just how much better it actually was. They admitted as much in the halloween documents.

They did a long campaign in the 90's and 00's of convincing businesses that OSS was illegal, too. And it worked pretty well.

I'm not sure they are. I bet lots of them use Linux servers, Solr, several open source databases and so on. I think it's mostly the small and medium companies who are afraid of missing support and stuff.

The big companies just don't like selling open source to their customers. Or getting them too close to the concept of it.

Because they can make more money by walling the garden.

I work in open source one of my products is. The benefit of open source is apparent when we talk about core technology and standardization. It’s not very helpful when it comes to specific implementations or customization.

Open Source requires sponsors, sponsors need to build on something to create capital to pay the developers behind the open source. I.e. Blender is open source, because people use it to make 3d models that they sell or get paid to build. So companies that use these models to make products like games and movies, pay Blender so that they can continue making it better and give them support. Also individuals and companies can add stuff to it. But really that’s neglect able. Open source is a promise.

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?

Big companies make their money selling things that they exclusively have the ability to sell.

The whole concept of open source flies in the face of that mindset.

Nobody has mentioned one of the top purely technical reasons companies are reluctant to open source things: support.

I worked for a company that opened a UI design framework and people loved it, but the moment you have an outside audience, you can't just make breaking changes or pivot the direction. You have to be sure your thing is completely stable before you open it up.

They felt they couldn't move fast enough while supporting the open one, so they forked it and just maintained the public one so the private one could change faster.

There are costs to support. I'm not saying companies shouldn't do it (Google does, all the time), bit smaller companies may not be able to afford it.

I'm just here to marvel at how effective the corporate world has been at steering the conversation toward Open Source, and away from Free Software

I don’t get why big companys are afraid of open source software

Maybe they think that their business would not be as profitable when using open source business models.

I would be willing to pay to have the license to modify my own software even if I couldn’t redistribute it afterwards.

That's source-available software. An example license that you would probably like: The GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) license.

Their workflow would be open to the public. The organizational structure doesn't want things like this out in the open.

It's happening. We're seeing lots of new open source software with a corporate shine to it coming out. I just think that it's not going to do anything good for open source.