innovation

Here’s a worthwhile post from @[email protected] on the topic of ‘Enshittification’. The economic reasons for enshittification Under capitalism, a company’s ultimate goal is to increase profits. Most people realize that there are 3 basic ways of doing this: Increase revenue (develop better products, acquire more customers). Decrease costs (improve production technology). A combination of the above. What most people don’t realize, is that this is a naïve, outdated view that applies only to young industries (it applied pretty much to everyone in the early stages of capitalism, because most industries were young - and this is why it is an established, widespread view). ...

In »Open Source: A capitalistic value engine« Christian Paterson was quoted for opensource.net as follows: Equally, clever engineering that separates commodity – or core – core-functionality with value-added functionality enables companies producing Open Source software to embrace an open and collaborative developer community whilst not providing a completely free lunch for competitors. Of course, if competitors start to feed back into the project because that makes operational sense for them, they effectively become co-investors. That may not stop them from obtaining an advantage, but it helps make the relationship less unidirectional. In this manner, one of the best defence tactics against competitors gaining an unfair advantage is to co-opt them into the project through a genuinely open and meritocratic governance structure. ...

Penpot has recently attracted a lot of attention, especially in the open-source community. Rather than relying on the common open-core model, an eigenständiges Geschäftsmodell was developed for the open-source application: the so-called Open Nitrate Model. At first glance the concept looks like a mix of open-core and free-code approaches, though the exact distinction and how it works aren’t entirely clear to me yet. ...

Thomas Di Giacomo writes in »Open Source projects vs products: A strategic approach« for opensource.net Every new version of Open Source upstream projects may remove features we and our customers depend on, introduce new bugs and potential performance issues, and cause other regressions that can disrupt business operations. Therefore, businesses that rely on Open Source must actively manage these changes to avoid potential disruptions. ...

The article “Why single vendor is the new proprietary” by Thierry Carrez is packed with smart ideas and information. The following quote is meant only as a representative sample of the overall content. In the next 20 years, Open Source got overwhelmingly popular and unleashed a software revolution. A recent study by researchers at Harvard Business School estimated the demand-side value of Open Source software to be $8.8 trillion! In other words, without Open Source, companies would have to pay 3.5 times as much for software than they currently do. It’s estimated that 96% of software contains an Open Source component. Developing new software today without using any Open Source would be a pretty challenging endeavor. ...