On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 1:37 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 12:19 PM, mmarco <mma...@unizar.es> wrote: >> My impression is that open sourcing SMC wouldn't have a big impact on the >> business oportunity. >> >> The main niche of clients would be universities that want to move their math >> courses to the cloud. For them, having the source code mean that it would be >> possible to set up their own server, but they still would need to buy >> hardware, set it up and maintain it, and hire personel with the expertise to >> administer it. That is a big investment just to start, i guess that you >> (having already the expertise and some hardware to start with) could offer >> prices that beat that option, specially in the short term. > > It's not so simple. When SMC was closed source, UW would do the work > involving taking payments, legal stuff, and allow me to use the > hardware/people/resource that UW has. Since SMC is now open source, > they won't allow any of that in a business context. (This was part > of the reason SMC was closed source.) This means that > commercialization of SMC can't happen until several relatively > expensive things along the lines of "they still would need to buy > hardware, set it up and maintain it, and hire personnel with the > expertise to administer it" happen, which must get paid for by private > money. The expenses are way more than an order of magnitude more than > I personally have available. Exactly what prevents the competitor > you are imagining is also an obstruction to commercialization of SMC > now. It's even a little scarier right now, because much of SMC is > running on Google Compute Engine, and those free credits are rapidly > running out (commercialization was going to take care of that). There > is enough hardware at UW to keep things running, though I also pay > over $7K/year just for physical rack space for hosting that hardware > at UW. > > But don't worry -- there is a potential private investor, and I think > things will work out very well. > >> The possible risk is that somebody could start a company to offer the same >> service, but again you have the starting advantage. >> >> About this... what about AGPL? Would that be possible? > > I can't make any license changes in the shortterm, though eventually > it may be possible. AGPL would mean that if somebody else makes an > SMC competitor they would have to share any modifications they make to > the backend code. That would be reassuring.
There is at least one company (https://about.gitlab.com/) that run web service completely using open source (MIT licensed) code: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master I don't know how much they earn though, but this suggest they have at least 6 full time employees: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/06/04/github-rival-gitlab-building-business-just-0-1-paying-customers/ Ondrej -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
