On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Ondřej Čertík <ondrej.cer...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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/
Thanks for the link and example, That article also says:
"We're starting to break even about now," says the CEO.
which might be encouraging (or discouraging) depending on how you look
at it, so maybe they make over 500K/year in revenue (though they are
in Ukrain so who knows how much their business costs to break even).
For comparison, github (which is closed source) was valued at almost 1
billion dollars in 2012 [1]...
William
[1]
http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-07-09-github-takes-100m-in-largest-investment-by-andreessen-horowitz/
>
> Ondrej
>
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--
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
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