I'm usually pretty against AGPL, though it may make a little bit of sense here. I often see companies "open source" their code under AGPL, which basically allows them to call themselves open source, but still able to sell commercial licenses, as few other companies will want to touch AGPL code.
(I personally lean on the MIT side of the spectrum.) On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 2:09 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > > > > -- > > 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. > > > > -- > William Stein > Professor of Mathematics > University of Washington > http://wstein.org > > -- > 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. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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