Top all-time · #9179
Joe Morrison
Personal blog · joemorrison.medium.comdatabusiness
Joe Morrison's personal blog at joemorrison.medium.com covers data and business. Since 2020, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “Death of an open-source business model”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Joe Morrison's Medium posts on open-source business models, OpenStreetMap's data and contributors, and the commercial satellite imagery market.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Death of an open-source business model3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-12-09
- Openstreetmap is having a moment3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-11-18
What Hacker News says?
Excellent reflection business changes in opensource here: Death of an Open Source Business Model [1] [1] https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-busin...
Comment linking /death-of-an-open-source-business-model-62bc227a7e9b
on “AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana”Submitted Openstreetmap is having a moment as a story · 434 points
HN discussionApple, Amazon, Facebook and MS have been lately contributing a lot to OSM, so what you see on Apple Maps might very well be OSM data. https://joemorrison.medium.com/openstreetmap-is-having-a-mom...
Comment linking /openstreetmap-is-having-a-moment-dcc7eef1bb01
on “OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities”Submitted Death of an open-source business model as a story · 334 points
HN discussion> AWS etc. already offer these services so the risk is low. I'm not sure about that. AWS had a NoSQL database, but replicated mongodb. Anyway, I think that the risk doesn't occur until and unless supertokens hits a home run. I mean, if you're big enough for a hypercloud provider to copy, that means you've been pretty darn successful in distribution of your product. But the risk is there. As for the relicensing, I ha…
Comment linking /death-of-an-open-source-business-model-62bc227a7e9b
on “Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'”FusionAuth (the company for which I work) have a similar model with a free (though, in our case, not open source) community edition for developer reach and to lower the barrier to entry. Then support and enterprise features are paid for by the enterprise. If you can find the right levers, it works. This has been a common business model. Redhat did it, Hashicorp does it, Rancher I believe as well. The entire SSO Tax…
Comment linking /death-of-an-open-source-business-model-62bc227a7e9b
on “Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'”It might sound funny, but making slippy maps in Web Mercator is emphatically not what people call GIS - GIS being: * The technical part of the academic Geography field * Data collection and mapping work done at agencies like the USGS and municipal governments * Work done with ESRI software (see https://joemorrison.medium.com/esri-cant-be-stopped-3b063f3d... ) Yes, Pelias is a mature project backed by a great team at…
Comment linking /esri-cant-be-stopped-3b063f3de0b4
on “A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap”Yeah, this ultimately probably winds up being owned by one or more cloud providers. It’s also the most common business model I see startups trying to do. It usually doesn’t work because you can’t put lipstick (flat pricing, self-service sales motion, open licensing) on a pig (janky and secretly manual integrations with misaligned data providers who view your success as a threat to their most lucrative contracts). Mo…
Comment linking /stop-building-satellite-imagery-platforms-and-marketplaces-af4919a56146
on “The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want”I agree. The first time I wrote about this same frustration a couple years changed my whole life—it’s how I wound up at my current job and something I still believe in very deeply: https://joemorrison.medium.com/the-commercial-satellite-imag...
Comment linking /the-commercial-satellite-imagery-business-model-is-broken-6f0e437ec29d
on “The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want”Apple incorporates OSM data into its maps for some regions, and Apple is also the most prolific corporate data contributor to OSM,* so I agree that Apple Maps is a great alternative to Google Maps. Unfortunately, it's not available on Android or as a web app. * https://joemorrison.medium.com/openstreetmap-is-having-a-mom...
Comment linking /openstreetmap-is-having-a-moment-dcc7eef1bb01
on “Google sends anti-regulation propaganda to small businesses using Google Maps”The difference between Mapillary and OSM is that Mapillary is a for-profit company, while OSM is an open dataset managed by a non-profit organization. The OSM Foundation can't sell its intellectual property rights to a for-profit company like Facebook without violating its mission statement:[1] > The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international, not-for-profit, democratic organisation with the tasks of supporting th…
Comment linking /why-on-earth-did-facebook-just-acquire-mapillary-9838405272f8
on “Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?”