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Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

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Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireguard layer-3 tunneling identity (public key) is for machines, not human users. Rolling out Wireguard in an "enterprise environment" for over 600 user laptops and desktops (mix of Linux and some macOS* and Windows*) with our existing configuration management (SaltStack/GitOps) was extremely easy to do. Where additional layer-3 tunnels that were user or group specific were necessary, we did some very light scripti…

Thanks for the feedback. How did you manage the IP assignment, keys revocation, ...? How did your ZT environment worked with WG on the network level? (zScaler creates its own tunnels for instance)

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireguard layer-3 tunneling identity (public key) is for machines, not human users. Rolling out Wireguard in an "enterprise environment" for over 600 user laptops and desktops (mix of Linux and some macOS* and Windows*) with our existing configuration management (SaltStack/GitOps) was extremely easy to do. Where additional layer-3 tunnels that were user or group specific were necessary, we did some very light scripti…

Thanks for the feedback. How did you manage the IP assignment, keys revocation, ...? How did your ZT environment worked with WG on the network level? (zScaler creates its own tunnels for instance)

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireguard layer-3 tunneling identity (public key) is for machines, not human users. Rolling out Wireguard in an "enterprise environment" for over 600 user laptops and desktops (mix of Linux and some macOS* and Windows*) with our existing configuration management (SaltStack/GitOps) was extremely easy to do. Where additional layer-3 tunnels that were user or group specific were necessary, we did some very light scripti…

Thanks for the feedback. How did you manage the IP assignment, keys revocation, ...? How did your ZT environment worked with WG on the network level? (zScaler creates its own tunnels for instance)

Looks like I forgot to clarify the meaning of the asterisk, so here:

[*] we charge a hefty premium to manage third party OS in a sideways way by offering a 75% discount on our endpoint OS, with exception to special and authentic cases (some 3D CAD or other).

Three important points of context to highlight here:

0.] We don't hire for "butts in seats", we hire for aptitude and/or talent then also culture very carefully and if someone isn't vibing, isn't "getting it", we fire very fast (locking them out with the same stack we use to operate customers' devices).

1.] We don't use Git in the typical pedestrian centralized way (ie GitLab), Git is of a distributed and we use Git as such in an approach that gracefully is combined with other things that, like Git, do their one small thing and do it right. Our approach has been described as "nirvana for security and compliance" and is still considered somewhat novel. We would call this "bespoke", but the use of this approach has been uniform in each place.

2.] We consider our Git approach with SaltStack something that any entry-level SysAdmin or even IT Ops should be able to wrap their head around. Salt obviates a lot of Python we might otherwise write. The end customer has "engineers" who do write in some interpreted languages, maybe some languages on JVM and some C#, but they don't write software in a sane way, so they pay for our clicky clicky to talk to our API for what we have done. Ultimately, the customer doesn't really "do computer" (even though they try), they are users, "power users" at best (which is kind of worse actually). Open Source is about *source code* ie software, which is the part we are good at and the customer is not.

3.] Without the existing wealth of open source software, we would not even attempt to be playing the same ballpark we are now. Context number zero is more strongly why we are much more confident with what we have than anything in the whitelabel-option Managed Services Provider space, but this context number three is also a big part.

The BeyondCorp / ZeroTrust in place does all of its "smart" like time-of-day or some statistic/heuristic at layer-4 (TLS). The layer-3 is there too because defense-in-depth. I know we have something on the roadmap to add more smarts to the Wireguard pieces (I'd have to ask someone). The non-management Wireguard tunnels, the ones for "app", don't come up without TPM unbothered and a user's hardware key being involved. We haven't yet seen a BeyondCorp / ZeroTrust suite from a vendor we found compelling or "we really want X feature they have" that we can't easily (and more quickly than a sales cycle) do ourselves with our model.

Background:

The customer had existing IPAM, but it was too much of a mess. The kinds of customers that don't have clean IPAM also don't have IPv6. So we went ahead and used some of the IPv6 that our corp has from ARIN with proper agreements in place with customer to make using our IPv6 space "okay" and endpoints do 4in6 to reach customers' existing IPv4 subnets (mostly RFC1918).

Every device in our purview is notated as a YAML versioned by Git for SaltStack to do whatever on the device. Each machine has a unique id, similar to the /etc/machine-id concept, with data for that machine expressed as SaltStack Pillar.

Typical incident:

Suppose machine morty.foo.baz.example.net is stolen from a user's car. Upon awareness of the incident the key "status" in the YAML for morty is updated to have value "stolen" added to change management (Git). A look up is done on every public key used by the Wireguard peer named Morty, and every device that uses any of those public keys gets poked to apply the new data expressed as Salt.

Remediation:

On another device running Wireguard named Rick, the public key for Morty is now expressed in a new way by Salt Pillar and the relevant Salt State has "file.absent" for the public key. For the public key Salt already has "onchanges" to "service reload wireguard-something" (reload, not restart) via init script which changes what needs to be changed and only what needs to be changed.

  https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/pillar/index.html#pillar

  https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/ref/states/requisites.html#onchanges

  https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/ref/states/all/salt.states.file.html#salt.states.file.absent

Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#154
Good question, and I don't like the answers of other users. They are exclusively naming big well estabilished applications, that could be there due to pure luck.

Though it is true that LibreOffice, ffmpeg, and Linux are successful and widely used, I was much more curious whether the small ShowHN ones got anywhere. And I barely found any.

All (recent) FOSS success stories come from the proprietary apps being so screwed up. (At least that's my impression)

Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Linus Torvalds developed git because the Linux kernel at the time used Bitkeeper, a proprietary source control system and its owner was changing the license. Now, everyone and their goldfish uses git, and I haven't heard about Bitkeeper in many years. It hasn't completely obliterated all the competition, but most of it, and those that aren't dead are on life support: in the open-source domain, CVS is mostly dead…

Linus didn’t write git because the BitKeeper license had changed exactly, he did it because Larry McVoy yanked Linux off the platform after Andrew Tridgell (of Samba and rsync fame) started poking around at the protocol to reverse engineer it. It turned out BK was so buggy that that alone was enough to corrupt other repos on the server, so McVoy just went and disabled Linux’s access without warning. Linus was pretty…

> Linus was pretty steamed at the participants in that debacle (especially Tridge for some reason)

The reason was that Tridge was trying to build an OSS alternative to BK.

Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opening LibreCalc just once was enough to prove to me that it's not a viable alternative to Office. Both usability and performance were bad, performance egregiously so.

I have the complete opposite experience. I use CSV files a lot, LibreCalc has a sane import dialog and handles these files near perfect by default. When working with Excel-users I always get a reply along the lines of „the file is weird, can you send me xls?“ And yes, I know that Excel opens CSV just fine. But it is not straightforward enough to explain it to a semi computer-literate office drone…

Excel used to give you the option of using the import wizard for CSVs when you opened them. Now they've intentionally hidden that in a submenu, for some bizarre reason.

Libre Office is good enough for basic use, but Excel has a lot of great features for intermediate users. Some of the newer functions they've added in the last few years are great, I use LET with my own lambdas and the quite often. I also kinda like the Power Query/M language, but the implementation in Excel is absolutely horrible.

Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#160
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus didn’t write git because the BitKeeper license had changed exactly, he did it because Larry McVoy yanked Linux off the platform after Andrew Tridgell (of Samba and rsync fame) started poking around at the protocol to reverse engineer it. It turned out BK was so buggy that that alone was enough to corrupt other repos on the server, so McVoy just went and disabled Linux’s access without warning. Linus was pretty…

> Linus was pretty steamed at the participants in that debacle (especially Tridge for some reason) The reason was that Tridge was trying to build an OSS alternative to BK.

Not that that made Tridge in any way deserving of Linus's ire ... but I guess Linus was upset to see his personal friend McVoy go off like this, and blamed who they saw as the instigator. Not the best reaction all told, but understandable human behavior regardless. Of course, the actually meaningful response was that he wrote Git, so it's all just ancient history now. I doubt there's any hard feelings left between any of the parties, or at least I like to think so.
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