Live data from Hacker News

Who eats who in open source

platformonomics.com

71–78 of 78 posts

Re: Who eats who in open source

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What dramatically better tooling does SQL Server has? I don't know about Oracle but SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) are vastly better than anything I've seen for open source databases. SSMS is just a really good visual client with an excellent table/view designer, diagram builder and query builder with GUI management features that let you manage virtually every facet of your ser…

Afaik, those things are available in DBeaver [0] and MySQL Workbench [1] as well. @jandrewrogers also mentioned a 4-fold performance increase by switching to proprietary solutions from pgsql. I am still wondering what those solutions might be... --- 0. https://dbeaver.io/ 1. https://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/

I’ve used both and I can assure you that both the products you mention fail to approach the utility and more importantly, the quality of either SSMS or SSDT.

Have you tried the SQL Server based products at all?

Re: Who eats who in open source

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without the provisions of the AGPL, an Amazon could co-opt some GPL'd (or even more permissively / less copylefted licence: MIT/BSD as examples), make extensive changes, use the code as part of an online service, and have no obligation to provide source to user(s). Under the AGPL, the source-disclosure provision persists. In both cases, Amazon is doing software development, but in the first, they're not contributing…

Except that Amazon does contribute to less copylefted open source code, so there must be some motivation beyond licensing forcing them to.

Any breakdown you're aware of for that by licence?

Note that AGPL applies to few projects at this point. Amazon is very heavily reliant on, e.g., Linux and Xen, both of which are GPL v2.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think crowdfunding will work with enterprise budgeting processes. That's where the sustaining money comes from for most OSS development.

A 'crowd' of enterprises is called a consortium, joint venture, foundation etc. While the funding arrangement for those is less formal than in actual crowdfunding, plenty of those do get funded out of enterprise budgets.

I took your meaning to be buyers of enterprise software, rather than producers.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, those things are available in DBeaver [0] and MySQL Workbench [1] as well. @jandrewrogers also mentioned a 4-fold performance increase by switching to proprietary solutions from pgsql. I am still wondering what those solutions might be... --- 0. https://dbeaver.io/ 1. https://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/

I’ve used both and I can assure you that both the products you mention fail to approach the utility and more importantly, the quality of either SSMS or SSDT. Have you tried the SQL Server based products at all?

Not that much, so I might have to take a better look then. :)

Re: Who eats who in open source

#75
People rarely mention in these debates that Bitcoin is open source, along with essentially all other cryptocurrencies. Indeed, the cryptocurrency business model could hardly exist without open source. It isn’t the same community at all as Linux / Postgres / etc, but it certainly should be considered a great success for open source.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that Amazon does contribute to less copylefted open source code, so there must be some motivation beyond licensing forcing them to.

Any breakdown you're aware of for that by licence? Note that AGPL applies to few projects at this point. Amazon is very heavily reliant on, e.g., Linux and Xen, both of which are GPL v2.

I don't know of such a breakdown, there is a list on this page of some of the projects they contribute to as well as their own open source code. https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/?opensource-all.sort-by=it...

Re: Who eats who in open source

#77
Open source thought they could sell consulting and hosting services to fatigued devs, if they fatigued them enough. All those single project focuses left the door wide open for multi-clouds to "just add glue" between disparate open source projects and actually aim to be easy.

We now await to see if compute will become a commodity or just priced that way to prevent it becoming so. Is any challenger bold enough to bite off more of the pie than they can chew?

Re: Who eats who in open source

#78

The root of the issue is that licensing costs, the only costs that open source is guaranteed to reduce, can be a small percentage of operational costs in practice. If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience, it can literally be economically uncompetitive with a closed source product that does optimize those other…

> The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully.

This is the developers perspective. In the time it takes to develop something the licence fees are indeed at tiny part of the cost.

However, over the lifetime of the software itself it's usually a different outcome. Software typically lasts decades. Banks are still running cobol software written decades ago. Perhaps it's possible even over those long lifetimes the licensing costs still win. When it breaks down completely is when you deploy that software multiple times, paying those licence fees each time you do it. If you start paying for 1000 CAL's you have a problem.

The other comment here that is a red flag to me is "all the tools that give you visibility into the database save you time". If it is development time then well and good, but if you are needing DBA's once the thing is deployed then just no. No matter how sophisticated those tools are, they still cost far more than needing no attention whatsoever. This is where open source usually wins, because it's lack of sophistication is usually an case of being pared back to the bare minimum to do the job.

Post reply on HN