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Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

steveburge.com

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#21
There was no battle and there is no war. Different methodologies and philosophies surrounding software development have different pros and cons, which themselves change over time as the tech industry changes.

If people want to choose to view the tech world through a filter that projects everything into some open source vs. proprietary software conflict, fine. There are many such filters though.

Someone could have a similar filter that only cares about vertical vs. horizontal integration. It might even be instructive! Microsoft was on top of their game in the '80s and '90s because they had the right business model (horizontal integration- sell the OS and have everyone else make the hardware it runs on and the apps that run on top of it). Other companies have more recently had more success with a more vertically integrated approach, where the hardware and the software are explicitly designed with each other in mind to maximize things like performance, power management, size, shape, and UX of the resultant products.

As things like the mobile industry continue to evolve, we may be moving back into an era where horizontal integration becomes dominant again. And maybe that will lead to another era where it goes back to being dominated by vertical. Who knows. But at no point did vertical or horizontal ever "win" (although plenty of pundits said it did in the '90s), and there is no endgame where one does. It's just a pendulum that swings back and forth. If it ever stops, that means that the entire industry has ground to a halt.

The exact same things can be said about open source vs. proprietary, including the fact that the two are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of things have open source as well as proprietary components, and plenty of companies have some mix of vertical and horizontal integration. I'm not saying these perceived dualities in our industry are comparable, as they describe very different things, only that describing it as a war with an ultimate winner or loser is futile for the exact same reasons.

People should absolutely love open source and be inspired to be proponents of it wherever possible, but I always take great exception to philosophies like RMS', which seem less about emphasizing a particular set of virtues (freedom, openness, sharing, etc.) and much more about demonizing something else. RMS' life goal is not to promote free software, it's to destroy proprietary software. Do what you do because you love something, not because you hate the opposite of that thing. That always leads down very unfruitful paths, including casting everything in binary terms and thinking about things like imaginary battles and wars instead of simply doing great things in the manner that most inspires you and encourages others.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#22

Android is such a miserable experience that it has made me turn in my phone for the first closed-source computing device I have owned in 9 years. The latency on everything is at least 200-300ms, which makes typing consistently difficult (as if the moronic autocorrect didn't make it impossible anyways). The battery consumption is terrible (I have never been able to go more than 12 hours without a charge, and after a y…

Not sure what android phone you were using, but my Nexus 4 has definitely provided an amazing android experience. Your phone must of been $50 because my latency close to none. Be smart and download apps that are trusted, not one of the thousand "flappy bird" clones that just give you ads. Also bloatware only gets on your phone if you put it there. I've removed all the carrier apps on my family's T-Mobile phones(all android). Giving permissions up? I believe I can tell apps what to use from me, just edit their permissions in the settings. Pick a phone that's reliable and then complain.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#23

Who made that chart? It doesn't even mention Rails so I'm assuming it's pretty much made up.

It only mentions the very biggest players. While Rails is popular on HN, it doesn't surprise me that compared to PHP, ASP, and Java, it doesn't have much market share.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#24

Mobile: dominated by Apple and the faux-open Android. I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.

What application did you use to post that comment? Is it Open Source?

I posted from my laptop and used Aurora (Firefox) running on Ubuntu so... technically, yes but in a rather unsatisfying way.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#25

Android is such a miserable experience that it has made me turn in my phone for the first closed-source computing device I have owned in 9 years. The latency on everything is at least 200-300ms, which makes typing consistently difficult (as if the moronic autocorrect didn't make it impossible anyways). The battery consumption is terrible (I have never been able to go more than 12 hours without a charge, and after a y…

What kind of Android device did you have? What version of Android was it running?

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#26

Mobile: dominated by Apple and the faux-open Android. I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.

What application did you use to post that comment? Is it Open Source?

There's HN which is MIT licensed.

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=HN&fdid=com....

And HN Droid which is "unlicensed."

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=HN&fdid=com....

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#27

Android is such a miserable experience that it has made me turn in my phone for the first closed-source computing device I have owned in 9 years. The latency on everything is at least 200-300ms, which makes typing consistently difficult (as if the moronic autocorrect didn't make it impossible anyways). The battery consumption is terrible (I have never been able to go more than 12 hours without a charge, and after a y…

Indeed... everything you posted is the exact opposite of my experience with stock Nexus 5 and my non-techie friends with their S5's and Galaxy Notes.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much that, it's that a rather large percentage of the apps people want for Android won't run on AOSP. They require Android + Google Services, which are all closed.

I think that's what I meant or maybe you mean something else; what kind of thing are you talking about? People want the Google services apps but which apps people want which are not Google apps require Google services?

A large number of apps require Google Services be installed and won't work with bare AOSP anymore. Location services is part of Google Services now, so apps that require it need GS. Every app with in-app purchasing won't work without Google services, so you can forget about most games working on AOSP.

There isn't one Android anymore. There's the base pure open source Android, aka AOSP. There's Android with Google services, which supports things like the Play Store, in-app purchases, location services, etc. There's Amazon's Android fork which has some of their own APIs inserted for in-app purchases and location, but Play Store, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc are unavailable for it. Now there's Nokia's new Android fork which will have its own set of APIs for location, in-app purchases, etc.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#29
Linux is younger than I am. GNU is two years older than I am. Anyone making smart statements about the long-term prospects of a spontaneously organizing tidal wave erupting from a vacuum needs to take a step back, stop talking, and find something worth working on to them personally.

Web is mostly a distraction for proponents of FOSS. Web developers consume the foundation of FOSS and, without moving past web development, cannot contribute to that foundation. I don't honestly look to domination of web software components as a source of open source growth or an indicator of open source health. Web developers are users and FOSS is powered by developers.

Put more stock in Valve and Crytek's long-term influence on developers using Linux to game on. They subsequently can learn to program Linux, and that's way more influential than 99% of the garbage out there about web being some egalitarian magic kingdom where open source and individuals can thrive, so there. Gaming is one of the last great bastions of totally proprietary software platforms where users with the natural propensity to do so do not eventually become developers.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#30

Who made that chart? It doesn't even mention Rails so I'm assuming it's pretty much made up.

Keep in mind that the level of hype often doesn't correspond to the actual amount of usage a technology experiences.

Yes, Ruby on Rails has been widely and frequently publicized. Yes, there are some people who have a semi-religious devotion to Ruby on Rails, and are quite vocal about it. Yes, a number of books have been written about it. Yes, training is available for it.

But in reality, we really don't see it used all that much, at least compared to PHP, Java, and ASP.NET. The numbers given in that graphic may not be exact, but I wouldn't be so quick to rule them out, either.

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