You are mentioning that an experiment with nextcloud has failed? I cannot find any evidence regarding that, even more I see it highly used among governments and municipalities in the EU.
Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
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Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#12Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech. Hard to be an alternative when you serve the same master.
It's more of a symbiotic relationship. The open source community depends on commercial support. Essentially all of the bigger projects indeed get a lot of their contributions from the companies that use, build, and depend on these projects. It's how the software world can collaborate with their competitors on the things they don't compete directly on.
This isn't charity, they are literally using more OSS software than they produce their own software. By several orders of magnitude in most cases. Companies like Google have many millions of lines of code in proprietary in house code. But they depend on an even larger amount of code in OSS form.
E.g. Android and Chrome OS are based on Linux. Those products are built on many thousands of open source packages. And of course Google is contributing to lots of them and created a few themselves. Chrome is open source because webkit was open source because Apple forked KHTML from the KDE project.
Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing.
VC funded OSS companies are a bit more challenging. These companies are perpetually confused about their licensing and need to keep things proprietary and open at the same time. These projects get a lot of attention because of the VC money but technically they only represent a tiny fraction of the OSS community.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#13Big tech relies on open source and, often enough, vice versa
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#14> The regular IT environment in the European Parliament is managed by whole teams of professionals, it comes with training, and is supported by Microsoft partners and ultimately by Microsoft itself. There are also large amounts of computing power available to make things work well.
> An Open Source experiment meanwhile is typically operated by an enthusiastic hobbyist with borrowed equipment. Rolled out without training and without professional support, by someone who likely did this for the first time, it’s no wonder things often don’t work out well.
> After the experiment, the faction was disappointed and concluded that Nextcloud was no good. And that was also their lived experience. “Let’s not do that again!”
This is a rhetorical trick known as implication or insinuation. By presenting information indirectly, the author prompts readers to make a connection themselves without explicitly stating it.
The author implies that the European Parliament's failed experiment with Nextcloud was due to a lack of professional resources and expertise, suggesting it was handled similarly to typical open-source projects led by hobbyists without proper support. However, he doesn’t provide any factual evidence that the Parliament’s Nextcloud experiment actually lacked professional resources, training, or adequate equipment. Instead, he hints at this by describing common issues with open-source setups, leaving readers to assume the experiment suffered from similar shortcomings.
I would have appreciated some facts, or even sources for his claims, but there are none. And I couldn't find any information about the Nextcloud deployment having failed.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#15Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech. Hard to be an alternative when you serve the same master.
That the „commodify your complements“ strategy
I cite that essay always when "but this should be open source" comes up in a corporate context...
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#16Countries have run nationalise infrastructure before, and successfully. The problem is if they did not view it as nationalised infrastructure and instead viewed it as some sort of mana that would fall from open source heaven. Open source software is the building blocks used by large rent (service fee) seeking corporations. They will extract large profits from any of these contracts and that is a demonstrable fact, th…
The point of going to big businesses for software services and support is that most customers don’t have needs that are large enough to justify the full-time staff needed for top-notch support. So companies that provide services amortise this over many customers and can employ n dozen full-time staff for a particular subsystem when the average customer might only need them a few times a year. So the tradeoff makes sense – even with a big profit margin, the customers still save money compared with DIY.
This logic doesn’t really hold when it comes to large governments. Their needs are large enough that they can justify employing specialists. At that point, the profit margin the service business is capturing is just inefficiency. Internal services should be more common in large governments.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#17I think the article should have started off different considering that it actually concludes with a semi-positive stance on how open source “is” an alternative to big tech. It’s an area we take rather serious here in Denmark. Now, I won’t get into the irony of everyone wanting to replace Chromebooks in our school systems because Google is evil when the replacement is very likely to be Microsoft who is as much of a snoop these days since Google actually sells similar forms of privacy to our education. What we do have as a real working alternative to both is locally developed education solutions which will work as well, if not better? Than Google’s Educational tools on Chromebooks. What we lack is a political leadership that will commit to this. Part of this is because we’ve only recently gotten a digitalisation minister, even though people spend far more time on computers than they do on their daily commute and we’ve had a transportation minister since basically forever. Another part is that many of the top advisors in public service tend to “job hop” between our leading industry companies and public service, leaving to many contracts heading toward closed software.
What our educational alternatives show, and they have been implemented in some places and in Greenland I believe. Is very much in line with what the article recommends at the end, as far as small incremental useful changes with clear and cut goals. What would you achieve with Nextcloud? Replacing everything you have in Azure AWS in one big step? Obviously that is going to go horribly. That’s not even how we migrated into Azure from on prem. What you can do, is to start by slowly moving your applications and services into moveable parts, by container rising them. Writing your run-books in Python rather than Powershell and so on.
Then there is the change management, which the article touches on, and which is always forgotten by decision makers. Partly because decision makers don’t know what IT is, well… I guess that is it really. Where in the past (and I’ve written about this a lot) SysAdmins and supporters were unlikely to want to leave their Microsoft training, I think we’re at a point in IT history where that is less of a case because so much is now done on Linux even if you’re deep into the Microsoft ecosystem. Similarity the Office365 platform is not in as much ownership of your employee base because many people under 30 will not have “grown up” with it. Where it would have been inconceivable to not use Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook 5-10 years ago we’ve entered a world where we actively have to train employees in Office products because they are used to iOS, Android and MacOS and not “PCs”.
Again, you should start by doing things in small steps. Our Libraries have switched to Ubuntu on every public PC, and it has been a non-issue because many library users are equally unfamiliar with Ubuntu and Windows, and since most things happen in a browser anyway, the underlying OS isn’t an issue.
That is how you do it. Slowly with small steps, and yes, some of those steps don’t need to be open source. If you want to replace Azure or AWS then it’s much better to head to Hetzner (or similar) rather than to try and do it with NextCloud or similar. Because then your SysAdmins will not really need much retraining as that is not very different from what they already do in many cases where moving into the cloud has really just been moving a bunch of VMs.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#18IDK about 'open source', but 'libre software' is what fueled tons of propietary software from the 80's
until today. Without that software tons of propietary software (even console games) woudn't even exist.
I remind you all Emacs powered some German airline's ATC in the early 90's, and it used to be used under Amazon for tons of stuff thanks to its easy widget UI to achieve tasks with very little Elisp.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#19I think the author is not learned in the technology economics.
IBM to save it's business had to merge with Red hat almost 50% 50% in 2018.
Microsoft it's security and cloud offering had to, open source it's .net framework, aquire GitHub, ditch Visual Studio fot Visual Studio Code,
ARM is eating the world, it over hauled the x86_x64 architecture, and became the Defacto architecture.
We can go on and on and on and on,that the Open Source business model, became necessary to survive in tech, not just to exist.
If you don't open it, they will eat you up.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#20Thw problem is big tech can offer free as in beer hosted services.
You can use Google docs for free so it takes some dedication to self host that and pay for the server.
Now if big tech charged for everything things would be more like the old days where you might use small tech, such as a local hosting provider that does open source installs.