101–110 of 199 posts
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License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyone used them for free, then they were acquired by giant companies who charge for their use.
It would exist as I knew it until 2000's, and hence why I see a parallel where current non-copyleft adoption has taken us back to.
Yet they dont.
The problem is not big tech. Not open source. It's that the European tech economy crippled itself and cries wolf about it all day.
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> They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it. and they'd tell you to pay up 10x, or lose this stability in the future; If it was an open source software, you will have the option to go to a competing vendor.
Is there a single example of multiple vendors selling support for the same open-source piece of software, where I can just hire a different vendor if I no longer like my current one, without changing anything major in my operations? You could say that Canonical and IBM RedHat compete on offering Linux support, but the reality is that it's not that much harder to switch from RHEL to Ubuntu than switching to any other…
IBM RedHat is the steward of RHEL, and Canonical is of Ubuntu, so if you want support from them there are no real other options, but they do work with multiple different ISVs.
If you want to stay 'independent' and have the most leverage you can take a linux which is not from a bigco, such as Debian.
I'm really worried about cloud-lock-in for bigger companies. My previous company switched large amounts of product to AWS, when I asked about how this was feasible after doing back-of-the-envelope calculations they said: well you should not consider list price, nobody is paying list price, we get discounts.
This reminded me of an ISP I worked for in 2006 that invested in large amounts of Solaris machines because they got big discounts instead of going for the much more obvious Linux route. Then after two years or so the new (Oracle at that time?? I'm not sure) sales rep paid a visit and they said, when they were not able to sell MORE new servers: OK screw the discounts, from now you're paying list price. So that got them stuck in a real bad place. I'm afraid the same might happen to companies who move to cloud providers as well.
And then I've not even touched on issues such as privacy, security, business continuity, and losing the skill to actually run your own hardware
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> They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it. and they'd tell you to pay up 10x, or lose this stability in the future; If it was an open source software, you will have the option to go to a competing vendor.
Is there a single example of multiple vendors selling support for the same open-source piece of software, where I can just hire a different vendor if I no longer like my current one, without changing anything major in my operations? You could say that Canonical and IBM RedHat compete on offering Linux support, but the reality is that it's not that much harder to switch from RHEL to Ubuntu than switching to any other…
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That the „commodify your complements“ strategy
I cite that essay always when "but this should be open source" comes up in a corporate context... https://gwern.net/complement
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
almost the entire world and industry is literally running on open source.
As much as it pains me to say it, it's true. I use predominantly open source software on all my computers with some small exceptions. I used to rely on some cloud services because of the convenience and nothing else. But leaks started becoming way too common and what I can say about all places that I've worked at, data is handled really badly. If you pair that with some OSINT skills, you can learn pretty much anythin…
I think your experience is interesting, because it seems like approximately the same small fraction of individuals as companies commit to "vertically integrated software"--that is you own everything top to bottom. That is to say almost nobody does it. For an individual that's excusable, it's a mountain of expertise and effort, although I imagine it pays off rather well in skills learning. For a company, not so much.…
Because it is risky. The more esoteric the knowledge gets, the further it moves away from your core business, the more in-demand the skills are. As an example, maintaining your own metrics and timeseries storage. It takes quite a few skilled hands to do this in house and probably only feasible for larger companies anyway. Or you can simply hand this problem over to DataDog. While they are pricey, it is potentially pricier to build your own internal DataDog-like system, especially if you consider the opportunity cost of pulling your most skilled engineers to build it instead of building your product that your customers are paying for. Companies are perfectly willing to pay a premium to not worry about something, and that includes not worrying about your very skilled engineers leaving and then needing to scramble because no one else understands what has been built.
I 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,t…
> ditch Visual Studio for Visual Studio Code How has Microsoft ditched VS for VSCode? VS is lightyears ahead in features and performance. The two are not even remotely comparable. VSCode is a text editor that wants to be an IDE, but if you work with C++ or .NET you're shooting yourself in the foot if you use VSCode. VSCode is not a serious alternative to VS or other IDE's like JetBrains Rider.
I think the key point is this; >> (By the way, all new software without accompanying support & guidance is doomed to fail. And if that software comes from a dominant player, you’ll just have to deal with that by the way.) There's a temptation to conflate the software license with the software business. This is natural, but places software as the primary value in the chain. From a business perspective the software tho…
>In truth the license doesn't matter.
It's funny to bring that up in the context of Red Hat who have started to circumvent the GPL by terminating their relationship with anyone who tries to actually make use of the rights granted by it. "The license doesn't matter" because they've found a loophole in it, but it clearly does matter in that they had to do so in the first place and weren't able to adhere to its spirit due to business concerns.
[1]: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...
[2]: https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-08-redhat-gets-around...
I prefer privately hosted web and mail servers. Before "the cloud", the economy worked just fine and companies had enough money for in-house IT.
By using the nextcloud example, the author of the article is asking the wrong question.