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Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

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Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#111

Post by vanattab »

ci5er wrote: post #108
vanattab wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my experience as a government contractor I have to say I think the government taking taxpayers money and funding open source infrastructure would be a terrible idea. What the government should do however is release all software it develops or pays to have developed from scratch as FOSS excluding sensitive defense systems and the like of course.

Interesting. I believe that VistA's (VA Hospital EHR) was originally open sourced because of a FOI filing. And then they (more-or-less) got behind it seriously. Contrary to the title of this posting, in 2005-or-so, there was more than one company formed around commercializing VistA that pulled down venture funding. Draper-Fisher-Jurvetson funded one, and I forget the other... But this was strictly a "toss over the wa…

While I think it would be nice if community changes make it upstream so the government can benifit from the changes this is not the motivating factor. The motivating factor in my mind is that taxpayers paid for the code they should have the rights to use it. Already if the code is written by a government employee it is in the public domain because the government can't copyright. But in the public domain is not the same thing as publicly available. There have been cases were government employees have written a code base then hired contractors to work on the code and sell the product back to the government at crazy prices. And then when the government wants the source code make a change they can't get because the code base is now proprietary. And the government is forced to pay the contractor outrageous sums to make a change to what originally was the government's code.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#112

Post by [deleted] »

ci5er wrote: post #108
vanattab wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my experience as a government contractor I have to say I think the government taking taxpayers money and funding open source infrastructure would be a terrible idea. What the government should do however is release all software it develops or pays to have developed from scratch as FOSS excluding sensitive defense systems and the like of course.

Interesting. I believe that VistA's (VA Hospital EHR) was originally open sourced because of a FOI filing. And then they (more-or-less) got behind it seriously. Contrary to the title of this posting, in 2005-or-so, there was more than one company formed around commercializing VistA that pulled down venture funding. Draper-Fisher-Jurvetson funded one, and I forget the other... But this was strictly a "toss over the wa…

[deleted]

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#113

Post by [deleted] »

ci5er wrote: post #108
vanattab wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my experience as a government contractor I have to say I think the government taking taxpayers money and funding open source infrastructure would be a terrible idea. What the government should do however is release all software it develops or pays to have developed from scratch as FOSS excluding sensitive defense systems and the like of course.

Interesting. I believe that VistA's (VA Hospital EHR) was originally open sourced because of a FOI filing. And then they (more-or-less) got behind it seriously. Contrary to the title of this posting, in 2005-or-so, there was more than one company formed around commercializing VistA that pulled down venture funding. Draper-Fisher-Jurvetson funded one, and I forget the other... But this was strictly a "toss over the wa…

[deleted]

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#114

Post by 23david »

nzoschke wrote: post #96
bobwaycott wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't running on AWS make this decidedly and automatically not open-source infrastructure? [edit]—typos

The article is also talking about the software tools that glue everything together. > Open source infrastructure refers to all the tools that help developers build software. On a deep level, it includes physical things like servers, but closer to the surface, it also includes things like programming languages, frameworks, and libraries. I also don't follow the AWS -> not open logic. I lease resources in someone else'…

Providing open-source clients does not make AWS an open ecosystem. If anything, my sense is that the overall direction of the AWS platform has been to get more and more proprietary and closed with initiatives like Lambda and Redshift that can't exist at all outside AWS. Rather than being some indication of the openness of the platform, I'd say that having open-source clients and sdks simply makes good business sense.

Once you're up and running on the AWS platform with any significant infrastructure setup, you're basically locked in for life. I hope there are counter-examples, but I'm unaware of any significant migrations off of AWS in the last few years. Some of that is due to their overall pretty high service level, but it's also incredibly hard to replicate the AWS infrastructure on your own because the tooling either doesn't exist or is immature.

I think there's a really under-served niche of startups with AWS spends of greater than $200K/year that would love to move some or most of their infra off of AWS to achieve greater cost saving or unlock different product possibilities that can come with running in a datacenter or across different cloud providers. And would be willing to pay for services and tools to fill that need. I'm finding myself in that situation now, and even though we've been careful to not get tied in to most of the managed AWS services, we're still facing lock-in due to heavy integration with cloudformation. Without a good open-source or managed service alternative to just cloudformation, we're basically faced with needing to completely re-architect our systems if we move off of AWS. And full re-architecture initiatives tend to stay near the bottom of the Devops backlog if things are working.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#116

Post by toomuchtodo »

scrollaway wrote: post #110
toomuchtodo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's far more offensive to have someone else police your words But which is entirely understandable in a workplace environment.

I'm truly sorry to hear you work at such an awful place that you might consider this acceptable, let alone understandable.

Its acceptable when liability concerns (which are great in the USA) are taken into account.

Unless you have deep pockets and don't mind paying several hundred thousand dollars out in settlements at a time.

Re: Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable

#117

Post by nzoschke »

23david wrote: post #114
nzoschke wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is also talking about the software tools that glue everything together. > Open source infrastructure refers to all the tools that help developers build software. On a deep level, it includes physical things like servers, but closer to the surface, it also includes things like programming languages, frameworks, and libraries. I also don't follow the AWS -> not open logic. I lease resources in someone else'…

Providing open-source clients does not make AWS an open ecosystem. If anything, my sense is that the overall direction of the AWS platform has been to get more and more proprietary and closed with initiatives like Lambda and Redshift that can't exist at all outside AWS. Rather than being some indication of the openness of the platform, I'd say that having open-source clients and sdks simply makes good business sense.…

Redshift is Postgres 8 something. It has proprietary extensions but I've had a really easy time getting data in and out in my limited usage.

I saw a local Lambda emulator today on HN.

But I do understand your concern. Software on AWS has an serious gravity and is hard to move.

I totally understand the CF challenge. I'm locked into that tool too. Terraform is great but doesn't really offer anything to replace the deepest parts of CF.

Which brings us back to the article. More funding for tools in the space would be huge for all of us.

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