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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

#121

Post by kalaksi »

DeathArrow wrote: post #60
jillesvangurp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing. My conjecture is that open source is polished enough for most customers to use when there are commercial interests implied. Linux on the server is a resounding success, Linux desktop not so much.

I disagree about the desktop not being a success but I guess it depends on how you define success. It's true that it's not as popular as some other OSes.

Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

#122

Post by eesmith »

poincaredisk wrote: post #74
sph wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet what "sells" about VSCode is the closed-source features, not the open source core. Everybody uses VScode today because of collaboration features and Copilot integration. VSCodium is very niche.

Citation needed? I use vscodium explicitly for its license, but my friends and coworkers who use vscode don't use collaboration features and copilot anyway and could use vscodium as well if they cared. What sells vscode is that it's a nice extensible cross platform IDE filling a niche between "just use vim" and "full blown jetbrains IDE for every language that you use".

https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ - "Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture"

> Whilst Visual Studio Code is "open-source" (as per the OSD) the value-add which transforms the editor into anything of value ("what people actually refer to when they talk about using VSCode") is far from open and full of intentionally designed minefields that often makes using Visual Studio Code in any other way than what Microsoft desires legally risky...

Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

#123

Post by pjmlp »

surfingdino wrote: post #81
pjmlp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice explanation, except IBM has been one of the largest Linux contributors since forever, they saw it as a means to reduce Aix development costs. Linux only took off during the dotcom days as IBM, Oracle and Compaq started adopting it into commercial workloads, back in 2000. Visual Studio Code isn't in the same ballpark as Visual Studio. It was already an Azure project, as the Monaco editor, and it was a way to kill…

Linux took off when PCs were finally able to run operating systems with virtual memory. All of a sudden devs did not need to pay for licences for C/C++ compilers and other dev tools, but most importantly they no longer had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Unix workstations or servers. It coincided with the commercialisation of the Internet (it started as a non-commercial project funded by DARPA).

Linux was nowhere around when PCs were already running OS/2 and Windows NT, it was something to toy around at home, for doing university homework, and only because Windows NT POSIX wasn't good enough.

Had Microsoft known better, and Linux would never taken off on PC.

Paying for software was never an issue back then, piracy was quite common, you could get whatever you wanted on the countries where street bazaars are a common thing.

Check the list, make your order, come around the following week.

Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

#124

Post by axegon_ »

jcgrillo wrote: post #75
axegon_ wrote: post #36

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.…

Not necessarily. In my experience large corporations have a ton of internal tooling that no one knows about, even internally. Say in a company with 6000 employees scattered around the globe, tough luck knowing whether some developer made a one-off tool to debug something and used the company's LDAP to authenticate, and then the app connects to some db full of stuff. Years back I stumbled upon such a tool that had a web shell that allowed you to do pretty much anything using some dev's account - anyone with a company email could access it. This is far more frequent than you might think in large corporations. In small companies, typically everyone has access to everything and if that isn't the case, more often than not, you will ask someone to go and fetch something for you and the third time around, they will get fed up with it and give you full access so you don't bother them anymore. 6 months down the line, everyone has access to everything. Or if a small to mid-sized company sees people that clearly know what they are doing, they commonly give them full access to everything so they can get on with it. Like at my current job I've had root access to everything, everywhere since day 1.

Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

#125

Post by jcgrillo »

okwhateverdude wrote: post #107
jcgrillo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Why do so few make the choice? 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…

There are three big risks I see in depending on vendors:

1. You aren't average. Market forces might not align with your use case. The pricing model might change, or it might happen that you find out later it doesn't scale well for your business.

2. They might leave you suddenly. For example, all the google "products" (quotes because there is actually only one--ads) that have disappeared over the years. Even when an open source dependency suffers a cataclysmic licensing event, you can still fork it and carry on, provided you've both chosen your dependencies wisely and hired the people capable of maintaining them.

3. By choosing a vendor you're making a commitment to ossifying a part of your stack. The observability example is a good one here. At the companies I've worked for who do all their logging, metrics, alerting, etc in-house, developers aren't afraid to use the tools. The tools adapt to the requirements, whether it's cost efficiency, features, whatever. At the companies where we've used vendors everyone's perpetually afraid of increasing the monthly bill, and nobody has a say in deciding what goes on the product roadmap. To be clear, this might be the right trade.

Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

#126

Post by rubymamis »

hggigg wrote: post #99

They are missing something major here and getting bogged down in some technicalities. Open source has no alternative to big tech because big tech commoditised stuff that's useful whereas open source commoditised stuff that is interesting to the developers. When I sit down at my mac, I have a working and very polished calendar, mail client, todo list, contacts, note taking app, music player, browser, photo editing and…

Very much agree. I made a cross-platform and open-source note-taking app[1] in Qt C++ but never really talked to common end users and their needs, just built for myself.

Now that I'm working on a proprietary version[2] (with a block editor I rewrote from scratch), I'm talking to these end users and understand their frustration in using my product. For example, many users had issues discovering the different features of the app, so I created a toolbar, which much helped. This is just one example.

[1] https://notes-foss.com/

[2] https://get-notes.com/

Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

#127

Post by pjmlp »

teddyh wrote: post #54
dtquad wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta was always planning to release LLaMA to the public. They were literally sending LLaMA 1 to anyone with a ".edu" email.

Bell Labs did the same with Unix, but Unix was still not open source. This is why we run GNU/Linux today, not Unix™.

There is still enough Unix™ around, including from a well know fruit company.

Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

#128

Post by pjmlp »

DeathArrow wrote: post #60
jillesvangurp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing. My conjecture is that open source is polished enough for most customers to use when there are commercial interests implied. Linux on the server is a resounding success, Linux desktop not so much.

Even on the server you're better off with the custom cloud offerings than using an off-the-shelf image.

That is the thing, what really won on server and embedded was UNIX/POSIX, and while GNU/Linux is the cheapest and more flexible way to achieve that, it isn't the only one, and the best experience is anyway with vendor custom distributions with their special sauce, not the pure FOSS one.

Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

#129

Post by blackoil »

keelhaule wrote: post #19

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…

ARM isn't open source. Companies like MS and Google use OSS that complement themselves but the core money makers are closed source and closely guarded.
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