Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by jillesvangurp » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 4:10 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #138

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…

> 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. I don't think this is actually true: 1. The Google codebase is on the order of billions of lines of code, not millions. 2. It's basically all written in house, from the threading libraries and core standard libraries up. The parts that are open source (e.g. Linux, Ope…

Webkit still is open source. Apple never owned the full copyright to it and they would have to do a complete rewrite to get out of that license, which is GPL and always has been. Safari is indeed closed source. But it uses webkit. For the same reason, Google is stuck with the same license and copyright situation. Whether they like it or not, webkit/kml/chromium are forever GPL. Nothing short of a complete rewrite can fix that.

I think you are grossly underestimating how dependent both companies are on various open source projects. It's definitely true that they also do a lot of in house code of course; and they also contribute a lot of their own projects. And of course especially Google is a repeat offender when it comes to creating a lot of dead projects, reinventing the wheel, etc. It looks like their attempt to create their own operating system kernel is slowly dying now. Fuchsia is all but dead at this point. So they are back to Linux being their only future. There's the whole Kotlin ecosystem, which they helped create, which is starting to compete with flutter. And so on.

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

#172

Post by jcgrillo » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 4:24 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #169

paulnpace wrote: post #149

A sales position I was working in 2017 was the first time I'd used Windows 10. I had a very urgent issue with a customer who needed our small business to confirm a change they were requesting. I needed to go through the technical details of the customer's request by reviewing their documents over the phone on my computer. As I was on the phone and going through their documents, Windows 10 decided to install updates.…

If you did have a proper IT department, they would have forced you to keep your computer up to date with security and other patches anyway. All that posts like this do is document people's irresponsibility in keeping their business-owned computer secured.

Isn't this post describing exactly the situation of a forced update interrupting work, though? Doesn't matter who does it, the effect is the same. The difference is if your IT department controls the software you at least have the option to make it less intrusive.

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

#173

Post by jcgrillo » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 4:27 PM UTC

jazz9k wrote: post #148

dtquad wrote: post #32

80% of Linux code contributions come from US big tech.

If you look at well maintained OSS projects (apache, php, etc). It's the same. Companies with the cash to hire developers are the reason they are successful.

So this means the system is working pretty ok, tech companies are sharing the common burden of things that affect them but don't confer competitive advantage? It seems more active participation by governments (if they can figure out how to do it) would only make things better?

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

#174

Post by eesmith » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 4:44 PM UTC

kkfx wrote: post #145

eesmith wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FLOSS is the personal computer model, where you own the computer and have final say on what data is processed on your machine. If you can't try to make your software or computer lie in on your behalf, it is not FOSS. The big tech model where trust is in the company, not the person. Business love the big tech model because it's easier to let a few credit card companies deal with the trust issue than establish a trust…

I mean the "mainframe model" of a single large system and many dumb terminals, now dumb terminals are named enpoints and the mainframe is someone else computer across the world. The trust problem is easy to solve, with an open society: as long as payments got processed with open APIs and the government takes care of the frauds there is no trust problem. I do not need to trust a third party with eCash, I only need to…

I'm pretty sure I know where you are coming from, but I disagree with your interpretation.

The centralized trust model does not require mainframes connected-to by dumb terminals. We need only look at how Visa in its first few decades used carbon copy devices and signatures, along with eventual consistency across a network of mainframes, to gain market power.

"The trust problem is easy to solve" is laughable, as you well understand by the need for "the law enforcing it and the schools teaching it to the masses."

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

#175

Post by paulnpace » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 4:48 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #169

paulnpace wrote: post #149

A sales position I was working in 2017 was the first time I'd used Windows 10. I had a very urgent issue with a customer who needed our small business to confirm a change they were requesting. I needed to go through the technical details of the customer's request by reviewing their documents over the phone on my computer. As I was on the phone and going through their documents, Windows 10 decided to install updates.…

If you did have a proper IT department, they would have forced you to keep your computer up to date with security and other patches anyway. All that posts like this do is document people's irresponsibility in keeping their business-owned computer secured.

This rates among the most arrogant pompous asshole responses I've ever encountered on HN. I ran updates exery single morning to avoid exactly this problem.

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

#176

Post by svilen_dobrev » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 5:12 PM UTC

roywashere wrote: post #103

tsimionescu wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It works, but just for _some_ solutions. For instance, there are multiple providers of support for PostgreSQL. And there are many companies offering support/consulting for WordPress. 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…

> losing the skill to actually run your own hardware

i see a trend in recent years in losing the skill for making proper software too - Something that works and is usable and is not about changing colors and pixels and protocols everyday for the sake of it. Maybe the opposite trend of the everybody-can-program since 1995? Or maybe not - not sure how ML-generated stuff will impact all this.

btw there was ~2021 talk/article by same guy about how outsourcing-everything leads to total deskilling:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

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

#177

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 5:20 PM UTC

Cupprum wrote: post #112

poincaredisk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Do you by any chance work with Python? If i recall correctly, the default Python library for VSCode doesnt work out of the box in VSCodium, as its pulled from MS servers, which VSCodium does not allow. I think you need to enable this connectivity on your own. So my understanding is that by “crippling” the maket, its more convenient for people to just use VSCode.

I mean, I used pyright (the free one) in emacs for years, and it was fine. Pip installable et al, maybe this all happens automagically in VSCode?

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

#178

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 5:22 PM UTC

vanviegen wrote: post #94

DandyDev wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say that is the reason, then that seems a very valid reason, right? Accountability is important, especially in large organizations. I guess what ticks me off a bit is the trope of dissing on management for saying 'no' but leaving out all the relevant context that might show management to be right. Don't get me wrong, I've seen my own fair share of bad management. But it's not so black and white when it comes to…

> Accountability is important, especially in large organizations. Why? So we'll have someone to blame when things inevitably go wrong? In my experience, the people who like to say the buck stops with them are nowhere to be found when that happens. I much prefer organizations focussed on actually getting things right, instead of worrying about who takes the blame.

I once had a few drinks with an Oracle salesperson many moons ago, and he did a pretty good job of convincing me that they sold risk minimisation over personnel changes to my uber boss, which honestly makes more and more sense to me as I continue in my career.

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

#179

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 5:28 PM UTC

paulnpace wrote: post #175

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you did have a proper IT department, they would have forced you to keep your computer up to date with security and other patches anyway. All that posts like this do is document people's irresponsibility in keeping their business-owned computer secured.

This rates among the most arrogant pompous asshole responses I've ever encountered on HN. I ran updates exery single morning to avoid exactly this problem.

You "ran updates every single morning" but somehow did not see the popups Windows puts up warning about required patching and did not take the "pause updates for up to 7 days" option that Windows provides? Sorry but that doesn't sound very believable.

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

#180

Post by teddyh » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 6:14 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #164

teddyh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, macOS is FreeBSD, not the Unix from Bell Labs.

macOS is many things, a bit of NeXTSTEP, a pinch of Mach, q.b. BSD, and a UNIX™ certification from OpenGroup.

A UNIX™ certification is not the same as being actual code from Unix™.

NeXTSTEP was 4.3BSD plus Mach, using Display Postscript as its windowing system and TIFF as its image format, supporting transparency for icons. macOS is FreeBSD plus Mach, using Display PDF as its windowing format and PNG as its image format, supporting transparency for icons. Basically NeXTSTEP but every component upgraded to its then-modern equivalent. (Except Objective C, they kept that.)