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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

#181

Post by bruce511 »

chii wrote: post #39
bruce511 wrote: post #29

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…

> 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.

>> If it was an open source software, you will have the option to go to a competing vendor.

You miss the point. Enterprises don't go looking for another vendor. Vendors come to them with a sales offering.

If I'm running SQL Server the I pretty much know where I stand with Microsoft, and there are endless MS approved support people.

With PostgreSQL some vendor has to come to me and convince me to switch. PostgreSQL is really well supported, and it's at least an option. 99% of Open Source though has 1 or 0 support entities, and 0 sales people.

Sure, with PostgreSQL I can do my own research. I might even have skills to do it myself. But now I have to explain my choices all the way up the ladder.

Am I going to use an OSS accounting system with no sales people? With no support people? Or am I gonna pay $99 a year or whatever for QuickBooks?

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

#182

Post by pjmlp »

teddyh wrote: post #180
pjmlp wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equ…

Where do you mention Unix™ is the original source code, and not UNIX™ as defined by OpenGroup, the owners of UNIX™?

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

I know pretty well how NeXTSTEP used to be, my graduation project was to port a visualization framework from NeXTSTEP/Objective-C to Windows/C++.

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

#184

Post by surfingdino »

pasc1878 wrote: post #96
surfingdino wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 took off AFTER PCs were finally able to run operating systems with virtual memory. I was using VM systems running on PCS from 1989 (OS/2) Linux only started in 1991 and did not take off for say 10 years, by then Windows NT existed. So VM was necessary for Linux but was not the reason for it taking off. In my experience Linux came in for servers replacing other Unix servers. Windows NT servers continued for some…

Linux definitely replaced Unix servers. I remember calling Digital Equipment Corporation rep in the UK in 1994 for a quote for a server and was told I'd need to pay a minimum of 100,000 GBP for a minimum running config. That's 200,000+ GBP in today's money for something that had less power and storage than a RaspberryPi with an 32GB SD card. Yes, the price included the license for the operating system and the http server.

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

#185

Post by kkfx »

eesmith wrote: post #174
kkfx wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Well, easy to solve, means the solution is simple, not that reaching/implementing the solution is simple. Laws enforcing and school teaching are very complex, but the solution is damn simple. It's the road to it the complex part.

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

#186

Post by eesmith »

kkfx wrote: post #185
eesmith wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Well, easy to solve, means the solution is simple, not that reaching/implementing the solution is simple. Laws enforcing and school teaching are very complex, but the solution is damn simple. It's the road to it the complex part.

So like how single-payer universal healthcare in the US is also a simple solution.

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

#189

Post by wrs »

whoitwas wrote: post #170
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. " The rise of the Internet and the dot-com boom happened largely without OSS, on proprietary UNIXes, proprietary web server engines, and proprietary database engines. FAANG and other high tech businesses can easily afford very expensive servers and datacenters to house them thanks to the very very fat profit margins. They can also easily afford the cost of an OS…

This is nonsense. Consumer workstations were proprietary. The internet was made by government grants and us.

Not sure who “us” is meant to be, but the first Internet boom (1995-2000) used a whole lot of Solaris, Windows, and Cisco. Of course there was plenty of OSS too, but Linux servers, or Intel servers, weren’t the standard.

I remember visiting early Hotmail and their sharded “capital unit” was a great big Sun storage server and a bunch of Intel desktop towers running BSD. The latter was considered rather wild at the time.

Last I checked, some eBay URLs still had “ebayISAPI.dll” in them, which is a remnant of that period.

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

#190

Post by pabs3 »

dmd wrote: post #167
pabs3 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the first result for "museum cataloging software" in DuckDuckGo, CollectiveAccess? This was without adding an "open source" qualifier. It seems to be in use in the industry too. https://www.collectiveaccess.org/ https://www.dublincore.org/groups/tools/dc2008/dc2008_seth_k... Another one apparently in use in the UK is CollectionSpace: https://collectionstrust.org.uk/software/collectionspace/ http://www.colle…

Yes, there are plenty of them. That is not the point I was making.

Hmm, then your point wasn't clear.
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