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Open Source does not win by being cheaper

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Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#271

Post by TeMPOraL »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #266
TeMPOraL wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your browser. Your video editor. Your DAW. I'll grant you those, though I've been hearing noise about DAWs starting to move to the browser. And, of course, you omitted image editing , which at this point is almost completely taken over by a small number of SaaS offerings (Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Canva). > Your OS. I'd wish. At this point Microsoft is, both explicitly and unironically, saying that Windows "is a…

SaaS does not mean "the software opens a socket and communicates with a server for brief portions of its runtime". It does not mean "cloud-based". It does not mean whatever Microsoft wants it to mean. SaaS means that a substantial portion of the compute task associated with "an application" can only be completed via a server request (whether it's to initiate the compute task, or fetch the code that will run it, or so…

> SaaS means that a substantial portion of the compute task associated with "an application" can only be completed via a server request (whether it's to initiate the compute task, or fetch the code that will run it, or some combination of the two).

Does "ask for permission to run local code" count? Then modern video games, and quite a lot of other software, count. Per your "initiate the compute task", my robot vacuum is fully SaaS.

> It does not mean whatever Microsoft wants it to mean.

What Microsoft means fits your definition, they're just taking a soft approach - Windows now constantly fetches new code from the cloud, they're just not forcing it to be a required dependency, should you want to turn this behavior off.

Also remember I called out software being implicitly SaaS, not explicitly.

Related: forcing people away from Windows 7. Half a year ago, my wife was forced to upgrade her perfectly fine Windows 7 laptop to Windows 10, which she actively hates, because suddenly, third-party software like Spotify begun refusing to work, showing instead messages to the tune of "upgrade to newer Windows or GTFO". Yes, it's not Microsoft doing this per se, but the effect is the same. Implicit SaaS is a software ecosystem problem.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#272

Post by palata »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #25

"Open Source" doesn't win, period, because it doesn't compete with anything. Open Source is not a business model or a product. It's an engineering widget. You can use it to build a product, or you can use it to make a jig to shore up an uneven table leg. Nobody cares about the license or whether they can read your code. They care if you build a product that solves their problem. You know why companies use Open Source…

> For the most part, Open Source products win by either being A) cheaper, B) Freemium, C) "Source-Available", D) being the incumbent, or E) a better product.

Nitpick: source-available is not open source, by definition.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#273

Post by TeMPOraL »

thfuran wrote: post #263
TeMPOraL wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything. Like e.g. my robot vacuum that I couldn't operate between 1600 yesterday and noon today, because the Internet was down and the robot insists on being able to talk with servers in China to be able to vacuum the floor. Same with my A/C and floor thermostats, except those at least have IR remotes or wall panels for local control. Of course, I am operating all those via an Open Source HomeAssistant app, conne…

Oh, yeah. There's a lot of iot webshit out there.

Worst thing is, you have little choice. In my case:

- There's approximately zero non-SaaS robot vacuums among the newer models. I gave up on this after a long search for something free of this insanity.

- With my A/C unit and thermostats, the brand and model choice was made by the people doing the installations. I'm not sure if there are non-cloud, network-controllable options anymore, and even if they were, I'd have to look for local HVAC companies that actually offer them.

- I spent much more time and money than is reasonable to have a fully-local networked baby cam, that doesn't leak videos to the cloud. Specifically, I had to buy a camera and two pieces of expensive network gear from Ubiquity (per HN advice, thank you), because that's apparently the only option in Europe (US folks have Amcrest), other than hacking something together from a spare Android phone, or webcams and Raspberry Pi. There's literally no other cloud-bullshit-free option I could find.

(The "baby cam" is at least made of professional, high-quality gear, so that's a silver lining, but I doubt normal people would be happy to spend €500+ just to keep the video stream in-house.)

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#274

Post by Applejinx »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #268
Applejinx wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So open source is only for people who are already wealthy enough to not need to make money In practice, yeah. Counts for me: I inherited enough money to develop the world around my open-source work, though I began that work while I was still extremely poor. Understand that what 'need to make money' means to a Silicon Valley tech bro, is one hell of a lot different than what it would mean to a normal person. If you l…

What's your project?

I'm Chris from Airwindows.

I've recently done a bunch of work on extending what's possible in slew clipping and slew softclipping, and I'm about to do my level best to provide legit big-analog-console sounds ITB as open source free software: that is through minimal but unorthodox DSP to target the end state of the sound rather than putting up GUIs and then using traditional DSP to imitate every last analog step in the process.

A recent milestone is Console Zero https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDAZTEUtSpk which is a bit of a radical experiment in applying only such mathematical calculations that preserve the mantissa of the floating-point value being worked on (where possible). This led to a 'switched' panner with a completely different (or absent!) pan law, in which every pan position retains the mantissa of the audio word, for an LCR-like effect where you also get a mid-right and mid-left position plus a whole array of increasingly hard-panned positions.

baconpaul from the Surge Synth project has helped me extend my codebase to things like VCV Rack support and is generally pleased with the relentless consistency of my code library (especially the VST2s which are all stereo and have no control variation beyond 0-1 inputs) and my ability to write notes and descriptions in such a way that he can write code to parse that and do things like bring all the plugins, INCLUDING what documentation they have, into a single package via elaborate scripting.

As a rule I put out a new open-source plugin under the MIT license every week. I am paid a bit over minimum wage by my Patreon, and if I didn't need or want to get studio gear to use and study, that would cover my cost of living handily :)

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#275

Post by pjmlp »

thinkmassive wrote: post #254
pjmlp wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now remove the ones with FAANG funding.

I’m not seeing the relevance. If you’re going to move the goalposts, you could at least explain why.

The whole point that I failed to fully express on my sentence, was how many of those projects are still relevant in 10 years from now, without the funding of commercial entities.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#276

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Applejinx wrote: post #274
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your project?

I'm Chris from Airwindows. I've recently done a bunch of work on extending what's possible in slew clipping and slew softclipping, and I'm about to do my level best to provide legit big-analog-console sounds ITB as open source free software: that is through minimal but unorthodox DSP to target the end state of the sound rather than putting up GUIs and then using traditional DSP to imitate every last analog step in th…

Hey Chris. Interesting HN nick :) Happy to be a Patreon supporter.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#277

Post by Applejinx »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #276
Applejinx wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Chris from Airwindows. I've recently done a bunch of work on extending what's possible in slew clipping and slew softclipping, and I'm about to do my level best to provide legit big-analog-console sounds ITB as open source free software: that is through minimal but unorthodox DSP to target the end state of the sound rather than putting up GUIs and then using traditional DSP to imitate every last analog step in th…

Hey Chris. Interesting HN nick :) Happy to be a Patreon supporter.

…wow. How'd you sneak in without me noticing?

I'm far from a Paul Davis, but if there's anything you'd like, let me know. Worst that can happen is I'll go 'I have no idea how to code that' :)

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#278

Post by dgudkov »

closeparen wrote: post #149
dgudkov wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that the big cloud is somehow more security-conscious? Because they said so?

The major cloud providers are serious engineering shops whose business and reputation actually depend on technical and operational competence. And the Silicon Valley community is full of current and former employees who will tell you what it's like inside.

In reality, their business and reputation don't depend on security mishaps, because they are too big to fail.

See this fresh thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702095

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#279

Post by closeparen »

dgudkov wrote: post #278
closeparen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major cloud providers are serious engineering shops whose business and reputation actually depend on technical and operational competence. And the Silicon Valley community is full of current and former employees who will tell you what it's like inside.

In reality, their business and reputation don't depend on security mishaps, because they are too big to fail. See this fresh thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702095

Nobody wins every single time against the most sophisticated attackers in the world. Microsoft put up a very respectable fight here. When a random small-to-medium enterprise IT department gets owned, it’s for some braindead stupid low-hanging-fruit reason. Attacks like this don’t happen because they are unnecessary.

Re: Open Source does not win by being cheaper

#280

Post by dgudkov »

closeparen wrote: post #279
dgudkov wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, their business and reputation don't depend on security mishaps, because they are too big to fail. See this fresh thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702095

Nobody wins every single time against the most sophisticated attackers in the world. Microsoft put up a very respectable fight here. When a random small-to-medium enterprise IT department gets owned, it’s for some braindead stupid low-hanging-fruit reason. Attacks like this don’t happen because they are unnecessary.

There was no respectable fight. They used the same signing key for all customers AND own corporate mail. It's a stupid rookie mistake. Exactly the type you would expect from a small-to-medium IT department.
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