Just migrated from GitHub to Gitlab, also finally made the move away from macOS towards Ubuntu as my primary machine. Ive been using Macs since almost 15 years, enjoyed it all the way but FOSS comms snd tech is the future.
Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
31–40 of 199 posts
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#3280% of Linux code contributions come from US big tech.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#33You are mentioning that an experiment with nextcloud has failed? I cannot find any evidence regarding that, even more I see it highly used among governments and municipalities in the EU.
Tangentially, although there's been sporadic setbacks, as Limux[1] in 2017, there are new commitments to linux[2] that I hope will lead the way, at least in Europe.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
[2]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/germa...
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#34I 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…
Open source won those battles but the war doesn't end. The next fight is AI and thanks to a leak we have open source (weights and inference) models now. Without that leak we would not have the ecosystem evolving around Llama.
Meta was always planning to release LLaMA to the public. They were literally sending LLaMA 1 to anyone with a ".edu" email.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of going to big businesses for software services and support is that most customers don’t have needs that are large enough to justify the full-time staff needed for top-notch support. So companies that provide services amortise this over many customers and can employ n dozen full-time staff for a particular subsystem when the average customer might only need them a few times a year. So the tradeoff makes se…
It depends? Sometimes it is the feature set, but for example with future VMware pricing we'd be cheaper off hiring two full-time staff and running proxmox, which is currently being evaluated.
This depends on the level of support you need. Two members of staff might be fine for non-critical systems but it’s not enough to support anything that needs to be up 24/7. There’s not enough coverage and less than zero slack. If my alternative is to hire two people, I would rather spend the money with a company that is large enough to employ more people, in different timezones. But if most support can be handled by a larger body of existing staff and you only need specialists occasionally, then it might make sense.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#36As 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 anything about anyone from a single leak. So over the past few years I've been slowly cutting down my dependency on cloud services. Nextcloud was the first big step, a zfs pool for backups, a few custom protocols for alerting and kill switches and that's it.
On paper this sounds really good but there's a lot of overhead when it comes to maintenance. "Yeah, it's just one more docker-compose.yml, big whoop"(yes kubernetes is pointless overkill if you are the sole user). I've said that too many times and it's not true cause it only takes one small thing that you overlooked and you have to spend a day or two to put everything back up together.
Another thing worth mentioning is that open source can be a good alternative but open source does not mean free or cheap. For instance, I've gotten really into drones and radio communications lately. Take hackrf and the baby brother that is flipper zero - they are both completely open source but neither of them is cheap. In fact, they are really expensive - they are effectively open source ASIC's. I'm willing to bet that north of 80% of the cost is down to the software and not the hardware - because polishing a piece of software to the point where you can pick up a product and use it without effort or a steep learning curve, involves a ton of work on behalf of developers and UX/I people.
And you can't really cut off all big tech - open source phones are BAD, you don't really have a good alternative to google maps and waze, you still heavily rely on search engines and a few dozen services if you start digging deeper. There are also a number of services which do not have an even half-decent open source alternative. Also not everyone has the skills to set up and run these things.
I think the big case in favor of self-hosting whatever you can is that while open source is far from immune to leaks, if it resides in your private network(which it should) without access to the rest of the world, those holes will eventually be patched and you can take action in the meantime - stop the service, block a few ports, etc. The odds of you personally getting affected are pretty low. Now if a leak happens in big tech, there's nothing you can do about it and by the time you learn about it, it's often too late. Honestly, this is the number one reason I'm doing this to myself.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#37Let's simplify: FLOSS domain is the internet domain, where anyone own a desktop, a homeserver, a company machine room etc. The big tech model is the old mainframe model, or the modern web where only few own anything.
Try to mimicking them is a waste of time and can't work, pushing the society toward ownership and freedom might work, because in a way or another we will end up there being technically the sole solution.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#38I 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…
That's the main point. No one buys software, they buy solutions. Accounting is a good example. I use a SaaS solution, but it doesn't matter because I could also take all my invoices to an accountant, and the effect would be the same.
Also, mixing open licenses into business doesn't usually make sense.
I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#39I 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.
Re: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
#40I 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…
That's the main point. No one buys software, they buy solutions. Accounting is a good example. I use a SaaS solution, but it doesn't matter because I could also take all my invoices to an accountant, and the effect would be the same. Also, mixing open licenses into business doesn't usually make sense. I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open sou…
> I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source.
I totally agree with this. And not just businesses, individuals too.