Who eats who in open source • Hacker News Board

Re: Who eats who in open source

#41

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 11:33 AM UTC

rienbdj wrote: post #38

dredmorbius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL doesn't protect the Free Software business. It protects the Free Software code itself. The fact that a company backing an AGPL-licensed work goes under isn't the direct concern of the license. The fact that the code itself remains as Free Software, with a source-release obligation, even when run as an online service, is the principle concern. Copyleft free software licenses, as with the GPL and AGPL, promote the…

You're right, but there's another concern: who maintains the software? The original developers forming a company that supports development is not possible if the company is not protected by the license in some way.

Without the provisions of the AGPL, an Amazon could co-opt some GPL'd (or even more permissively / less copylefted licence: MIT/BSD as examples), make extensive changes, use the code as part of an online service, and have no obligation to provide source to user(s).

Under the AGPL, the source-disclosure provision persists.

In both cases, Amazon is doing software development, but in the first, they're not contributing back to the codebase. In the second, they are.

Amazon are maintaining the software. Along with other users.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#42

Post by exceptione » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 12:27 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #35

henryfjordan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience I feel the opposite is true. There are many open source projects that are at least on par with their proprietary counterparts. Postgres is competitive with every SQL DB I've heard of except maybe in some niche use-cases. Redis is open source and incredibly performant. S…

There are two major dimensions to the operational cost weaknesses of open source. Neither is guaranteed to be meaningfully exploited by proprietary software in any particular case. Since we are talking about operational costs, this is almost entirely about data infrastructure software, not things like React. First, there is a vast amount of supported operational tooling that is simply missing from open source ecosyst…

> I can guarantee data intensive businesses who make competent use of open source that I can reduce their infrastructure costs by 4x with ease

I am interested in your perspective and experiences.

> Oracle and SQL Server have architectures that are as obsolete as PostgreSQL, they don't compete on the basis of being modern, efficient designs but on the basis of having dramatically better operational tooling.

What dramatically better tooling does SQL Server has?

> PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Redis (I've used all three operationally) have several times the hardware requirements to deliver a workload in practice than is required with a state-of-the-art architecture.

What should I think of when you talk about state-of-the-art architecture? And what would replace aforementioned tools?

What should the open source offerings do to win you over?

Re: Who eats who in open source

#43

Post by siscia » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

I wonder if advancement in orchestrator will shift the balance. There is a lot of effort into putting human knowledge into software, so that it can react to unexpected situation and self heal. K8s operators to be specific.

If this software works well enough, what would be the competitive advantage of AWS?

Re: Who eats who in open source

#44

Post by leoc » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #15

> The unexpected and asymmetric competition from the clouds confounds open source companies, who must confront the fact the competitive advantage of knowing their software better than anyone else isn’t the insurmountable moat they had hoped. It is never fun to wake up and discover your product is now just a feature of a broader offering, but this is what is happening with software. Claiming open source is eating the…

> (in Robert Metcalfe’s infamous expression, cross-platform web browsers & the Internet would reduce Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”)

Compare the number of platforms nowadays which (to varying extents) treat Linux as a free set of buggy device drivers.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#45

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 1:30 PM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #9

I work at Pivotal and disagree with a fair amount of the characterisation thereof, but my bias is mostly informed by actually working there for the last 6 years. Let's look at the heart of the argument instead. > If you squint, open source could be seen as a very generous charitable donation to some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet. Broadly: yes. Except backwards. FLOSS can be seen as a public…

> A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good.

True in the general case of course, but there are arrangements that can be used to mitigate this. Crowdfunding with a threshold mechanism, ala Kickstarter, is one of these - reaching the crowdfunding threshold is a stable equilibrium. The intuition is that if every funder's contribution is critical to the threshold being reached, the funders are essentially "matching" each other's contribution, and thus providing a successful incentive even in a strictly rational sense.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#46

Post by zzzcpan » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

siscia wrote: post #43

I wonder if advancement in orchestrator will shift the balance. There is a lot of effort into putting human knowledge into software, so that it can react to unexpected situation and self heal. K8s operators to be specific. If this software works well enough, what would be the competitive advantage of AWS?

K8s is not an advancement in orchestration and is very much on the AWS side in this, deeply integrating with proprietary cloud services that do their own operations and infrastructure, not even considering open sourcing those services and their supporting infrastructure nor working towards alternatives to replace them. It's just that the same thing that makes AWS piles of money is the same thing the company behind k8s is after, so they are definitely not going to advance k8s in a way that commoditizes AWS. Not that they are even capable of doing so.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#47

Post by tyingq » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 2:07 PM UTC

I'm skeptical about "multi cloud eats cloud". If you're going to be boxed into using a lowest common denominator of services, cloud has less value. You might as well jump straight to hosted bare metal. The skill sets needed aren't much different than multi-cloud, and it's much cheaper.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#48

Post by Andrex » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 2:14 PM UTC

> Pivotal got eaten by “Dockernetes” aka containers (ironically because Google was pissed off about Hadoop, but that is another story)

Would anyone care to give a brief summary? It's the first I've heard of this.

Re: Who eats who in open source

#49

Post by type0 » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 2:28 PM UTC

jdsully wrote: post #22

wmf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.

That's just simple competition that we've always had. Microsoft working on a competitor to your product was the huge fear of the 90s. Cloud providers competing with your own source code is a new phemonema. The original thesis would be that brand loyalty would be strong enough to prevent forking like this. "You don't want that third-rate version, get the real thing from the original authors!". It appears that the cust…

And in this case the brand loyalty of AWS is stronger

Re: Who eats who in open source

#50

Post by detaro » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

jdsully wrote: post #22

wmf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.

That's just simple competition that we've always had. Microsoft working on a competitor to your product was the huge fear of the 90s. Cloud providers competing with your own source code is a new phemonema. The original thesis would be that brand loyalty would be strong enough to prevent forking like this. "You don't want that third-rate version, get the real thing from the original authors!". It appears that the cust…

In many businesses, getting permission to buy/license from a new supplier is way more effort than just selecting another option at the cloud provider you're already set up with.