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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

#51

Post by pjmlp »

sirdvd wrote: post #33
la_fayette wrote: post #11

You 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...

I can tell that a few years ago a couple of NRW libraries used a SuSE variant in kiosk mode, apparently not everyone found that great, as some of the ones I regularly visit now have Windows in kiosk mode, with the usual set of Office, Adobe and other packages.

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

#52

Post by sph »

DeathArrow wrote: post #48
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…

>I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. So you would pick a software costing 1 million over a software that is 90% as effective but costs 1 thousand?

Weird question. There is no 100% effective software, there is no way to measure effectiveness (what sells in enterprise is marketing and a good sales team, not "effectiveness") and it all depends on the budget.

If it fits your budget, and a commercial product has a good sales team (vs a cheaper opensource one with zero marketing), the commercial product is gonna get chosen even if it costs infinitely more. That's basically IBM and Oracle's play book.

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

#53

Post by DeathArrow »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #2

Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech. Hard to be an alternative when you serve the same master.

> Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech.

People have to put food on their table and can't work for free. Someone has to pay for that work. Nobody will pay for it if he can't extract some benefits from doing so.

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

#54

Post by teddyh »

dtquad wrote: post #34
nrnrjrjrj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#55

Post by pjmlp »

keelhaule wrote: post #19

I 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…

Nice explanation, except IBM has been one of the largest Linux contributors since forever, they saw it as a means to reduce Aix development costs.

Linux only took off during the dotcom days as IBM, Oracle and Compaq started adopting it into commercial workloads, back in 2000.

Visual Studio Code isn't in the same ballpark as Visual Studio. It was already an Azure project, as the Monaco editor, and it was a way to kill Atom.

ARM is only successful on mobile devices and Apple hardware.

If you mean ARM on server, the most successful company, Ampere, is largely owned by Oracle, and there are some ongoing discussions about a full acquisition.

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

#56

Post by whoitwas »

DeathArrow wrote: post #50
whoitwas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyone used them for free, then they were acquired by giant companies who charge for their use.

How is software an utility?

analogy: A similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar.

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

#57

Post by sph »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #44
eesmith wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio Code is not open source. GitHub is not open source.

I mean, technically true, but from context we can infer they were referring to vscode, which is open source. Visual Studio Code is vscode + ms stuff, but at it's core the project is MIT, and has been recently forked by a lot of teams (cursor, void, that fruit scandal, etc).

Yet what "sells" about VSCode is the closed-source features, not the open source core. Everybody uses VScode today because of collaboration features and Copilot integration. VSCodium is very niche.

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

#58

Post by pjmlp »

whoitwas wrote: post #46
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…

License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyone used them for free, then they were acquired by giant companies who charge for their use.

It would exist as I knew it until 2000's, and hence why I see a parallel where current non-copyleft adoption has taken us back to.

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

#59

Post by auggierose »

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…

So if Adobe open-sources all of their software tomorrow, that would not impact their business?

> In truth the license doesn't matter.

Come on. What matters is the way the business extracts value from you, and the license is part of that. Especially when the software you produce is so great that nobody needs to be called, because it just works.

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

#60

Post by DeathArrow »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #12
thierrydamiba wrote: post #2

Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech. Hard to be an alternative when you serve the same master.

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…

> Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing.

My conjecture is that open source is polished enough for most customers to use when there are commercial interests implied. Linux on the server is a resounding success, Linux desktop not so much.

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