The New Struggles Facing Open Source

An anonymous reader writes in with this story about the open source movement's contentious beginnings and the points of trouble it faces today. "The early days of open source were fraught with religious animosities we feared would tear apart the movement: free software fundamentalists haggling with open source pragmatists over how many Apache licenses would fit on the head of a pin. But once commercial interests moved in to plunder for profit, the challenges faced by open source pivoted toward issues of control. While those fractious battles are largely over, giving way to an era of relative peace, this seeming tranquility may prove more dangerous to the open source movement than squabbling ever did. Indeed, underneath this superficial calm, plenty of tensions simmer. Some are the legacy of the past decade of open source warfare. Others, however, break new ground and arguably threaten open source far more than the GPL-vs.-Apache battle ever did."

Comments

It's the cloud

[poet]

The cloud... GCE, AWS/EC2 etc.. that are the biggest threat to Open Source. Things like S3 with its proprietary protocol, developers falling in line for RDS and Dynamo. In short, locking yourself into very expensive, closed alternatives because: "It's easy". The battles never went away, they have just shifted. If you are paying attention and not spending all your time reading CTO magazine, you can see this.

Re:It's the cloud

[fatgraham]

Is there currently an open source alternative[to the closed alternative]?

Re:It's the cloud

[hax4bux]

Why is "the cloud" different from old school proprietary environments? 30 years ago, there were many versions of UNIX like platforms and odder things all promising to make your life easy if you just purchased from the same vendor. I think this is still a strategy at IBM.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Because "the cloud" offers outsourcing of the hardware management, something that wasn't really practical before. That's a big win for customers, especially smaller ones.

Re:It's the cloud

[mlts]

I remember seeing one OSS company working on a generic API that works with whatever one's cloud provider of choice, so it doesn't matter what is on the backend, one can spin up a VM, provision it, do what is needed, then kill it. For storage, any application can use the API, and it deals with whatever cloud storage provider one is using (S3, Azure.)

I do worry about cloud computing as a whole for the open aspect, as well as the security aspect... just for the fact that once you lose physical access, you only have someone's word that their security is up to snuff.

Of course, once people are locked into a specific cloud provider, it becomes quite hard to move to a different provider or back to in-house. That is a concern.

Re:It's the cloud

[poet]

Well Softlayer at least offers a SFTP interface to their S3 competitor.

The current "open source" alternative is to use APIs that already exist instead of creating new ones for no particular purpose.

Re:It's the cloud

[poet]

The difference is the value proposition. People are fooled into thinking the cloud is somehow cheaper (it isn't once you reach about 300.00-500.00/month.)

Re:It's the cloud

[Billly Gates]

I am happy to pay for software.

In economics both the worker and customer benefits. If you need something done and you have people waiting then there is no time to wait fixing or developing a system.

The free market provides solutions such as a more reliable virtualize and office suite over free alternatives. Namely MS office and vmware workstation over Libre office and virtualbox. Windows just works.

My comment just made a few red in the face but it's true. I have money. I need things to work without workarounds. I need a resume formatted properly on someone elses comouter. I need Windows 10 and 6 different vms to just work without crashing. Clouds are great too.

If these were all sooo horrible and anti user then the free market would have bankrupted them. You are denying a programmer financial incentive to serve his customers and me and my boss to buy software which pays for itself.

Re:It's the cloud

[mlts]

The problem is that with those environments, you could find a way to export your data from the locked down computer somehow... even if you turned your database tuples into a very nasty .CSV file and had some programmers import every table back into another format.

There is no physical access to the data in the cloud, and generally few companies will back up their data stored in the cloud... of if they do, the backups are stored in the cloud. So, in theory, all it takes is a bad guy to do a purge on the provider's side... and the cloud provider's client is now out of business.

Without physical possession, how can one actually say who is doing what with the data, and where it is located? For example, what keeps a US cloud provider from outsourcing capacity to a European provider... which outsources to a provider in a hostile country to the US.

At least with an IBM mainframe, you knew where your data was and could back it up. With cloud computing, all your critical business data can be destroyed or corrupted and nobody would be able to tell until it is too late.

Re:It's the cloud

[Billly Gates]

Let's say you own a business with 60 users in 2 locations? Does it make sense to blow 100,000 in an IT guy after taxes, Obama care, and other expenses, plus an additional 100,000 on servers and 50,000 on software?

Or go to office 365 and pay $900 a month and it just works?

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope nobody trusts with you of an IT budget much beyond 300-500/mo.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can run Office 365, you already have all those expenses.

Re:It's the cloud

[sanf780]

If there is value added on rolling your own, then any money spent on that IT guy is well spent. I suppose guys like the ones in Venezuela do not trust US companies anymore, so they have to roll their own.

Not that I trust the US companies that are under NSA rule these days.

Re:It's the cloud

[jythie]

Maybe, maybe not. Non-tech companies generally have pretty simple needs, often not enough to justify a full time person much less extract any value from, a you say, rolling their own.

Re:It's the cloud

[jythie]

There is a bit of poetic justice there. Back when GPLv3 was being debated, they made sure you could not do this type of thing with embedded products but, since many of their rank and file worked in the world of web servers, they also made sure the license did not cross those boundaries.

Re:It's the cloud

[goarilla]

Most companies just shrug the security risks away when they see what it'll cost them to do it right.
Businesses don't want to hire more people, especially not for the perceived money-eating departments like IT infrastructure.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

With the cloud...uh yeah, Kolab, OpenCloud, RedHat, Apache Cloudstack, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus...and these are just off the top of my head, granted I think about this stuff a lot, but yeah it's there. In fact most of the business stuff is fairly easy to replace with open source. There's always some cruft, but once everything moved to the web, it took a ton of compatibility issues with it. Everything can run in a browser.

Re:It's the cloud

[Njorthbiatr]

You're not paying shit for those expenses. Read what the poster actually said.

You're not paying $100k on an IT guy because you don't need an IT guy to set up all your server stuff.

You don't need to pay $100k on servers because you just pay MS for their cloud service. You don't need to pay for any cloud software because MS integrates it seamlessly into the user-side of Windows.

I run a personal version of Office 365 after switching over from LibreOffice and let me just say that the two aren't even remotely comparable. LibreOffice is at least a decade behind MS Office and I can't believe I ever thought them equal. People here are probably going to think I'm some shill for MS but I'm not, I'm just not afraid to throw a good product under the bus without ever trying it and getting a grip.

And I know there's a lot of MS hate from IT people, and sure, I hear you, they could do a lot more to make it better for all you tech wizards that know networking like the back of your hand. It's probably that which is clouding your judgment of their system. To a non-programmer, non-tech guy who thinks CLI is some small government agency and not common language infrastructure or command line interface, MS's stuff is gosh darn fantastic.

The interfaces, in general, are intuitive and easy to understand and everything usually just works out of the box. Usually. With the amount of software that goes into putting together an OS it would be surprising if it weren't. But that's okay. And Office 365 works with the cloud effortlessly. It's nowhere near as clunky as Google Drive (Do you really want to have to trust them with your data?). You just press save and it's in your document folder and on another document folder on your cloud service. Piece of cake.

I mean really what do you actually want here? Do you want Apple taking over and forcing everyone to use the same hardware and lock down everything you develop? Is that what you really want? Do you want Linux running hands free on every computer? That's fine too, but only if you're okay with having to deal with a market share that's all over the place because you have to deal with six or so distros and you can't rely on the user to be smart enough to figure out how to get your program to work on it.

That's what I really get from people on the MS hate train, just a common lack of understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels. I have seen so many bad UI designs and such that make perfect sense from a programming aspect, but are confusing and unintuitive for the person you designed them.

So don't bash MS for building a superior model to the open source alternatives for 90% of the market share.

Re:It's the cloud

[jbolden]

Can you clarify where you are getting this from. I'd put the price point much much higher (i.e. around 1000 servers and buying your own space via. fiber). I'll agree that paying by the minute for server runs about 4x the cost of by the month but there are clouds that sell more consistent usage.

Re:It's the cloud

[mspohr]

I get your point but Office365 is a terrible example. You'll still need the IT guy. Better example would be ChromeOS where you wouldn't need servers or software and hardware tech support could just be "grab a new cheap ChromeOS PC out of the supply closet and login".

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that open source software isn't the same thing as libre software right? Oh you don't, then why don't you let the adults converse. Windows doesn't "just work" any more than linux. The fact that the field of tech support is vat and global testifies to that. Linux was, for a very long time, just not ready. Now it is. You can buy a linux laptop, from a linux laptop vendor or a BSD server from a BSD vendor and it will just work, just like Windows. Also getting a fix from a vendor? That's truly laughable, even if you're paying you're really lucky if they give a damned.

Re:It's the cloud

[jean-guy69]

Yes, thanks to Joyent, who opensourced smartdatacenter the software they use to run their public cloud...

The hypervisor is SmartOS, it is based on Illumos (fork of opensolaris)..
It has ZFS, Dtrace, Zones (think virtualisation with bare metal performance), crossbow.. and KVM as they ported it..
You can run SmartOS instances inside Zones, and even Linux instances (by way of ABI translation), or any OS using KVM,
And even present you datacenter as an elastic docker host, as they implemented Docker API in SDC.. (sdc-docker aka Triton)

I'm currently evaluating it, so far I'm impressed..

Here are the github repository and the docs

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you now? I was a cluster operator in college. When you rent time on an timesharing platform, you don't have physical possession. You have convenience, and you pay trust to get that.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say you own a business with 60 users in 2 locations? Does it make sense to blow 100,000 in an IT guy after taxes, Obama care, and other expenses, plus an additional 100,000 on servers and 50,000 on software?

Or go to office 365 and pay $900 a month and it just works?

You don't need a 100,000 IT guy nor 100,000 on servers and 50,000 on software if you can just as easily replace this with an office 365 environment.

Re:It's the cloud

[DogDude]

No, Office 365 is a perfect example. That's cheap and easy.

Chrome OS is still a complete unknown. Windows 7 isn't rocket science, can do anything you need it to do, and is solid. Windows isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Re:It's the cloud

[chipschap]

I run a personal version of Office 365 after switching over from LibreOffice and let me just say that the two aren't even remotely comparable. LibreOffice is at least a decade behind MS Office and I can't believe I ever thought them equal.

I'm no fan of MS or MS Office, and I use Linux/LibreOffice myself. But I'm willing to try to be open-minded and listen to the other side, and you seem willing to present it in a logical fashion. Can you say in what way or ways LibreOffice lags MS Office so badly? I'm not talking about obscure features used by only a few people. A decade of lag implies some really fundamental problems. Can you elaborate?

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Because pre-GPL3, you could take FOSS (and can take many other OSS too) code that the intent was that the code be available for tinkering and allowing the author to benefit from others benefiting from using the programmers code and never give back and lock out anyone else from gaining from the open source advantages that the cloud houses benefited from.

It was closed source taking without copyright being violated.

Closed source companies have the BSA to knock doors down and demand (even if it's not legal) that you do not let anyone else have the code, never mind if you yourself are no longer using it, or even have never used it.

Open source don't necessarily get paid in money, but in tech sharing, and lawyers don't want paying in anything other than money (or a share in the company profits).

Re:It's the cloud

[Junta]

It's nowhere near as clunky as Google Drive (Do you really want to have to trust them with your data?)

If you don't trust Google, then why trust Microsoft? The degree of trust in the solution should be skeptical. This is of course likely to be fine by a lot of people, but we shouldn't pretend MS is a more or less trustworthy entity than any of their competitors at this junction. Ideally the protection of the data and the storage of the data are provided by two distinct entities (and the protection code audited for security and to be sure it is doing what it promises).

Do you want Apple taking over and forcing everyone to use the same hardware and lock down everything you develop?

Nope, but MS would gladly do that in a heartbeat if they got enough clout. Same goes for Google or really any sufficiently 'successful' commercial entity. This is why mono

In general I think I understand your point, but anything getting a monopolistic hold on a market generally does not go nice places for the consumers.

Re:It's the cloud

[phantomfive]

I run a personal version of Office 365 after switching over from LibreOffice and let me just say that the two aren't even remotely comparable. LibreOffice is at least a decade behind MS Office and I can't believe I ever thought them equal. People here are probably going to think I'm some shill for MS but I'm not, I'm just not afraid to throw a good product under the bus without ever trying it and getting a grip.

Shill doesn't matter......but bad arguments and lousy writing does.

You are a person who just wrote an entire paragraph saying how great Office 365 is, and how horrible LibreOffice is, without giving a single concrete reason why. Would it have been so hard to say, "I don't like how LibreCalc handle equations" or even "the icons are ugly?" But you have nothing. That's why people accuse you of being a shill.

Re:It's the cloud

[Junta]

I don't know about his cut off point (might be on the low side), but there is an inflection point where the providers economies of scale aren't adding value for your organization and instead you just are paying for their costs and their profit.

If you are effectively tying up more than a rack of real equipment in two availability zones or more, you may well be in the territory of being able to save money by coming *off* the cloud.

It's like owning a box truck versus going to U-Haul. If you move something once in a blue moon, you go to U-Haul because owning a truck is too much for occasional use. If however you are a moving company, owning one or more big box trucks will be cheaper than renting.

Re:It's the cloud

[hitmark]

Dunno about practical.

I seem to recall reading that IBM or some other mainframe company tried to rent terminal time to individuals and companies.

But then the micro-computer happened along with the spreadsheet, and suddenly every accountant wanted a computer on his desk.

Re:It's the cloud

[Grishnakh]

Windows 7 isn't rocket science, can do anything you need it to do, and is solid. Windows isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Windows 7 is already obsolete and being EOLed. Choosing this for a new deployment makes no sense at all.

Re:It's the cloud

[hitmark]

I would be weary of RH these days. Ever since Oracle forked RHEL they have been trying to shore up their fief.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point. Given MS Office's ribbon interface, MS Office is about a decade behind LibreOffice in terms of ease of use. I would download, install, and use LibreOffice even if MS Office was already paid for and installed.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a person who just wrote an entire paragraph saying how great Office 365 is, and how horrible LibreOffice is, without giving a single concrete reason why. Would it have been so hard to say, "I don't like how LibreCalc handle equations" or even "the icons are ugly?" But you have nothing. That's why people accuse you of being a shill.

And yet nobody here would bat an eyelash if he had swapped "LibreOffice" and "Office 365" in his example - he'd be lauded as an Open Source hero and voted +5, Insightful by people who can't see past their own prejudices. to apply a consistent standard of judgement.

Re:It's the cloud

[phantomfive]

And yet nobody here would bat an eyelash if he had swapped "LibreOffice" and "Office 365" in his example - he'd be lauded as an Open Source hero and voted +5, Insightful

Now you're being ridiculous, mod points aren't the same as 'being lauded as an open source hero.' I don't think I've ever seen someone lauded as an open source hero on Slashdot for a comment (but who knows, it could have happened).

To further show the absurdity of your point, his comment is currently modded at +4.

Frankly, I wish the mods paid more attention to examples of reality given in posts, but you can't have everything.

Re:It's the cloud

[Beefpatrol]

"And I know there's a lot of MS hate from IT people, and sure, I hear you, they could do a lot more to make it better for all you tech wizards that know networking like the back of your hand. It's probably that which is clouding your judgment of their system. To a non-programmer, non-tech guy who thinks CLI is some small government agency and not common language infrastructure or command line interface, MS's stuff is gosh darn fantastic."

Your post implies that non-tech guys' opinions are the only ones that matter. When you need a tech guy, and they can't/won't help you because you have chosen the option that nobody can easily fix, you better have honed your vendor arse-kissing skills in advance because most vendors aren't that helpful unless you give them lots of money first and 90% of the market share isn't going to pay a vendor (much, if at all) for tech support. Knowing networking well does not cloud one's judgement of the system; being technically knowledgable allows one to see features and flaws that the less knowledgable cannot; being knowledgable only "clouds" judgement if your goal is to be wrong.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't trust Google, then why trust Microsoft?

Because Google's business is built on mining your data, Microsoft's is built on you paying them license fees.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Hes' downright dishonest! A company that has precisely *zero* IT needs besides running MS Office? That kind of shop would never have a full-time IT guy. And given that they just need somewhere to store files, they'd be fine with a cheap entry-level server (like a $600 basic PowerEdge T320 server), and Windows Standard is $700. Two of those means around $3000 total expense, plus a one-time fee for someone to set it up. Amortized over a 5 year period, that's $600/year which is a pittance for any business of that size. Office Home and Business is $200.

Total expense for two servers, plus 60 licenses of MS Office, plus consultant fees: around 15k, or 3k/year amortized over 5 years.
Total expense for his $900/month solution for 5 years: 54k, or 10.8k per year.

Nevermind that this organization will most likely need to run some other line of business software that will require buying and setting up the servers anyway... And they'll have other troubles that will make them pay consultants part of that "100k salary" regardless. Office 365 is by FAR the most expensive solution!

Re:It's the cloud

[Beefpatrol]

I was actually going to point out that probably 98% of the Office 365 (Word) users out there would be entirely fine using whatever the most recent version of Word was in 2005. I wrote plenty of stuff in Word in the early-late 90s when I was in school. Lab reports including Excel graphs, etc.. Nearly everything that annoyed me about Word and Excel in 1995 still annoys me about Word and Excel in 2015.

Re:It's the cloud

[phantomfive]

Let's say you own a business with 60 users in 2 locations?

How many businesses are like that?

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I really get from people on the MS hate train, just a common lack of understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels. I have seen so many bad UI designs and such that make perfect sense from a programming aspect, but are confusing and unintuitive for the person you designed them.

Most open source and free software is designed by developers for developers which is why the user experience is usually terrible. LibreOffice is an exception and avoided this for the most part because it isn't a grassroots open source project, it was a proprietary competitor to MS Office which was later released as open source and maintained by the open source community.

Re:It's the cloud

[Beefpatrol]

Chrome OS isn't a complete unknown from the user's point of view. Imagine a laptop that runs Chrome, (the browser) in full screen mode and has as it's home page a selection of commonly used office-type web apps and and an app store that works pretty much like the Android web store. You log on to the machine with your Google/Gmail account credentials. That is not particularly unknown even to non-technical users. I don't really like Chrome OS because the hood is welded shut, but for every day usage, (browsing, email, Pandora, video conferencing, etc.), it works fine.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook support integrated with Exchange servers, and the calendar integration that comes with it. That's about it.

Re: It's the cloud

[Qbertino]

Is there currently an open source alternative[to the closed alternative]?

Yes there is: Abundandt dirt cheap hardware.

In the grand scheme of things cloud computing is just a fad like SAS or Network Computing was before, in order to hijack peoples stuff and hold it ransom. Nobody short of the bazillionth pinterest clone thgat has to scale by 100 orders of magnitude in 3 weeks because of the hype train coming in is going to fall for that. It's all same shit, different name.

Cloud development is all the hype because the toolstacks we use may be FOSS and the best there is, but they're still 15 - 20 years old (LAMP anyone?) and miles away from what would technically be possible today. Eventually you'll be able to meta-prototype an app with few clicks of a button and be able to deploy it whereever you want in a matter of seconds and the whole stack for that will be FOSS with the entire app and datalayer abstracted and encrypted two levels up. No one will give a shit about cloud space then, short of buying 30 gigs and 20 gigaflops of it with their mobile phone package as a signing bonus.

Until then I'd suggest you stay away from the cloud and build your own toolchain and runtime kit on last years decommisioned laptops that are a dime a dozen. It's faster, cheaper and you can do it when the web is down. Unless you belong to that crew mentioned above that's building said twitter clone, has to scale yesterday and is going out of business in 2 years anyway.

Re:It's the cloud

[mspohr]

The real problem with Windows is that it needs a lot of maintenance to keep it running. Updates and malware removal will keep an IT guy busy forever.
ChromeOS doesn't have these problems. It's kept up to date transparently and doesn't get the malware that cripples Windows.
I agree that Windows isn't going anywhere anytime soon... that's the problem. It does deserve to die.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that open source software isn't the same thing as libre software right?

Nothing in his post indicated that he didn't.

Windows doesn't "just work" any more than linux.

Rubbish, everybody knows that depends entirely on what you are trying to do. As far as the desktop is concerned Windows most certainly does "do the job" better than Linux in most cases which is why people use it over Linux despite Linux being free of charge and easily installable. On servers and embedded systems it is another matter.

Linux was, for a very long time, just not ready. Now it is.

Yeah, yeah...2015, Year of the Linux Desktop! There has been no fundamental change that has suddenly made it ready, it is still just as incompatible with major applications as it ever was.

You can buy a linux laptop, from a linux laptop vendor or a BSD server from a BSD vendor and it will just work, just like Windows.

You have been able to do that for the past decade, Best Buy was even selling systems with Linux pre-installed and nobody wanted them because they can't run the programs that users need their computers to run. Why is this so difficult for Linux advocates to understand? You can have the most technically superior operating system in the world, easily installable for no charge on any existing system and nobody will ever use it because it doesn't run their programs. If all you want is a browser then it really doesn't matter what operating system you run, Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS...who cares. But what about Autocad? Solidworks? Photoshop? Logic? After Effects? Final Cut? Premier? Avid? Flame? Revit? Maya? MAX? Motionbuilder? etc... You know, tools that people use their computers for. Linux leaves you high and dry, this is not the fault of Linux per-se but of the distro makers who aren't providing a tangible advantage and disruptive reason for developers to say "hey Linux has XYZ feature that is worth spending time and effort to provide to our customers".

Re:It's the cloud

[Anguirel]

Knowing networking doesn't necessarily inherently cloud one's judgment, but it could be a contributing factor to having clouded judgment regarding certain products unless you intentionally account for it. Say someone asks me for a recommendation on what sort of product to get -- here, being technically knowledgeable can easily cloud my judgment unless I consider the user's end-needs as well. I know how to circumvent the flaws in a more complicated system and thus might minimize those flaws compared to flaws in a simpler system that cannot be mitigated, and I also tend to desire access the benefits such complexity allows and would chafe at the lack of such things in the simpler system. However, someone without my knowledge will flounder on the more complex system due to those flaws I minimize, and will not even be aware of the flaws with the simpler system because they have no need for that functionality. The right choice for me is not the right choice for everyone.

For example, I dislike Apple products because I am knowledgeable and like using my products in certain ways that are antithetical to Apple's standard practices (I also often have aesthetics issues with many of their design choices, but that's usually separate). However, I'm also aware that for people that just want the device to work with minimal configuration, that use a more limited subset of the functionality available, and that are happy to stay inside the walled garden, Apple products can be comparatively ideal (e.g. my parents).

Re: It's the cloud

[Qbertino]

You guys get it all wrong. We are way past both those szenarios already. You need neither the expensive IT guy nor some overpriced subscription cloud bullshit. You get a stack of NUC Micropcs, install Ubuntu and are done. If you can't spare the 500 euros for the student to do this you get Chromebooks which these days come at 150 a pop, new. Turn on, log in, use. The great Google is taking care of you. End of story.

Re:It's the cloud

[jrumney]

The biggest threat to free and open source software is, and always has been FUD. What this article is saying is that previous FUD did not work, so it is trying to come up with new FUD.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not wrong. There is risk in going to cloud infrastructure, but there is also risk when you build in shop. What is to stop a sys admin from blowing away all your VMWare servers and killing the netapp appliances backing it up in your own data center? What about the guy who hacks into your network and does the exact same thing you're worried about with Amazon?

You might make an argument about the people you can hire to control your own data center. Maybe you're going to get it right. Not everyone can do that though.

Where I work, we're trying to spin up amazon infrastructure because our IT department can't deliver reliable servers. We have weekly outages counted in hours. We have slow or failing netapp appliances because they bought too small and put all their eggs in one basket. We have database servers that are 20% slower than they were 2 months ago because someone put them in VMWare and thought a network share would perform like a dedicated hardware raid controller and SSDs. Sometimes, you have to punt.

Re:It's the cloud

[turbidostato]

"Where I work, we're trying to spin up amazon infrastructure because our IT department can't deliver reliable servers"

You most probably won't sucess becose your problem seems not to be your IT guys but lousy management and you won't get rid of them moving to the cloud.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

An how many "common home" users are using this?

I certainly don't..

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post implies that non-tech guys' opinions are the only ones that matter.

No, just that most users are "non-tech guys".

When you need a tech guy, and they can't/won't help you because you have chosen the option that nobody can easily fix, you better have honed your vendor arse-kissing skills in advance because most vendors aren't that helpful unless you give them lots of money first and 90% of the market share isn't going to pay a vendor (much, if at all) for tech support.

I'm not quite sure exactly what sort of scenario you are talking about here but certainly given that he is talking about the context of Microsoft you're more likely to find somebody who can support that than anything else. I would be interested to what specific scenario you are talking about here though.

Knowing networking well does not cloud one's judgement of the system

Actually it can, very often those invested in the process feel threatened or confused when that process is automated for them but end users love that.

Re: It's the cloud

[Blaskowicz]

Now.. which Ubuntu? on which NUC?

Re:It's the cloud

[MrKaos]

LibreOffice is at least a decade behind MS Office and I can't believe I ever thought them equal. People here are probably going to think I'm some shill for MS but I'm not, I'm just not afraid to throw a good product under the bus without ever trying it and getting a grip.

That's because you are a shill, maybe not paid, but still a shill. After being locked into Word and its inconcrappable file formats *with itself* and having to reinstall older versions of the software to restore documents, output them in text and reformat them *yeah* there is a BIG reason to stop using MS Anything. 80% of people out there use 20% of the functionality of a Word Processor like LibreOffice or Office 365.

Show me a list of 10 common *day to day* operations that can be achieved in 365 but not on LibreOffice because the UK government disagrees with you and being locked into MS Word products. Even their support of ODF was something they are unwilling to do voluntarily so until you have experienced the costs of freeing yourself from such a lock I respectfully suggest you STFU.

And I know there's a lot of MS hate from IT people, and sure, I hear you, they could do a lot more to make it better for all you tech wizards that know networking like the back of your hand. It's probably that which is clouding your judgment of their system.

Professionally my judgement of Microsoft came from experiencing the heavy handed way they dealt with customers, their vendors, the ruthless way in which they dispatched both their competition and worse, anyone who ever partnered with Microsoft have the intellectual assets of many good start-ups who just wanted to get a good idea out there and make a living from it, plundered.

I have seen businesses, who put their faith in Microsoft, destroyed by Microsoft and everyday businesses who had nothing to do with them, aside for it being on their desktop, be the subject of audits for licensing, which Microsoft would resolve by squeezing that customer for everything they could get simply because they didn't know how to handle their software licenses.

Microsoft has mercilessly bashed, berated, ridiculed, marginalized, litigated and patent harassed the open source community for over a decade all the while using whatever BSD and apache licensed software they could get away with not crediting in widows.

Any company smaller than a government were harassed with lawsuits and endless appeals on the details until MS got their way, making it easier for many to just not fight and give Microsoft what they wanted.

And if you were a government, like the US government, lobbying and whatever sleight of hand could be used from the dirty tricks department to again, get their way.

Fortunately the GPL is seeding the exact type of business models that Microsoft cannot compete with or touch. They may always be around, but every day they get less relevant and because of that the growth of Information Technology can shed the atrophy attached with being shackled to the Windows paradigm.

That's what I really get from people on the MS hate train, just a common lack of understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels.

Until you have worked 36 hours, non stop trying to rescue a business who are going to go under and everyone is going to loose their jobs, stop telling me I should spend my time 'understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels'. Try and have a little empathy for the programmer who worked all night so you could get paid when payroll was down, then came in in the morning, looking like shit, to make sure everything is ok only to cop a serve about how much effort he puts into his appearance.

In case you didn't realize it wasting time trolling through registry entries or recovering data or work out why NTFS filesystem performance falls off after some timed license event ain't how I want to spend my day. Making IT easy for you, is hard work and, occasionall

Re:It's the cloud

[goarilla]

"And I know there's a lot of MS hate from IT people, and sure, I hear you, they could do a lot more to make it better for all you tech wizards that know networking like the back of your hand. It's probably that which is clouding your judgment of their system

We don't like the office stack because it's a huge opaque application suite that is horrible to troubleshoot and fix when it breaks.

Re:It's the cloud

[Njorthbiatr]

The UI looks and feels like Office 2003, that's a major point it's lagging behind in; there seems to be an unwillingness to adopt the slick UI Windows has been evolving its platform into. I remember back in 2007 when everyone was complaining that the changes were all horrible, except they weren't; people just didn't want to have to deal with something new.

It's not that the old classic UI is bad, it's just clunkier than the new UI.

Another major lagging bit is the lack of integration of admin tools. It's really hard to beat MS on this front, especially with how well they meshed it in with their cloud service. I do admit that LO is working on this front.

There's a whole bunch of other differences found here, but it's with fair warning that it may not be totally accurate or very rigorous. In any case, the major differences is that LO supports more file formats and such.

I want to get the point across that I don't mean it's lagging behind in a bad way, I just mean it's lagging behind. I never said that LO was bad (I know you didn't say this, but other posters have falsely assumed I think it is); it's not bad, it's quite good. It's just not as good as O365, especially for the demographic it's aimed for.

So no, it's not lagging behind like Java is lagging behind. More lagging behind like how a 2003 car would compare to a 2013 car.

Re:It's the cloud

[Njorthbiatr]

MS doesn't profit from selling my data, they profit from licensing.

But I agree on your point about monopolies.

Re:It's the cloud

[Njorthbiatr]

Where did I say LibreOffice was horrible?

Re:It's the cloud

[Njorthbiatr]

It really sounds more like you're suffering from a case of bad management, so I'll let you vent. Nothing sucks quite as bad as being set up to fail because the guys above you treat you like some robot that thinks you can magically fix any technical problem just by throwing you at it.

Look there's a lot about MS that I'll call their bullshit on. For instance, how they managed to break the start menu in the technical preview of W10, then fixed it, then broke it but allowed a registry fix, but then removed the fix for some inexplicable reason. It seriously boggles my mind that someone could be put in charge of this.

I don't hear a lot of great stuff about Windows Server, either.

But Nadella is just proving to be highly competent in pushing MS's direction, so in that case we'll see.

Re:It's the cloud

[ray-auch]

Calc still has hard row/column limits similar to ten year old excel.

Writer still has no outline view (or draft view) similar to Word 2000 or earlier - bug report / feature requests outstanding since 2002 I think, and at least second most highly voted feature across all that time.

Those decade lags _do_ imply real problems - in each case the underlying architecture cannot cope with the wanted features.

Re:It's the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

The UI looks and feels like Office 2003, that's a major point it's lagging behind in; there seems to be an unwillingness to adopt the slick UI Windows has been evolving its platform into. I remember back in 2007 when everyone was complaining that the changes were all horrible, except they weren't; people just didn't want to have to deal with something new.

I have to use the newer versions of Office for work daily, I HATE THE RIBBON UI and no it is not just because it is "new". Ribbon UI is a step back in usability, the ribbons are not nearly as keyboard shortcut friendly, and what is with bury crap in unintuitive places (for example: Help menu -> About in Outlook is under the File ribbon, seriously WTH?!?!?)

Re:It's the cloud

[phantomfive]

Here is your quote:

I run a personal version of Office 365 after switching over from LibreOffice and let me just say that the two aren't even remotely comparable. LibreOffice is at least a decade behind MS Office and I can't believe I ever thought them equal.

Justify it. You probably can't, you're probably a moron.

Re:It's the cloud

[Njorthbiatr]

I'm glad you pointed out what you meant when you said LO was horrible. I'm sorry you misunderstood what I said. What I actually meant was that O365 and LO aren't comparable and that LO is a decade behind O365.

Re:It's the cloud

[phantomfive]

I read what you said. I also notice you still haven't given a concrete reason to back up either of your assertions. Why is it a decade behind?

Re:It's the cloud

[david_thornley]

Economically, a copy of software can be valuable, and it's dead easy to make another copy. Therefore, if we have a legal framework that allows people to make their own copies if they want, we have the maximum number of useful copies in the world. That maximizes the economic value of the software.

Similarly, there is overhead to do license management, and this is an economic loss. FOSS does not require license management, and thereby is overall cheaper (all other things being equal). Nor does it require any sort of financial procurement process.

Nor is anybody in FOSS trying to deprive programmers of their livelihoods. The GPL invalidates one business model that, while extremely prominent, doesn't actually employ as many programmers as you'd think. Most programmers work on customization or custom software, which is irrelevant to FOSS.

There are economic problems with FOSS, obviously, but the gain would be more if we could solve those than if we could solve the economic problems of proprietary software.

Re:It's the cloud

[MrKaos]

A very measured response,

It really sounds more like you're suffering from a case of bad management, so I'll let you vent.

perhaps I needed to vent.

It's more a case of resolving bad business decisions and being the third party witness to the damage done. Often the people who made the decisions try to cover their ass regarding the choices they make and this often snowballs into a critical situation where people's lively hoods are on the line.

The 'reboot' mentality of Windows products shows that, whilst the bar to entry is very low, so to is the bar for failure. Good design practice is mandatory for Windows uptime and remains a hidden cost of the Windows model that is often regarded as unnecessary. Consequently technical debt in MS products is a common failing that is always present. You can try to fix it but the ship is sailing.

In the *ix space, the bar to entry is higher however the bar to failure is very high and technical debt has to be very high to produce failure, which, as opposed to windows systems, manifests in a slow and predictable way that don't result in downtime. Once coupled with the same good design practices *ix based systems are practically unstoppable. They are the internet.

So back to the question, show me a list of 10 common *day to day* operations that can be achieved in 365 but not on LibreOffice?

Nothing sucks quite as bad as being set up to fail

Corporate games are what they are. No one likes them but you have to know how to play to survive. I've worked with MS products since DOS and observed many of the shitty things that they do.

They have to play nice now, because Open Source offerings are a more powerful and flexible paradigm for modern business that yields greater returns over time. The ecosystem of software is larger, growing and permanent because it has its own intrinsic rights.

So much so that the discussion is about which Open Source licence model.

Look there's a lot about MS that I'll call their bullshit on.

The fact they have been found by a court of law to be criminal, engaging in predatory monopolistic practices to maintain their dominance in the market. They have acted that way for about 30 years, they were ok in the beginning however they continued to build antagonistic relationships that business had to submit to.

Business prefers open source because it, by default, doesn't have that practice attached to it. So business does not have to endure the antagonism anymore so, given the opportunity that Open Source gives them, business gets out of that relationship quickly.

I don't hear a lot of great stuff about Windows Server, either.

MS Server products are an also ran, they simply are not taken seriously in high end data center environments. They cannot compete with the agility of the Open Source cost model.

But Nadella is just proving to be highly competent in pushing MS's direction, so in that case we'll see.

Windows provides a great desktop offering with Windows 7 and perhaps 10 will be, we will see how he captains the ship. Microsoft failings though are like tears in the sails though, the wind blows and the ship moves with no regard for who or what is in the way. Much the way it always has it will go forward squashing anything in the way, just more carefully, as most business does not want to work with abusive partners, no matter how nice they are being now.

live and learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source pushovers getting walked all over by corporations finally starting to realize that maybe freedom is sort of important

Re:live and learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time a company plunders an opensource project the long-haired bearded ghost of RMS will be there to haunt you. Only fools trust those driven by nothing more than profit. The moment software freedom becomes inconvenient is the moment you realize that their promises aren't worth a single line of code.

Yet there are still apologists that insist on spreading the idea that being 'business friendly' is more important than true code freedom.

BSD license advocates are the uncle Toms of the software freedom movement.

Re:live and learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet there are still apologists that insist on spreading the idea that being 'business friendly' is more important than true code freedom.

It isn't apologists, it is pragmatists. In the majority of cases Free Software fails to deliver on anything but its promise of being "free", that makes it useless for most people.

Even if I value my ethics and morals above all else, if a hammer is produced that doesn't meet my ethical and moral standards then I will not use it, but if a hammer is produced that does meet my ethical and moral standards yet lacks the ability to drive nails then I also will not use it. Now if you are indeed one of those who values "software freedom" above all else then fine, don't use non-free software but stop with the religious practice of trying to convert others to your ideology because you have been failing at that for 30 years, the success of free software (limited as it is) is the byproduct of good software, not the other way around.

Re:live and learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet there are still apologists that insist on spreading the idea that being 'business friendly' is more important than true code freedom.

That is because "true code freedom" has proven itself to not be advantageous. Mostly free software produces me-too, also-ran products (no I am not talking about one element of a product like the Linux kernel in a smartphone): there is still no proper free desktop system (since the lemote yeelong is no longer in production, but that wasnt decent), why didnt free software innovate to bring us the modern smartphone? still terrible attempts at playing catchup. why didnt free software innovate to bring us the modern tablet computer? in fact that was half a decade ago and there is still no decent free software tablet. where is the free software smartwatch or activity tracker? im sure they will announce some half-assed thing 10 years from now.

Free software doesnt produce innovative products which is why it fails.

Easier to Destroy than Create

[Anonymous Coward]

The struggle now is how to keep people from destroying things. FireFox is a disaster. Gnome is useless. Seems like people take over these projects and tear them to pieces.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[bmo]

The struggle now is how to keep people from destroying things. FireFox is a disaster. Gnome is useless. Seems like people take over these projects and tear them to pieces.

I don't think the Open Source community is entirely free of the Peter Principle and politics for all the talk of meritocracy and organic growth. Especially when we have companies that subvert those goals for their own agenda despite their original lofty goals at founding.

--
BMO

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, companies usually do far less damage than "focal point" people when they go wrong/evil/etc.

We have several of these right now, I am not naming anyone because that would instantly kill any thoughtful discussion.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, the struggle is to deal with the naysayers who call one of the most successful pieces of software of all time "a disaster".

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

I'll name a couple of names, because I think there's an important point that needs discussion. Closed Source, commercial development tends to take place behind walls -- first and foremost a wall of marketers who manage the developers' image, then the wall of a closed development environment which one might contrast with the open development via mailinglists and newsgroups in the Open Source world, and finally the wall of expectations of "profesional" behavior that dictate certain kinds of statements never get made public. Open Source lacks two of those walls, and developers often lack the self-control to implement the third.

So, you get people like Lennart Poettering, who pisses off a lot of people, or Linus Himself, who has a far older reputation for bluntness. If you put them behind a phalanx of marketers and kept them off public mailing lists, people would see only one side of them. They'd blame failings on the faceless entity of the company, or on the CEO (who shouldn't go without blame). Whenever I see a systemd rant, I wonder what would be the equivalent in terms of Apple or Microsoft, and I realize that there is very little comparable because public images are managed so differently in the commercial world. There's the generic "Windowz $uckz bring back mah $tart menu," but little deep criticism of specific architectural changes to the OS, and certainly no focus on individual developers.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Tablizer]

The struggle now is how to keep people from destroying things. FireFox is a disaster. Gnome is useless.

If enough people agree with that and agree why it's a disaster, then they'll fork it or back an existing fork. That's how "democracy" corrects wayward OSS projects. MariaDB appears to have done it successfully after too many got ticked off with Oracle's management of MySql.

But the problem with the browsers is that there is not yet enough consensus on what sucks about them. Maybe it's just hard to get browsers right and there is no way to make everyone happy.

(Personally I'd like to see an XML sub-language to control the browser's interface and menus, and I can copy that XML to any desktop or device to have the browser interface be MY WAY all the time. I don't want an org dictating my browser interface. An "interface builder" utility would probably have to be provided for non-coders. Rough draft of such an idea: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?Use... )

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Anonymous Coward]

Peak is past.
Trajectory, not brick wall resistor.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[ProzacPatient]

(Personally I'd like to see an XML sub-language to control the browser's interface and menus, and I can copy that XML to any desktop or device to have the browser interface be MY WAY all the time. I don't want an org dictating my browser interface. An "interface builder" utility would probably have to be provided for non-coders. Rough draft of such an idea: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?Use... )

You mean something like XUL?

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Windows 8?

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[phantomfive]

I don't know, I still like Firefox, and Gnome is fine (it lets me open terminals, that's all I need). Neither is perfect, but they are fine.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Grishnakh]

Wrong, and wrong.

Firefox works great. A couple years ago, it definitely had some problems, it crashed all the time on me, but lately it's been working just great, much faster and much less memory usage than Chrome. If you haven't used it recently, give it another shot.

Yes, Gnome sucks, but this has nothing to do with anyone taking over the project. The Gnome devs are the same as they've been for ages. They were on a minimalization trend when they created Gnome2; Gnome3 is just the logical progression of their efforts to remove all choice and configurability from the user.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Tablizer]

Noooooooooo!

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[JanneM]

Firefox works just fine. Better than Chrome for me, actually; it uses less memory and less CPU, and when I stopped allowing Flash I rarely or never see any crashes either.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Anonymous Coward]

Easier to Destroy via a modded up comment in Slashdot than Create.

FFox works for me just fine, and has for the last 10 years.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[101percent]

Agreed. \o/

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Anonymous Coward]

They were already in pieces, firefox just rode the gravy train of pop up blocks because IE was targeted too heavily. Firefox was truly the only piece to make mainstream and than lose it all just like that.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8 still runs all of your programs though and that is what an operating system is supposed to do.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Bengie]

That's how "democracy" corrects wayward OSS projects

It's also how it destroys OSS projects. For every 1 useful fork, there are 99 useless ones. A city with 100k people may find it nice to have an option of several hospitals, but they don't need 100 hospitals, even if they're all using volunteer workers. Instead of a few good ones you get a bunch of mostly crappy ones. And the ones with good promise can't get enough volunteers because they don't realize how find the good hospitals.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[Beefpatrol]

Firefox's addons ecosystem is much better than Chrome's, though that may eventually change. Some of those Firefox addons are things I consider mandatory.

Re:Easier to Destroy than Create

[ale2011]

The struggle now is how to keep people from destroying things.

When serious work is involved, there is no hooliganism. "Explorative development" may be a better term than "destruction", not to negate that some products seem to go astray, but to ease asking why.

Market-driven companies have a clear answer —the more it sells, the better a product is. Alternative developments are sometimes subject to hairy evaluations, bringing about considerations on how well a product implements RFCs, its tunability and safety, its compliance with accepted models, and other issues that proprietary marketers don't care much about. I tend to consider such criticism good, but I must admit that while it can be constructive from a developer point of view, it doesn't help sales.

Let me also recall that the Free Software model is not overly clear on how programmers are going to get paid. Could crowd-funding reintroduce market-drivenness? Would that be good?

War and Piece

[ArhcAngel]

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. All I know is gimmee mines!

Re:War and Piece

[AdamHaun]

You're quoting A Tale of Two Cities, not War and Peace.

Re:War and Piece

[ArhcAngel]

The post is about a "war" between OSS camps and how even though they've buried the hatchet an even bigger threat looms. I believe I appropriately intertwined both tomes.

systemd is also a major battlefield...

[Anonymous Coward]

What people don't realize is how systemd is a big battlefield. This is a program that wasn't placed into userspace as close to the kernel as possible just because it was better than init, sysv, GRUB, and the many utilities that it replaces... but was dropped into place for pure political reasons.

This only has damaged OSS's reputation because of the incompatibilities with systemd and previous applications that worked fine starting from /etc/rc.d, but adds major security threats, since systemd is this monolithic program that has the ability to listen and take commands via the network... with no real auditing and code vetting to ensure that this doesn't result in a massive remote root issue.

So, staying that flamewars in OSS are dead is wrong... systemd is the biggest schism in the UNIX world since AT&T and BSD parted ways... and unlike the licensing issues of the two distributions, systemd and shoving it down people's throats appears to an outside observer to be mainly about ego, not adding reliability or security.

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. systemd deviously and cunningly usurped traditional Unix systems in a vulnerable spot and orphaned system services (ntp, dhcp, cron, initab...) that have been stable and even provided interchangeable choices. systemd is a scourge. The war is just starting.

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[SlashdotOgre]

I completely agree; systemd is in my opinion one of the greatest threats to Linux in particular and open source in general. From a competitive strategy perspective, systemd appears to me as a deliberate envelopment attack(pdf) to give RH substantial control over a huge portion of the Linux stack; in fact it's so strategically targeted that I wouldn't be surprised to find out years later that a Big 3 consulting firm recommended it to Red Hat. I have a lot of respect for what RH has done for Linux (and OSS in general), but if everyone switches to systemd, their level of control over the Linux ecosystem will be too much. Personally, I'm on Gentoo (have been for over a decade) and run OpenRC and eudev, but if Gentoo/Slackware fall, then I'm off to the BSD land.

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[Anonymous Coward]

What people don't realize is how systemd is a big battlefield.

... and those of you who modded this post 'Troll' instead of replying with substantive arguments just made his case for him.

(Posting anon because I just modded him 'Underrated' to correct this travesty.)

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[Antique Geekmeister]

There were technical reasons, as well as political reasons. It's attempting to replace half a dozen working individual tools, such as NTP daemons, logging daemons, and DHCP, with its own unified master toolkit. It's also attempting to get rid of "/etc". Leonard Pottering has stated so, publicly.

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've switched to FreeBSD. Jails is loads better than "Docker" (or what ever the latest 'thin provisioning' is cool days).

If you get hardware that supports FreeBSD there's a good chance the driver was written by the hardware company themselves. Everything 'just works' (if it's supported). ZFS is a great file system and having ZFS on Root with each update a true 'snapshot' is also great.

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[turbidostato]

"If you get hardware that supports FreeBSD there's a good chance the driver was written by the hardware company themselves. Everything 'just works' (if it's supported). ZFS is a great file system and having ZFS on Root with each update a true 'snapshot' is also great."

And still, hasn't grown to critical mass in, what? almost 20 years? Maybe a licensing decision has something to do with it.

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[goarilla]

(Posting anon because I just modded him 'Underrated' to correct this travesty.)

What about the travesty of abusing the moderation system like that to put weight on your own opinion ?

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[gweihir]

I agree. There are zero good technological reasons for systemd, but a whole load of excellent technological reasons against it, KISS being the most obvious. Yet it get being pushed with relentless force and a high-level of propaganda-skills and many, many people fall for it.

I predict that this will split the Linux-world into two: One where the term FOSS still has meaning and one where systemd rules (and backdoors) everything. I will happily be part of the former.

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[gweihir]

Calling a Distro that has been alive and well for 13 years and has managed feats like forking udev to eudev "absolute morons in terms of OS survival" can only be one thing: A dishonest and very transparent manipulation attempt by a shill.

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe a full system in a single source control/project setup decision has something to do with it.

Or maybe a "got sued by AT&T and blocked up for a year so Linux got to lead" has something to do with it (Linux and FreeBSD grew at the same exponential rate for a decade+, after which Linux network effects took over.)

Or maybe a "BSD was finished developing the easy stuff and had a harder time recruiting initial developers" had something to do with it.

The fact is: We don't know. There are probably several factors, and licensing may be one of it. There's a bunch of advantages in terms of code contribution to using the BSD license, but there's a bunch of advantages in terms of marketing to use the GPL.

Re:systemd is also a major battlefield...

[turbidostato]

"Linux and FreeBSD grew at the same exponential rate for a decade+, after which Linux network effects took over. There's a bunch of advantages in terms of code contribution to using the BSD license, but there's a bunch of advantages in terms of marketing to use the GPL"

No, I don't think it's a matter of code contribution vs marketing, but code contribution vs code contribution and what you say, fits my hypothesis:

At the very begining, GPL and BSD licenses look very much the same in terms of code contribution to the "free" branch of the project at hand in that, no matter what, there will not be external contributions. You see, most "minor" GPL projects have just one/two main developers and that's it.

But when a project success, the incentive for external code grows and here comes the difference: companies (and some individual developers) will always prefer BSD licensing in the hope of taking the cake and eating it too by means of closed sourced, let's say, extensions. This naturally leads to a more or less stable "core" and, if lucky, some closed sourced projects taking advantage of it.

GPL, on the other hand, may have a higher "point of no return" in terms of companies wanting to produce code to the project but once reached, the incentive is just too big to ignore and then, GPL will make sure that all those contributions add exponentially to the base code value.

This neatly explains the development of BSD's vs Linux as well as other projects.

Title?

[__aagmrb7289]

Wait, are we talking about new problems that are now having to stand up to open source? Or are we talking about open source having new problems with which it has to deal?

its what weve become that defines us

[nimbius]

the argumentative logic for BSD vs GPL is what i suppose TFA is batting around, and yes its still a very real argument for many. BSD being the license many concede is for a perfect world, but GPL being the only stick with which to ostensibly beat the far-too-often occurance of a corporation with its hand too far in the cookie jar. those kinds of arguments will never change, and in many ways they help define our character and shape our resolution as projects.

So lets tackle the argument, which is basically "openstack is a crazy project full of argument." Openstack is a hodgepodge of various contributors because it works, its an escape from the traditional hegemony of vmware and storage vendors, and those same vmware and mass storage vendors are clawing tooth and nail into the project to at least be part of it, as opposed to die quietly as theyre being instructed to do after having their software as a license cashcow model sidestepped entirely. Samsung and netapp are pushing blobs upstream, diligent open source project managers are kicking them back, and the cycle begins anew each time. The pedantic argument that open source is free to use but not free to build is one we've heard countless times, but plenty of non-corporate sponsored projects exist because hackers want them. Clemens Fruhwirth in 2004 created LUKS, Roy Marples wrote OpenRC, and Timo Sirainen wrote Dovecot and IRSSI because hackers wanted them and so did he. Corporations will always throw resources at software they use, the difference today is that softwares intrinsic value as open source is finally being realized.

Re:dumb story

[fche]

No, it's written by Matt Asay ... the Bennett Haselton of tech journalism.

Coda phase already

[ThatsNotPudding]

With the near Jonestown-like acceptance of systemd (controlled by one dominant company with lucrative NSA contracts, if not even deeper ties), the fait is pretty much accompli.

Much like the US itself, all we can hope for is a somewhat benevolent dictatorship in everything but name.

Re:Coda phase already

[phantomfive]

There are good practical reasons for adopting systemd. Debian (for example) didn't adopt it because of a cult, they adopted it because it solved a problem they had. That's about it.

What's the Definition of "Success"

[mpapet]

I should have closed the tab when it opened on an infoworld story.

Services to support Free software has proven to be a viable business model. IMO, that's a huge win. But, VCs aren't going to get too many IPOs out of that and infoworld probably has some newer advertisers thanks to Free software, but nothing like a Google or Microsoft.

The only threats on the horizon are continued support of increasingly draconian intellectual property laws. They impact everything, not just for software. Two examples: economic growth is constrained and the expansionn of basic human knowledge is restricted. It's returning to a feudal society structure. THAT, in my opinion, is the actual threat.

Pragmatism versus Idealism

[mpol]

Seeing cororate interest in Open Source / Free Software grow bigger, I am slowly moving towards the camp of the Idealists, like RMS.

Just looking at Linux, the kernel. It's great that it is being used in Android, and that it has a billion users there. But Android is not free in the practical sense for the enduser. They can never update their device to a newer version, because the hardwaredrivers are tied to the kernelversion. "Just buy a new device", Google and the manufacturers say. Just what GNU was all about in the beginning, "just buy a new printer".

Similar corporate interests are happening at Red Hat, which is pulling all the sheets in their direction. Their ideal is to have every Linux distro be similar, like RH. And we are "happy" to just take their software and use it, because it is so pragmatic.

The good thing about Free Software is, you can always fork it. But the barrier to do so is quite high, so there needs to be a lot of frustration for that to happen.
We will see what will happen to GNOME3, Mate and Cinnamon. I wish the later 2 projects the best.

Re:Pragmatism versus Idealism

[DMJC]

I think ultimately the answer will be Hurd, Stallman and co will keep it ideologically pure and eventually it'll get bigger as more people abandon corporate Linux.

Buffoons.

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA with my bodface: "The early days of open source were fraught with religious animosities we feared would tear apart the movement: free software fundamentalists haggling with open source pragmatists over how many Apache licenses would fit on the head of a pin. "

Is this what it has come down to? Really?

The rest of the paragraph is hyperbolic nonsense.

Skimming over this article, I see a lot of buzz words thrown about and very little content of interest.

Bored now.

(A)GPL solves this

[buchner.johannes]

AGPLv3 solves exactly this problem.

The question of open source is really -- do you have a secure upgrade path. If Windows goes away, and software you use depends on their software, you do not. If you use software based on a BSD/Apache2 license, and someone extends it and makes the result non-open source, and the software you use begins to require these extensions, you don't have a secure upgrade path anymore. GPL solves this problem and guarantees that you will always have an upgrade path, because derivatives need to be open source.

I think this is really the key point, and why purism in software licensing should not be laughed at by "pragmatists". Like for example distributions that do not include closed source software (Flash) or drivers (nvidia), because "pragmatists" want it to "just work". If you go down that path, you are making yourself dependent on a company going the path you want. You get into a situation 5 years down the line where even more software depends on closed source (e.g. mono/.NET), and it is out of your control. That's why I think purism in open source software is still relevant.

Pragmatically speaking, the upgrade path of open source software packages is not in your hands, but in those who are experts in that package's code, and those who invest time in it. The point is rather that if you get annoyed enough to pay someone, you would be able to get control back, while with closed-source extended BSD/Apache2 packages, you would not. You would need to re-invent that software.

For Web services, I think it depends. If the company provides proprietary data, then it doesn't really matter whether the software to access it, or the API is open source. You will have that dependency, until you have open data.

In summary, I think one should ask oneself: In 5 years, when this platform is outdated, and the company goes away or refocuses, what will I do, and am I prepared for that. Who am I dependent on? Having a community of millions of programmers which are in the same situation helps, because only one has to solve the problem and open-source it for an upgrade path.

Re:(A)GPL solves this

[exomondo]

If you use software based on a BSD/Apache2 license, and someone extends it and makes the result non-open source, and the software you use begins to require these extensions, you don't have a secure upgrade path anymore. GPL solves this problem and guarantees that you will always have an upgrade path, because derivatives need to be open source.

But it doesn't. In the AGPL case it can easily call out to another proprietary web service or a different process just like the way GPL software can communicate with a proprietary process which creates a non-free workflow.

I stopped reading at this line.

[luis_a_espinal]

But once commercial interests moved in to plunder for profit,

What a stupid, dogmatic thing to say.

Re:I stopped reading at this line.

[Antique Geekmeister]

And completely justified. I see it every day month, at least, in the database and web utility worlds with people who heavily modify their internal forks and provide _no_ access to those changes to anyone else.

Hotel California (Re:It's the cloud)

[Tablizer]

Let the buzzword hoppers be the pioneers who get arrows in their backs before the hard lessons of "The Cloud" are learned and publicized.

In my opinion we need better standards of file and data representation, and stack versioning for the cloud to work effectively. Vendors would have to cooperate to pull it off, and that's often the hard part.

For clouds to fulfill the virtualization role they claim to provide, it has to be just as easy to leave (migrate) a cloud as it does to join. Vendors typically make joining easy but leaving hard to order to hook you and keep you hooked. (Cue Eagle's "Hotel California")

Re:Hotel California (Re:It's the cloud)

[mlts]

My ideal would be to have storage and compute nodes interchangeable, and use something like vMotion to move VMs back and forth between local nodes and cloud based nodes. For example, if I have some VMs that do nothing most of the time (a VM that does quarterly/annual reports, for example), it can sit on a remote cloud provider until it needs to be used heavily... then moved to local computer/storage nodes. Once the reports are done, it gets shoved back to the cloud again.

On the storage side, async storage would be useful, especially for volumes that have critical data. At least it is a form of backup, even though there were still I/O transactions still in flight when things went down.

This functionality was mentioned in Windows Server 2016, so when the preview comes out, it might be interesting to see what MS has improved in this department.

Of course, this is assuming security issues are a solved problem... which isn't the case in real life.

Re:Hotel California (Re:It's the cloud)

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, if I have some VMs that do nothing most of the time (a VM that does quarterly/annual reports, for example), it can sit on a remote cloud provider until it needs to be used heavily... then moved to local computer/storage nodes. Once the reports are done, it gets shoved back to the cloud again.

Why? What possible benefit does that give you? Your Vm that does quarterly/annual reports is likely more-or-less completely idle except for the times it's running those reports. So really all it costs you to host it in-house is the pennies per Gigabyte of disk storage that it consumes on your local storage. It doesn't even have to be *fast* local storage, if it's used once every 3 months.

Pushing it off to the cloud in between runs:
1) Costs you a lot of money to transfer those gigs back and forth to the cloud;
2) Costs you the "idle" CPU usage in the cloud;
3) Complicates your network infrastructure by requiring VPCs, etc. to be hooked into your infrastructure;

All three of those factors cost you more money and hassle. The cloud is NOT "off-site storage" for your vms. The use case where clouds make sense is for horizontal scaling for highly elastic workloads ("we need to run more nodes at certain times of day / month / quarter / year and spinning up nodes for a few day/hours/weeks/months is cheaper than owning and running our own data center full of idle hardware 24x7x365."), for high availability and disaster recovery plans, and for local caching of data that your services & users require for more efficient content delivery.

Your "ideal" use case for the cloud strikes me as one of the most bizarrely backwards use cases I've heard.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Money talks. There are great financial incentives to destroy competition that exists freely. The only possible weapon to fight that is publicity.

wait, wut?

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD and Apache are both Free licenses. This author is not well informed.

TFA is not as interesting as....

[Zecheus]

.... 'what if' NFL mock drafts.

NOPE

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article, at the bottom.
  Matt Asay
A longtime InfoWorld contributor and former intellectual property lawyer, Matt Asay is currently VP of Mobile at Adobe. The views expressed are his own and not that of his employer.

A lawyer working for Adobe?

The greatest problem for Open Source is proprietary corporations. And people who only look at the bottom-line

Non-gov Backup License

[Anonymous Coward]

This license allows anything, except any kind of lawyer profit and change this license.

DFSG vs. OSD

[tepples]

You realize that open source software isn't the same thing as libre software right? Oh you don't, then why don't you let the adults converse.

Could you explain the difference? The Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition are almost word for word the same.

OSS = PITA

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I have to explain to potential clients why the software I'm selling isn't free. The simple explanation is 'because I like to fuking eat', 'because I have to pay rent on my office', 'because I have to pay my ISP'.

OSS: don't do me anymore fuckin' favours.

Re:OSS = PITA

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame Apple and their App Store.

It's filled with free apps to do just about anything your non-free app does.

And none of it is GPL.

Re:systemd is a UNIX Philosophy Violation

[mpapet]

What people don't realize is how systemd is a big battlefield. This is a program that wasn't placed into userspace as close to the kernel as possible just because it was better than init, sysv, GRUB, and the many utilities that it replaces... but was dropped into place for pure political reasons.

Yeah, I really don't know if that's right or wrong or what. I know I don't like it either. For me, multiple features of the UNIX design ideas that has made Linux successful are being openly violated, practically with contempt. Per the wikipedia page on the UNIX philosophy: the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves.

Systemd directly harms the server admins like me. I don't understand the urgent need to have the init system minding other daemon's business. It's not that there's no precedence for it, but, init doesn't need to check time, be involved in my bluetooth stack, xorg stack, etc. other than starting it, polling it, and stopping it.

What is open source these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember open source being committed projects done by a community of volunteers. Not big corporation like Canonical or Red Hat or even Google. All of which have taken open source to a new level of success but on the backs of diminishing its value as open source. When I see projects like Mozilla basically take open source to a new level but then allow what got them there to degrade to a point that you wonder if they lost their way? I say the same about Ubuntu and Red Hat and
others. Who seem to see open source as a way to get a cheap path towards a good OS that eventually becomes a commercial and proprietary like product.
Yea, you can say Chromium and Chromium OS are still open source. But they definitely benefit only from Google Chrome and Chrome OS. We still see some real
true to open source projects and they still offer truly community involvement. At least until some corporate giant see's it as their success story.

Re:Sexist opensource developers be banned?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much: Yes.

What Hans Reiser did to his wife Nina was pretty sexist. Even if you espouse relatively less fatal versions of his views, you should probably be banned.

Matt Asay open source advocate ..

[DougPaulson]

'Tonight Brad Smith, general counsel for Microsoft, delivered the “footnote” address at the Open Source Business Conference 2008. I asked Brad to speak because I figured it was the shortest path to getting clarity from Microsoft vis-a-vis open source and the nettlesome legal issues that have plagued Microsoft’s relationship with open source' ref.

"I understand that Microsoft may be using the OSI's license approval process to its own ends, and potentially ends that may be anti-open source. I'm still not sure, however, that it's appropriate to treat an incoming license from Microsoft any differently than one that comes from Linus Torvalds ref"

Re:Sexist opensource developers be banned?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hans Reiser did nothing wrong. He followed the law in Deuteronomy, which was the correct thing to do.

People like you should be killed.

Re:dumb story

[jono.ixr]

Well said! I wish he would stop writing tripe, he's completely out of touch when it comes to anything free software or open source.

FireFox is not a disaster ..

[DougPaulson]

Anonymous Troll: "The struggle now is how to keep people from destroying things. FireFox is a disaster. Gnome is useless. Seems like people take over these projects and tear them to pieces."

'Pale Moon is an Open Source, Firefox-based web browser available for Microsoft Windows, Android and Linux (with other operating systems in development), focusing on efficiency and ease of use. Make sure to get the most out of your browser!'

Re:systemd is a UNIX Philosophy Violation

[gweihir]

All the arguments against systemd are bogus. Even the things it claims to fix it does not. The strategy is a pure PR strategy one: Promise the holy grail, claim is fixes some things that are actual minor problems, and make sure to get people on-board before you actually deliver. Then make it very, very hard for them to leave again, and you never have to deliver. (They cannot deliver on most of their promises anyways, in part because it is impossible and in part because they are incompetent.)

Obligatory recent XKCD

[Phil Urich]

I think ultimately the answer will be Hurd, Stallman and co will keep it ideologically pure and eventually it'll get bigger as more people abandon corporate Linux.

The recent http://xkcd.com/1508/ shows human civilization ending in around 2042. There's a pause afterwards with no OSes run, and then in 2059, GNU/Hurd.

One of the survivors, poking around in the ruins with the point of a spear, uncovers a singed photo of Richard Stallman. They stare in silence. "This," one of them finally says, "This is a man who BELIEVED in something."