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The New Struggles Facing Open Source

Posted by samzenpus on from the it's-not-easy dept.

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."

9 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. It's the cloud by poet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
    1. Re:It's the cloud by mlts · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:It's the cloud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:It's the cloud by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. live and learn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

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

  3. Easier to Destroy than Create by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. systemd is also a major battlefield... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:systemd is also a major battlefield... by SlashdotOgre · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
  5. Coda phase already by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.