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