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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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.

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

[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?

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...

[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:dumb story

[fche]

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

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.

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: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.