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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."

4 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 Beefpatrol · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.