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Is Open Source Innovation Now All About Vendor On-Ramps? (infoworld.com)
InfoWorld published an interesting essay from Matt Asay, former COO at Canonical (and an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative), about innovation from the big public cloud vendors, which "even when open-sourced, doesn't really help the community at large... All this innovation is available to buy; none of it is available to build. Not for mere mortals, anyway."
Google in particular has figured out how to both open-source code in a useful way and make it pay. As Server Density CEO David Mytton has underlined, Google hopes to "standardize machine learning on a single framework and API," namely TensorFlow, then supplement it "with a service that can [manage] it all for you more efficiently and with less operational overhead," namely Google Cloud. By open-sourcing TensorFlow and backing it with machine-learning-heavy Google Cloud, Google has open-sourced a great on-ramp to future revenue.
My question: why not do this with the rest of its code? The simple answer is "Because it's a lot of work." That is, Google could open-source everything tomorrow without any damage to its revenue, but the code itself would provide other providers and enterprises only limited ability to increase their revenue unless Google did all the necessary prep work to make it useful to mere mortals not running superhuman Google infrastructure. This is the trick that AWS, Microsoft, and Google are all racing to figure out today. Not open source, per se, because that's the easy table stakes. No, the AWS/Microsoft Azure/Google Cloud trio are figuring out how to turn their innovations into open source on-ramps to their proprietary services. Companies used to lock up their code to sell it. Today, it's the opposite: They need to open it up to make their ability to operate the code at scale more valuable. For them.
My question: why not do this with the rest of its code? The simple answer is "Because it's a lot of work." That is, Google could open-source everything tomorrow without any damage to its revenue, but the code itself would provide other providers and enterprises only limited ability to increase their revenue unless Google did all the necessary prep work to make it useful to mere mortals not running superhuman Google infrastructure. This is the trick that AWS, Microsoft, and Google are all racing to figure out today. Not open source, per se, because that's the easy table stakes. No, the AWS/Microsoft Azure/Google Cloud trio are figuring out how to turn their innovations into open source on-ramps to their proprietary services. Companies used to lock up their code to sell it. Today, it's the opposite: They need to open it up to make their ability to operate the code at scale more valuable. For them.
The author offers the fact that Google open sources some of its software to profit off of the support it provides in a tone that suggests this is a problem. This is one of those everybody wins scenarios which Richard Stallman dreamed about when he invented the GPL. Can anyone explain to me what reason the author has to be upset other than "someone other than me is making money"?
I agree, the tone seems to be "oh no, open source creators are making some money, there must be a problem".
Open Source software has always been used in myriad ways, and continues to be.
So the real question is "is there a profound shift in balance that we need to discuss".
I don't know.
What I do know is that the phrasing "now all about" is vague and tendentious. Perhaps someone can point to some recent research on the subject?
... as good software is simple enough to be written by a single person in their spare time. If your software projects require more and more people to join, just to keep up with fixing the bugs, you're doing something wrong.
This is the reasons why most Free Software operating systems are unixoid. The guidelines of the UNIX Philosophy allow you to get most "bang for the buck", so you can reach the most with the least effort.
So you have people building things like Pulseaudio or Wayland, which attempt to solve simple problems in a hard way, instead of, for example, extending the terminal standard to be able to make GUIs and audio. That way you could have remote audio and GUI without modifying ssh.
All this innovation is available to buy; none of it is available to build. Not for mere mortals, anyway.
I kind of wish people would just stop talking about "innovation". First, because it's not clear what it means. Second, because most people probably don't really need innovation. Things certainly don't need constant innovation.
Most people and businesses don't need an innovating OS, they need a reliable OS that will run all of their applications. They don't need an innovative office suite, they need one that allows them to edit their office documents easily and efficiently. They don't need an innovative web server, they need one that will serve their web pages reliably, perhaps under a heavily load.
I know it's not fun for developers to think about making reliable tools that aren't innovative, but that's most of what we really need open source to do, and it's something open source has done pretty well with. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft haven't open sourced all their fancy cloud jazz, and I know the cloud stuff is really exciting to some small subset of developers, but really it's a fringe application.
On top of that, if I had to guess, I'd guess that it's probably not even extremely stable at this point (stable in the sense of "not changing"). These companies are probably rewriting things constantly to tweak for their own individual priorities, and I wouldn't be surprised if big chunks ended up being reorganized or rewritten in the next 5 years. (Admittedly, I don't know anything about the development process so I could be totally wrong, but going based on the rapidity of changes on Azure in the past couple of years, I don't think Microsoft even knows where they're going with it.)
As an old saying goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch. If a business is giving you something, it's as a hook to make money. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing but it's pretty obvious why AMD makes drivers primarily for AMD cards. Sometimes it's just auxiliary like they're giving you developer tools to build applications for their platform. Whether it's open source or closed source doesn't really change that. Is this a bad thing? Well, you should be aware that like everyone they have their motivations and their incentives may be contrary to yours.
Like most recently I was looking at an open source client-server solution, where their server is a central cloud service. The client had like really easy paint-by-numbers steps to build and run. The server had almost zero information, a dummy config file with no comments and gives nearly zero useful feedback. It doesn't even build out of the box due to checks and tests that depend on missing settings and keys. The curt replies from the company are basically "we don't have time to support other people trying to run the server". That might be true, but they don't have any incentive to make it easy either.
But I suppose that's mostly fair, it's no different than when individual open source developers don't want the changes I'd like to make. What is unfair is that they might come up with all sorts of excuses to avoid accepting your contribution, without disclosing their true reason for rejecting it. There's a lot of power in simply stonewalling you and saying we don't care if you want that even if you got a patch ready to go, make your own fork. Then again there's many people with bad ideas and bad code, refusing to accept it might totally be the right choice. The question is just whether you're doing it in good faith or not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The simple answer is "Because it's a lot of work."
No, it's because this is by design. They open source enough to improve image and maybe help get started, but keep closed anything that they think is fundamental to their strategy. This is not just google. Among the known cloud vendors, not *one* open sources any of their backend software. They all have something home grown. They have plenty of open source libraries to act as a client to their back end software, but software that is useless for interoperabilty between vendors or building your competing system. They also enjoy posting articles that *claim* to tell you how they do things, but proceed to omit any actionable details and lay on the buzzwords thick instead. Those articles are crafted to make it sound *really* hard and that they are so clever, but without actually reveling their hand or helping anyone in the slightest. They seem designed to make people feel intimated at the prospect of managing their own infrastructure by making the task seem far more exotic and arcane than it is.
It's not just cloud vendors. There are many electronic devices with open source libraries, but they only work with the respective closed firmware implementations.
I'd say broadly a transformation in standards and open source has happened in the last 15 years or so. In the late 90s you had this overwhelming emergence of standardization and openness in the industry. AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy et al gave way to the federated internet, IETF had a great body of standards and looking at the authors of the standards, they almost always including 'customers' alongside vendors. Linux began overwhelming the Unix market, and this inspired a lot of exploration of open source software. Over the past 15 years, people are locking away a lot of their infrastructure in distinct proprietary cloud providers. The web is more and more about helping people access the social network of the day, none of which are the least bit federated (discarding net neutrality will further reinforce this). You look at 'standards' and the authors are pretty much *always* on the vendor side now, and strangely these 'standards' don't facilitate interoperabilty, but give the vendors a way to claim they are using an industry standard without actually doing anything that would help in the way a standard should.
In short, standards, open source, and the internet all blindsided the vendors when it first took hold of the industry. Over time, the vendors have mastered the art of manipulating those things to their benefit, to let people *feel* like they are continuing the great open revolution, all while the gardens are being walled and the customers are getting locked into their vendors by using the newest 'standard' to interact with product.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
When you look at everything Google has done with Chrome browser, Android, Chrome OS, and its core OS in corporate built off of Ubuntu. Google has most certainly used Linux to further its own branding of products, but Google also is a big company that gives back too. I know some in open source who feel jilted by what Google has done with open source. The open source purists who cannot stand any relations with big companies. But clearly Linux and open source has benefited from these relationships even with Microsoft getting into the open source game. Myself using Ubuntu I know that it has absolutely benefited from a involvement with Canonicle and having a dedicated development team, as well as Red Hat has definitely made open source popular in enterprise. Not to mention Amazon, and other big companies using Linux in positive ways.
Words of easy virtue soon acquire a reputation.
There was a ten year period where it was rare to see any member of the Microsoft C-suite quoted without the word "innovation" appearing in there somewhere. Failing to use the word probably earned a journalist a harsh call, and restricted access.
If Microsoft wasn't innovating, just how were they consistently earning unusually large profits, even within their own sector?
There was a ten year period where it was rare to see any member of the Microsoft C-suite quoted with the word "monopoly" appearing in there anywhere. Willingness to use the word probably earned a journalist a sharp knock on the door, and restricted egress.
What "all about" from the story headline means is that the core message of open source is now taken for granted, and you need to update your virtue signalling of cynical wherewithal to a new marginal meaning, that's no longer about the thing, but entirely about an attitude toward the thing. Sure, it's work to keep up appearances, but it still beats thinking.
I look at this state of affairs and what I see is enlightened cleavage.
Prudent technologists won't settle for less than portable skills. Fill your brain with a proprietary technology where you can't even flex your fingers without a license grant, and then prepare to be sodomised by fad and fashion, and only those tall Stockholm stockings—festooned from time to time with crumpled bills—will lesson your discomfort.
Corporations (according to the standard hymnal) don't want any technology without a throat attached by a golden leash (it's a weird leash, with a collar at both ends, strung between a non-nonsense human of sturdy, adult build, and a dog with a never-ending adolescent growth spurt; "man controls dog" is now the new, even less reported "man bites dog").
For the most part, this bargain between technologists and corporations seems to work on both sides. Unless you thought that "open source" was code language for "go west young man" or "there's gold in them thar hills". If so, you're a member of the Dunning–Kruger sect of people who can't actually read what doesn't suit their purposes.
TensorFlow is open source because it helps everyone involved. I use it and I probably will never use Google or Amazon Cloud, I use a small cluster with GPU's because I can't transport 200TB of data to the "cloud" fast or cost efficient enough.
The cloud is great for testing stuff out and running one-off jobs, but if it is your day-to-day work, the cloud doesn't scale because the pipes don't scale along with the data centers.
Companies open source the products because it helps them, which is good, and it may provide them some side-revenue but it cannot be a sustainable economic model because the public cloud (or mainframes as we used to call it) simply isn't sustainable.
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A clone of a clone the most weakest of strawman
The latest information on Dolly says that clones are just as strong as anybody else. A cloned strawman has the exact same value as the original.
today you lose to yet again SUFFER DEFEAT!
That means they won, right?
While many open source licenses provide this benefit (BSD, MPL), they also allow for the source code to be rolled into proprietary products (such as OsX).
I think perhaps it is you who misunderstands Free Software, just because a derivative work could be non-free does not make the original work non-free. Restrictive open source licenses are not a requirement for Free Software.
By guaranteeing freedom to downstream users, GPL maintains these four freedoms for all and forever.
Nowhere is that a requirement for Free Software, indeed the permissive open source licenses you mention are Free Software licenses precisely because they satisfy the 4 conditions you list. TensorFlow, for example, is Free Software.
Examples?