11 ms·

Who eats who in open source

162 points by mathattack 7y ago

orastor 7y ago
Right now your webserver is eating your post
xwdv 7y ago
Who eats closed source software?
- edoceo 7y ago
  FTA it's Open Source, there is a neat fish diagram
- rmoriz 7y ago
  The cloud, too. Think of Office365, SAP Cloud Platform. It's benefical for a closed source vendor to switch to a service model, collect monthly recurrent fees and get free ultimate leverage against the customer.
tinalumfoil 7y ago
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.platformonomics.com/2019/11/dining-preferences-of-the-cloud-and-open-source-who-eats-who/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.pl...
- neonate 7y ago
  Also https://web.archive.org/web/20191123091956/http://www.platformonomics.com/2019/11/dining-preferences-of-the-cloud-and-open-source-who-eats-who/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191123091956/http://www.platfo...
mlinksva 7y ago
This analysis seems correct if OSS = OSS ISVs.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
The root of the issue is that licensing costs, the only costs that open source is guaranteed to reduce, can be a small percentage of operational costs in practice. If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience, it can literally be economically uncompetitive with a closed source product that does optimize those other operational costs even if it has a license overhead or creates vendor lock-in. I see this dynamic more and more, companies have figured this out. Sure, buyers prefer open source infrastructure without vendor lock-in, but they don't prefer it enough to spend 2-10x the OpEx, which is often the case in these discussions. The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. Open source is a nice idea that most companies love, but they aren't going to spend mountains of extra money in operational costs to get it.
- mehhh 7y ago
  Reducing OpEx often requires cooperation and pooling of resources that a proprietary vendor can force on their users with little choice, while by default software like Mastodon, Pleroma, etc treat other instances as potentially hostile, replicating data (often) needlessly. Efforts like https://jortage.com https://jortage.com can reduce OpEx quite significantly.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  > If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience I feel the opposite is true. There are many open source projects that are at least on par with their proprietary counterparts. Postgres is competitive with every SQL DB I've heard of except maybe in some niche use-cases. Redis is open source and incredibly performant. Same with Kafka (if you use it well). Linux sure runs better than Windows in my experience. There is also a whole class of open-source libraries like React that have taken over. I can't even think of a proprietary frontend framework. What software are you thinking of when you make these claims?
  - 0xFACEFEED 7y ago
jacques_chester 7y ago
I work at Pivotal and disagree with a fair amount of the characterisation thereof, but my bias is mostly informed by actually working there for the last 6 years. Let's look at the heart of the argument instead. > If you squint, open source could be seen as a very generous charitable donation to some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet. Broadly: yes. Except backwards. FLOSS can be seen as a public good -- it is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Excludability is the property that someone can be prevented from using the good (eg, requiring payment to consume a can of soft-drink). Rivalrousness is the property that utility from consumption of a good by one person diminishes utility for another person (if I drink the soft-drink, you get less of it). Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level. A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption. This hints at one of the ways that public goods get provided: through subsidy by benefactors, who will capture some but not all of the value created by their benefaction. A wealthy person may so enjoy seeing the opera that they will donate heavily to the local opera house. They don't capture the full benefit -- other folks can watch the same shows -- but they capture enough value that they are satisfied with the arrangement. They might also get value from other factors, such as social approval. The cloud providers do not sell public goods. Their services are fully excludable. If you refuse to pay, service will end. They are rivalrous at the limit, though, putting them into the category of club goods. These are much more likely to be provisioned in a pure market, since the benefits and costs fall more "correctly" on those who obtain or bear them.
- syshum 7y ago
  >>Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level. >>A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption. Thus the reason Free (As in Freedom) software advocates promote the use of Copy-Left Licensing, and why non-copyleft (like MIT, BSD, and others) are slowly eroding "open source" to less fully formed software and more just the tooling, libraries and dev environments used to create software
brodyprice 7y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20191123091956/http://www.platformonomics.com/2019/11/dining-preferences-of-the-cloud-and-open-source-who-eats-who/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191123091956/http://www.platfo...
- dang 7y ago
  That one's pretty clearly past the tipping point in usage, so I think we can leave it above.
  - brodyprice 7y ago
    Agreed, sorry. I wanted to add the archive link but felt like being snarky for some reason
gwern 7y ago
> The unexpected and asymmetric competition from the clouds confounds open source companies, who must confront the fact the competitive advantage of knowing their software better than anyone else isn’t the insurmountable moat they had hoped. It is never fun to wake up and discover your product is now just a feature of a broader offering, but this is what is happening with software. Claiming open source is eating the cloud is like coffee bean farmers claiming they’re eating Starbucks: it willfully (or just out of delusion) ignores the vast majority of what the customer is buying. As always, 'commoditize your complement': https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
- eloff 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing. The discussion previously here is also interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18854854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18854854
- leoc 7y ago
  > (in Robert Metcalfe’s infamous expression, cross-platform web browsers & the Internet would reduce Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”) Compare the number of platforms nowadays which (to varying extents) treat Linux as a free set of buggy device drivers.
awinter-py 7y ago
Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3). The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql. These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This makes the stock version of open source software hard to operate in the way AMZN / GOOG operate it, while still allowing AMZN / GOOG to benefit from community effort without giving much back.
- wmf 7y ago
  With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    That's just simple competition that we've always had. Microsoft working on a competitor to your product was the huge fear of the 90s. Cloud providers competing with your own source code is a new phemonema. The original thesis would be that brand loyalty would be strong enough to prevent forking like this. "You don't want that third-rate version, get the real thing from the original authors!". It appears that the customer base assumes quality is roughly equal considering its mostly the same code.
    - type0 7y ago
      And in this case the brand loyalty of AWS is stronger
    - detaro 7y ago
      In many businesses, getting permission to buy/license from a new supplier is way more effort than just selecting another option at the cloud provider you're already set up with.
  - slovenlyrobot 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 7y ago
I'm skeptical about "multi cloud eats cloud". If you're going to be boxed into using a lowest common denominator of services, cloud has less value. You might as well jump straight to hosted bare metal. The skill sets needed aren't much different than multi-cloud, and it's much cheaper.
larnmar 7y ago
*whom
beatpanda 7y ago
I was hoping this article was going to be more like “who makes enough money to eat working on Open Source Software?”
- nojvek 7y ago
  Me too. I don’t think there are many people making enough money to eat working on Open Source software. If you see GitHub, the largest most active projects are funded by Mega Corps like Micro Face Goog. I wonder how many companies are successful with open source but paid licence for commercial use.
zby 7y ago
The cloud is eating business relying on licensing. This is relevant for both open and closed licenses. By the way I have wrote a post on that when the MongoDB debate was raging: https://medium.com/hackernoon/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-efcdcfb00514 https://medium.com/hackernoon/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-.... The way for Open Source to survive is to make it attractive for cloud providers.
- marktangotango 7y ago
  How does one make their project attractive to cloud providers? For the sake of discussion; an infrastructure project like a job scheduler or some such?
  - zby 7y ago
    I was more thinking about making the licensing attractive to cloud providers. The idea is that cloud providers are the dominant players - so for Open Source to survive it needs to be adopted by them. But yeah - I don't know how to do that. Licensing is not a core of their proposal, open sourcing their software does not impact their revenue directly - but might indirectly by letting other cloud providers compete with them using their own code.
athrowaway3z 7y ago
I'll play the 'open source eating cloud' argument because what merit it has, isn't addressed in this piece. How do computers earn people money? Speaking in 2019 that's obvious. Cloud providers earn the most. There used to be other ways people got rich off computers. But all those businesses imploded against the awesome might of '0 marginal cost', 'only good solutions survive', world of open source. Open source has 'removed more profits'/'provided more value' then the cloud. Cloud is simply the high profit game until competition kicks in, open source tools become the norm, and only the value of the virtual machine is sold at 1% the current price.
gtirloni 7y ago
This conflates open source with companies using open source as a competitive advantage. For the latter, yes, cloud is eating their cake.
siscia 7y ago
I wonder if advancement in orchestrator will shift the balance. There is a lot of effort into putting human knowledge into software, so that it can react to unexpected situation and self heal. K8s operators to be specific. If this software works well enough, what would be the competitive advantage of AWS?
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  K8s is not an advancement in orchestration and is very much on the AWS side in this, deeply integrating with proprietary cloud services that do their own operations and infrastructure, not even considering open sourcing those services and their supporting infrastructure nor working towards alternatives to replace them. It's just that the same thing that makes AWS piles of money is the same thing the company behind k8s is after, so they are definitely not going to advance k8s in a way that commoditizes AWS. Not that they are even capable of doing so.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  I think the Operator pattern reveals a real shortcoming in Kubernetes: there's a wide gap between the core orchestration problem and the many fiddly particulars of individual pieces of software. What we gained in homogeneity for cloud-native software we're now losing in wide heterogeneity of Operator software.
Andrex 7y ago
> Pivotal got eaten by “Dockernetes” aka containers (ironically because Google was pissed off about Hadoop, but that is another story) Would anyone care to give a brief summary? It's the first I've heard of this.
- tyingq 7y ago
  I believe it's just saying that Google was disappointed that their MapReduce research didn't give them any market presence or power. Hadoop took the concepts and ran with it, with no direct benefit to Google. Pivotal benefited a lot with their commerical distro of Hadoop. Google didn't make the same mistake with K8S and it killed Pivotal's PCF.
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    Hadoop looked to be a big part of Pivotal's overall strategy early on but didn't pan out. Labs and Cloud Foundry have contributed the lion's share of revenue for most of Pivotal's life, though data products like Greenplum, Gemfire and RabbitMQ have also contributed a lot. Kubernetes was never really about Pivotal in any universe I can think of. It was about AWS. Disclosure: I work at Pivotal.
dandanio 7y ago
"whom"... Who eats whom...
lacker 7y ago
People rarely mention in these debates that Bitcoin is open source, along with essentially all other cryptocurrencies. Indeed, the cryptocurrency business model could hardly exist without open source. It isn’t the same community at all as Linux / Postgres / etc, but it certainly should be considered a great success for open source.
unraveller 7y ago
Open source thought they could sell consulting and hosting services to fatigued devs, if they fatigued them enough. All those single project focuses left the door wide open for multi-clouds to "just add glue" between disparate open source projects and actually aim to be easy. We now await to see if compute will become a commodity or just priced that way to prevent it becoming so. Is any challenger bold enough to bite off more of the pie than they can chew?

162 points by mathattack 7y ago

orastor 7y ago

Right now your webserver is eating your post

xwdv 7y ago

Who eats closed source software?

edoceo 7y ago
FTA it's Open Source, there is a neat fish diagram
rmoriz 7y ago
The cloud, too. Think of Office365, SAP Cloud Platform. It's benefical for a closed source vendor to switch to a service model, collect monthly recurrent fees and get free ultimate leverage against the customer.

tinalumfoil 7y ago

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.platformonomics.com/2019/11/dining-preferences-of-the-cloud-and-open-source-who-eats-who/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.pl...

neonate 7y ago
Also https://web.archive.org/web/20191123091956/http://www.platformonomics.com/2019/11/dining-preferences-of-the-cloud-and-open-source-who-eats-who/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191123091956/http://www.platfo...

mlinksva 7y ago

This analysis seems correct if OSS = OSS ISVs.

jandrewrogers 7y ago

The root of the issue is that licensing costs, the only costs that open source is guaranteed to reduce, can be a small percentage of operational costs in practice. If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience, it can literally be economically uncompetitive with a closed source product that does optimize those other operational costs even if it has a license overhead or creates vendor lock-in. I see this dynamic more and more, companies have figured this out. Sure, buyers prefer open source infrastructure without vendor lock-in, but they don't prefer it enough to spend 2-10x the OpEx, which is often the case in these discussions. The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. Open source is a nice idea that most companies love, but they aren't going to spend mountains of extra money in operational costs to get it.

mehhh 7y ago
Reducing OpEx often requires cooperation and pooling of resources that a proprietary vendor can force on their users with little choice, while by default software like Mastodon, Pleroma, etc treat other instances as potentially hostile, replicating data (often) needlessly. Efforts like https://jortage.com https://jortage.com can reduce OpEx quite significantly.
henryfjordan 7y ago
> If open source makes little effort to optimize the vast majority of other operational costs at scale, and this is largely the case in my experience I feel the opposite is true. There are many open source projects that are at least on par with their proprietary counterparts. Postgres is competitive with every SQL DB I've heard of except maybe in some niche use-cases. Redis is open source and incredibly performant. Same with Kafka (if you use it well). Linux sure runs better than Windows in my experience. There is also a whole class of open-source libraries like React that have taken over. I can't even think of a proprietary frontend framework. What software are you thinking of when you make these claims?
- 0xFACEFEED 7y ago

jacques_chester 7y ago

I work at Pivotal and disagree with a fair amount of the characterisation thereof, but my bias is mostly informed by actually working there for the last 6 years. Let's look at the heart of the argument instead. > If you squint, open source could be seen as a very generous charitable donation to some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet. Broadly: yes. Except backwards. FLOSS can be seen as a public good -- it is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Excludability is the property that someone can be prevented from using the good (eg, requiring payment to consume a can of soft-drink). Rivalrousness is the property that utility from consumption of a good by one person diminishes utility for another person (if I drink the soft-drink, you get less of it). Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level. A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption. This hints at one of the ways that public goods get provided: through subsidy by benefactors, who will capture some but not all of the value created by their benefaction. A wealthy person may so enjoy seeing the opera that they will donate heavily to the local opera house. They don't capture the full benefit -- other folks can watch the same shows -- but they capture enough value that they are satisfied with the arrangement. They might also get value from other factors, such as social approval. The cloud providers do not sell public goods. Their services are fully excludable. If you refuse to pay, service will end. They are rivalrous at the limit, though, putting them into the category of club goods. These are much more likely to be provisioned in a pure market, since the benefits and costs fall more "correctly" on those who obtain or bear them.

syshum 7y ago
>>Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level. >>A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption. Thus the reason Free (As in Freedom) software advocates promote the use of Copy-Left Licensing, and why non-copyleft (like MIT, BSD, and others) are slowly eroding "open source" to less fully formed software and more just the tooling, libraries and dev environments used to create software

brodyprice 7y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20191123091956/http://www.platformonomics.com/2019/11/dining-preferences-of-the-cloud-and-open-source-who-eats-who/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191123091956/http://www.platfo...

dang 7y ago
That one's pretty clearly past the tipping point in usage, so I think we can leave it above.
- brodyprice 7y ago
  Agreed, sorry. I wanted to add the archive link but felt like being snarky for some reason

gwern 7y ago

> The unexpected and asymmetric competition from the clouds confounds open source companies, who must confront the fact the competitive advantage of knowing their software better than anyone else isn’t the insurmountable moat they had hoped. It is never fun to wake up and discover your product is now just a feature of a broader offering, but this is what is happening with software. Claiming open source is eating the cloud is like coffee bean farmers claiming they’re eating Starbucks: it willfully (or just out of delusion) ignores the vast majority of what the customer is buying. As always, 'commoditize your complement': https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement

eloff 7y ago
Thanks for sharing. The discussion previously here is also interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18854854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18854854
leoc 7y ago
> (in Robert Metcalfe’s infamous expression, cross-platform web browsers & the Internet would reduce Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”) Compare the number of platforms nowadays which (to varying extents) treat Linux as a free set of buggy device drivers.

awinter-py 7y ago

Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3). The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql. These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This makes the stock version of open source software hard to operate in the way AMZN / GOOG operate it, while still allowing AMZN / GOOG to benefit from community effort without giving much back.

wmf 7y ago
With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.
- jdsully 7y ago
  That's just simple competition that we've always had. Microsoft working on a competitor to your product was the huge fear of the 90s. Cloud providers competing with your own source code is a new phemonema. The original thesis would be that brand loyalty would be strong enough to prevent forking like this. "You don't want that third-rate version, get the real thing from the original authors!". It appears that the customer base assumes quality is roughly equal considering its mostly the same code.
  - type0 7y ago
    And in this case the brand loyalty of AWS is stronger
  - detaro 7y ago
    In many businesses, getting permission to buy/license from a new supplier is way more effort than just selecting another option at the cloud provider you're already set up with.
- slovenlyrobot 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 7y ago

I'm skeptical about "multi cloud eats cloud". If you're going to be boxed into using a lowest common denominator of services, cloud has less value. You might as well jump straight to hosted bare metal. The skill sets needed aren't much different than multi-cloud, and it's much cheaper.

larnmar 7y ago

*whom

beatpanda 7y ago

I was hoping this article was going to be more like “who makes enough money to eat working on Open Source Software?”

nojvek 7y ago
Me too. I don’t think there are many people making enough money to eat working on Open Source software. If you see GitHub, the largest most active projects are funded by Mega Corps like Micro Face Goog. I wonder how many companies are successful with open source but paid licence for commercial use.

zby 7y ago

The cloud is eating business relying on licensing. This is relevant for both open and closed licenses. By the way I have wrote a post on that when the MongoDB debate was raging: https://medium.com/hackernoon/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-efcdcfb00514 https://medium.com/hackernoon/aws-and-mongo-and-open-source-.... The way for Open Source to survive is to make it attractive for cloud providers.

marktangotango 7y ago
How does one make their project attractive to cloud providers? For the sake of discussion; an infrastructure project like a job scheduler or some such?
- zby 7y ago
  I was more thinking about making the licensing attractive to cloud providers. The idea is that cloud providers are the dominant players - so for Open Source to survive it needs to be adopted by them. But yeah - I don't know how to do that. Licensing is not a core of their proposal, open sourcing their software does not impact their revenue directly - but might indirectly by letting other cloud providers compete with them using their own code.

athrowaway3z 7y ago

I'll play the 'open source eating cloud' argument because what merit it has, isn't addressed in this piece. How do computers earn people money? Speaking in 2019 that's obvious. Cloud providers earn the most. There used to be other ways people got rich off computers. But all those businesses imploded against the awesome might of '0 marginal cost', 'only good solutions survive', world of open source. Open source has 'removed more profits'/'provided more value' then the cloud. Cloud is simply the high profit game until competition kicks in, open source tools become the norm, and only the value of the virtual machine is sold at 1% the current price.

gtirloni 7y ago

This conflates open source with companies using open source as a competitive advantage. For the latter, yes, cloud is eating their cake.

siscia 7y ago

I wonder if advancement in orchestrator will shift the balance. There is a lot of effort into putting human knowledge into software, so that it can react to unexpected situation and self heal. K8s operators to be specific. If this software works well enough, what would be the competitive advantage of AWS?

zzzcpan 7y ago
K8s is not an advancement in orchestration and is very much on the AWS side in this, deeply integrating with proprietary cloud services that do their own operations and infrastructure, not even considering open sourcing those services and their supporting infrastructure nor working towards alternatives to replace them. It's just that the same thing that makes AWS piles of money is the same thing the company behind k8s is after, so they are definitely not going to advance k8s in a way that commoditizes AWS. Not that they are even capable of doing so.
jacques_chester 7y ago
I think the Operator pattern reveals a real shortcoming in Kubernetes: there's a wide gap between the core orchestration problem and the many fiddly particulars of individual pieces of software. What we gained in homogeneity for cloud-native software we're now losing in wide heterogeneity of Operator software.

Andrex 7y ago

> Pivotal got eaten by “Dockernetes” aka containers (ironically because Google was pissed off about Hadoop, but that is another story) Would anyone care to give a brief summary? It's the first I've heard of this.

tyingq 7y ago
I believe it's just saying that Google was disappointed that their MapReduce research didn't give them any market presence or power. Hadoop took the concepts and ran with it, with no direct benefit to Google. Pivotal benefited a lot with their commerical distro of Hadoop. Google didn't make the same mistake with K8S and it killed Pivotal's PCF.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  Hadoop looked to be a big part of Pivotal's overall strategy early on but didn't pan out. Labs and Cloud Foundry have contributed the lion's share of revenue for most of Pivotal's life, though data products like Greenplum, Gemfire and RabbitMQ have also contributed a lot. Kubernetes was never really about Pivotal in any universe I can think of. It was about AWS. Disclosure: I work at Pivotal.

dandanio 7y ago

"whom"... Who eats whom...

lacker 7y ago

People rarely mention in these debates that Bitcoin is open source, along with essentially all other cryptocurrencies. Indeed, the cryptocurrency business model could hardly exist without open source. It isn’t the same community at all as Linux / Postgres / etc, but it certainly should be considered a great success for open source.

unraveller 7y ago

Open source thought they could sell consulting and hosting services to fatigued devs, if they fatigued them enough. All those single project focuses left the door wide open for multi-clouds to "just add glue" between disparate open source projects and actually aim to be easy. We now await to see if compute will become a commodity or just priced that way to prevent it becoming so. Is any challenger bold enough to bite off more of the pie than they can chew?