7 ms·

Open-source and the demise of proprietary software (2018)

69 points by akulkarni 7y ago

ossworkerrights 7y ago
Would be interesting to research how open source affects indie development.
sys_64738 7y ago
This is a natural progression that wasn't available during the software crisis of the 1970s.
- zabzonk 7y ago
  Really, there was no "crisis", at least none that I ever came across. Perhaps you could post an example? The 1970s saw the development of UNIX, VMS, CP/M and other enormously successful products.
  - synt4x1k0 7y ago
    http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/NATOReports/index.html http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/NATOReports...
    - zabzonk 7y ago
      That would appear to be about the 60s.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Given how open source is eating into the proprietary software market, this is something everyone in the industry, from developers to operators to investors, should be closely watching. I suspect the biggest change to affect proprietary software is the shift to SaaS rather than open source.
- mikece 7y ago
  True; throught a SaaS model a cloud company could make extensive changes to Linux and deploy it to their datacenter on which their services are sold, but without the obligation to give back any of the code because they haven't distributed the code. I'm not saying this is actually happening, and experience with companies who build on FreeBSD show that upstreaming their changes helps keep the diffs small when pulling down updates around their proprietary code.
Edmond 7y ago
The conclusion is simply not backed by reality. There are certainly realms where open source has supplanted proprietary counterparts and they all mostly fall under infrastructure type software. We all use these infrastructure open source software products because they serve needs that practically anyone doing technology work will find themselves to have. The larger universe of commercial software is HUGE and most of it is proprietary and will remain that way.
- Aloha 7y ago
  I'd agree with you, the conclusions in this article are wildly optimistic and not backed by reality. While I'm happy there is more open source stuff, I also see no substantive change in proprietary software in the near future either.
- robenkleene 7y ago
  The irony of open source is that its biggest success is closed-source web apps, which, since your data is now hosted in the cloud, means you've lost the one thing you actually had control over, your data. And you still don't have the source code.
kazinator 7y ago
Open source isn't eating all proprietary software. Open source is enabling proprietary software to be more profitable, because it makes free all the commodity pieces that are needed to make proprietary software work. Customers would otherwise have to pay for these things (in an ongoing manner) leaving less of their $$$ to spend on your payload. Open source powers SaaS which is so closed and proprietary that the user doesn't even get to execute the binary code on their own hardware. Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten your business.
- amelius 7y ago
  > Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten your business. It seems like the rule is that open source is eating all-except-niche software.
  - robenkleene 7y ago
    So you’re saying everything except “operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff” is “niche software”? I’m not following, e.g., that would make Google and Facebook niche software?
    - nine_k 7y ago
      They are extremely niche in a sense. There are very few other search engines (all much smaller), and there's no another Facebook. The market just naturally gravitates to the biggest player.
      - robenkleene 7y ago
        What's the definition of niche being used here? I'd define it as software that's only relevant to a small percentage of the population (i.e., that obviously wouldn't include Facebook and Google).
codr7 7y ago
I don't really buy into the political debate. The arguments for open source as applied to non-technical users don't really work as advertised from my experience. Sure, you could potentially find someone to maintain it if the version you depend on goes bottom up. But the contexts where that's the preferred solution are few and far between. More important in my mind is that open source software is strictly higher quality from a technical perspective. Because it's not prostitution most of the time, it's passion and wider perspectives such as sharing knowledge. And a higher quality foundation means better software, because whatever commercial cruft someone adds on top it will still work better. I recently reinstalled a laptop that was running Windows 10 with Kubuntu for a non-technical friend, which is not an excellent example but still applies since Canonical is semi-commercial. And it's a total win, because Windows is simply crap from the bottom up. Android is another example, as is macOS.
- kiba 7y ago
  I don't really buy into the political debate. The arguments for open source as applied to non-technical users don't really work as advertised from my experience. Sure, you could potentially find someone to maintain it if the version you depend on goes bottom up. But the contexts where that's the preferred solution are few and far between. People don't certainly exercised their right to modify the source code as often as their usage. It's certainly an important right, but less often than the right to use the software as the user see fit. Arguably freedom zero is much more important in a world in which every business and companies are trying to nickel and dime you as an eternal income stream.
- ken 7y ago
  I'm not sure what these are examples of. Is Android "open-source"? Is macOS? I tried to compile Android from source this year, and spent weeks reading about it, finding distributions and tools to help, downloading packages, verifying signatures, and eventually running an enormous build command. I was ultimately unsuccessful. No matter what I fixed, there was something else that didn't work. Everything had the classic open-source excuses: it's being fixed soon, that's the wrong branch, you need to upgrade your tools, the docs are out of date, ... Android today is not anything like Andy Rubin's "the definition of open" from 2010. As far as I can tell, it's basically SAAS for smartphones. A corporation gets the benefits of open-source, but users don't.
fierarul 7y ago
This is a decent article that could stand on its own. It is also a PR piece by TimescaleDB which has all interest in convincing people/investors that an open-source company is a good deal: > (Disclaimer: Our company TimescaleDB is an open-source time-series database startup and shares investors with several of these companies, including Elastic, MongoDB, Hortonworks, Confluent, and Databricks.) There were more paragraphs, but I only picked 2 to comment: > If you are an individual, your project (or your contributions to someone else’s open-source project) will get you visibility and help your long-term career. If you want, you’ll travel the world, deliver talks on your work, and meet like-minded people along the way. I doubt this is still the case. With GitHub/Universities promoting open source contributions all over the place, it offers much less leverage. Maybe a very popular project helps the career but otherwise I think it's just a work out of passion. Might even hinder your career. >Some think that open-source foundations should fund open-source projects directly through stipends or fellowships. But these foundations are not money-making machines: e.g., the Apache Foundation barely made $500,000 in 2011. Perhaps these foundations can fund individual developers, but are extremely unlikely to be able to support open-source projects at scale. True. But some foundations do fund specific areas in need, eg. FreeBSD Foundation. Apache is a bad example as they don't fund anything. What do they need $500,000 for is unclear to me since infrastructure for projects can't cost so much (and nowadays it's offloaded to GitHub, etc).
- akulkarni 7y ago
  This comment is really funny. The way we (TimescaleDB) try to convince people (and investors) is with our product, not blog posts. But we write blog posts to transparently share our learnings with the rest of the world. That's just the open-source way. :-) Btw for others who are reading - contributing to open-source is still very much a way to build your career, travel the world, etc. I personally know people who are living their best lives because of this. It doesn't happen for everyone, but if you are early in your career then I very much recommend it.
  - fierarul 7y ago
    It's not funny if you think that http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html is more or less mandatory reading on HN. I would like to see some data point towards the success related to open source involvement. I'm sure outliers exist just as there are people doing really well with their solo AppStore app or with their niche website. And I'm saying this as somebody involved in open source: better to see it as a hobby done out of passion. Any other benefits are random/luck and except if you get to feel some passion for a highly sought out niche (hello Machine Learning) you shouldn't expect anything out of it. Entering into it with the expectation of building your career, traveling the world, etc is going to lead to disappointment.
1996 7y ago
Ah, timescaledb. They are funny. I tried them really hard. I was rooting for them. Then it bit me: death by a thousand papercuts One of the many papercuts was actually more serious, to the point it was funny: I remember how in their stable versions, they had a humorous bug: if you did \copy instead of insert to a timescaledb, the timestamps looked right when you eyeballed them with a select, but acted wrong when you used them in a query. Theefore it passed tests, but took down production whenever than happened. Ouch. To their credit, they preserved this bug very well for several stable versions - for far longer than my patience with broken software. That's quite bad for a database that intends to do timeseries - something so basic you won't ever see in proprietary software. Then before there was pipelinedb which also had its fair share of bugs before going under. Some of them took a production database offline. But it was such a CPU hog that it had been anticipated. Still after that timescaledb bug, I banned the use of third party postgres extensions.
- akulkarni 7y ago
  Hey there, glad you think we are funny, but sorry to hear you are having problems. This problem you mentioned is new to me - have not seen it before. Did you file a Github issue for this? Happy to chat more there (or feel free to ping me directly - ajay (at) timescale.com).
  - 1996 7y ago
    As timescaledb is now banned with all third party extensions, I don't have a server where I can reproduce that. But it was 100% reproducible on a very simple routine scenario (add many records to an existing timescale db) Just try to do a massive '\copy from' into a table that is already a timescaledb, using a tsv source with at least a few million records, make sure the dates are well spread out. Then use windowing functions to count the records per time unit. Compare date_trunc to time_bucket and select. Unless the issue was silently fixed, I'm sure you will be laughting too - but I recommend you wait until after xmas to have that good hearthy laugh, as it may cause you to want to fix the issue ASAP :) Once of the field was defaulting to NOW(), maybe that's what caused the funny bug but I didn't investigate much after that. It was the straw that broke the camel back. Thousand papercuts. Not worth the time investment.
throwaway49872 7y ago
More like: Proprietary software reinvents itself as corporate-driven Open Source with SaaS Lock-In
- pyuser583 7y ago
  Bingo. Look at Microsoft. Used to charge an arm and leg for software. Then ran up against competition from Apple and Google. 2000s were not good for Microsoft. They’re getting their act together now. But for a while they were very much old tech.
  - ken 7y ago
    They realized there's a lot of technical people who like open-source software, so they found a way to insert themselves into the middle of that.
    - throwaway49872 7y ago
      The whole SaaS industry and most of "tech" companies are little more than middleman between open source software and end users.
gnufx 7y ago
I'm not sure about the general thesis, but some of the history is questionable. For one thing, I assume gumby would disagree about Red Hat being "the first company to build a successful business on top of open-source software" (for values of "open-source" equal to "free"), even if though became successful enough to buy Cygnus.
jpalomaki 7y ago
I think the ”original idea” behind open source was to enable collaboration. If two companies both need accounting system and they don’t see accounting system as something that would bring them competitive advantage, why not build the system together. In many other fields this collaboration is enabled through government. Companies pay taxes, taxes are used to fund infrastructure such as roads and railways. If I remember right for example Apache Software Foundation had a requirement that core team for project should not come from just single company. One way to categorize open source projects is to check how many companies really collaborate on the project. Is it a true joint effort or is it in practise dependent on one entity.
akulkarni 7y ago
Hi, author here. I wrote this over a year ago. I think I still agree with most of the points in the article, but if I were to write this today I'd emphasize the role of Cloud and SaaS even more. I think it's pretty clear that Cloud has become the dominant way to consume open-source for new projects. It's also true that SaaS is already replacing traditional proprietary "on premise" software. But I think there's a wrinkle here: open-source software can still build larger communities (and as a result, reduce reliance on a single vendor) than a SaaS company ever can. For example, look at Elasticsearch. Even if you don't want to run Elasticsearch yourself, you can choose to run it on Elastic Cloud or on AWS. So now you have at least two different companies who are invested in making Elasticsearch better for you. Compare this to Sumologic or Splunk, where you are clearly beholden to that vendor. In other words, SaaS is the new proprietary software. And I still believe that open-source is poised to "eat" it.
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
There are more Open Source projects than there are programmers with the time to collaborate. Some types of software lend themselves to Open Source, others don't. I once saw a disparaging comment in a forum attempting to create an open-source accounting package, "who would want to work on that boring stuff?" See http://progenygenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-open-source-mirage.html http://progenygenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-open-source...
smitty1e 7y ago
I take the syncretic view that the GPL/apache/proprietary categories of licenses are greater than their components. These three categories cover the spectrum of motives for doing software. What's key is to respect these motives and protect the legal regime that supports their creative tension.
Data_Junkie 7y ago
It's not eating business logic, it's enabling it. Grace be to God.
rstuart4133 7y ago
He is wrong. Proprietary software is near impossible to escape. Try running exclusively open source is impossible (sadly, for those of us who like to keep prying eyes out of our hardware). It's in the firmware blobs we load, embedded in ROM's in things like SSD, in the digital thermometer on my desk, the monitor my computer is connected to, the IP phone I use, in the modems in my mobile, in the batter control chip in my laptop. But to a programmer, I guess it may look like open source is replacing everything else. That's because we programmers have gradually have replaced everything we use with open source - compilers, editors, web servers, libraries for just about everything. Even stuff we use play with rather than get paid for is replaced - like photo and video editors, 3D printers, model plane piloting software. It's easy for us, and cheaper in the long run, and given enough time the end result is better quality than the proprietary stuff because we all pitch in to knock off the paper cuts. But it really is a case of "scratching itches", so if a programmer doesn't get itchy about something then it usually won't have an open source version. It's not hard to find examples. There are some usable PCB design tools out there - but 3D mechanic drafting tools weren't a thing until 3D printers tickled our interest in that area. Anything that requires specialised hardware is going to be out of reach - so you won't see open source MRI scanners, but I have no doubt you will see devices using 2 cheap web cams to do SLAM in the not too distant future. This has had the accidental effect of making us more efficient. Any tool we can conceive of that allows us to do our job done better is free. The tools we already constantly get better - for free. In any other industry this might be a problem as supply overwhelms demand, but we seem to be in the odd position of the world demanding what appears to be a near infinite amount of software. I am constantly amazed by how the demand for good programmers never seems to tail off. Even where I live (Australia) which has very high wages by international standards, and in the face of huge numbers of programmers coming out of low wage areas, _and_ in the face of jobs being some of the most transportable on earth, anyone competent programmer who wants a job gets one within weeks. I think we partially have open source to thank for that. But step outside of what programmers want, and we are as mercenary as the rest of them. We are more than happy to develop nice new shinies we use and give them away for free, but we know who butters our bread. We don't write code for them for free. And since we are all getting paid, that must mean most of the code we write isn't available for free.

69 points by akulkarni 7y ago

ossworkerrights 7y ago

Would be interesting to research how open source affects indie development.

sys_64738 7y ago

This is a natural progression that wasn't available during the software crisis of the 1970s.

zabzonk 7y ago
Really, there was no "crisis", at least none that I ever came across. Perhaps you could post an example? The 1970s saw the development of UNIX, VMS, CP/M and other enormously successful products.
- synt4x1k0 7y ago
  http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/NATOReports/index.html http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/NATOReports...
  - zabzonk 7y ago
    That would appear to be about the 60s.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

Given how open source is eating into the proprietary software market, this is something everyone in the industry, from developers to operators to investors, should be closely watching. I suspect the biggest change to affect proprietary software is the shift to SaaS rather than open source.

mikece 7y ago
True; throught a SaaS model a cloud company could make extensive changes to Linux and deploy it to their datacenter on which their services are sold, but without the obligation to give back any of the code because they haven't distributed the code. I'm not saying this is actually happening, and experience with companies who build on FreeBSD show that upstreaming their changes helps keep the diffs small when pulling down updates around their proprietary code.

Edmond 7y ago

The conclusion is simply not backed by reality. There are certainly realms where open source has supplanted proprietary counterparts and they all mostly fall under infrastructure type software. We all use these infrastructure open source software products because they serve needs that practically anyone doing technology work will find themselves to have. The larger universe of commercial software is HUGE and most of it is proprietary and will remain that way.

Aloha 7y ago
I'd agree with you, the conclusions in this article are wildly optimistic and not backed by reality. While I'm happy there is more open source stuff, I also see no substantive change in proprietary software in the near future either.
robenkleene 7y ago
The irony of open source is that its biggest success is closed-source web apps, which, since your data is now hosted in the cloud, means you've lost the one thing you actually had control over, your data. And you still don't have the source code.

kazinator 7y ago

Open source isn't eating all proprietary software. Open source is enabling proprietary software to be more profitable, because it makes free all the commodity pieces that are needed to make proprietary software work. Customers would otherwise have to pay for these things (in an ongoing manner) leaving less of their $$$ to spend on your payload. Open source powers SaaS which is so closed and proprietary that the user doesn't even get to execute the binary code on their own hardware. Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten your business.

amelius 7y ago
> Of course, if your business is selling operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff, then, yup, open source has eaten your business. It seems like the rule is that open source is eating all-except-niche software.
- robenkleene 7y ago
  So you’re saying everything except “operating systems, development tools, databases and other infrastructure stuff” is “niche software”? I’m not following, e.g., that would make Google and Facebook niche software?
  - nine_k 7y ago
    They are extremely niche in a sense. There are very few other search engines (all much smaller), and there's no another Facebook. The market just naturally gravitates to the biggest player.
    - robenkleene 7y ago
      What's the definition of niche being used here? I'd define it as software that's only relevant to a small percentage of the population (i.e., that obviously wouldn't include Facebook and Google).

codr7 7y ago

I don't really buy into the political debate. The arguments for open source as applied to non-technical users don't really work as advertised from my experience. Sure, you could potentially find someone to maintain it if the version you depend on goes bottom up. But the contexts where that's the preferred solution are few and far between. More important in my mind is that open source software is strictly higher quality from a technical perspective. Because it's not prostitution most of the time, it's passion and wider perspectives such as sharing knowledge. And a higher quality foundation means better software, because whatever commercial cruft someone adds on top it will still work better. I recently reinstalled a laptop that was running Windows 10 with Kubuntu for a non-technical friend, which is not an excellent example but still applies since Canonical is semi-commercial. And it's a total win, because Windows is simply crap from the bottom up. Android is another example, as is macOS.

kiba 7y ago
I don't really buy into the political debate. The arguments for open source as applied to non-technical users don't really work as advertised from my experience. Sure, you could potentially find someone to maintain it if the version you depend on goes bottom up. But the contexts where that's the preferred solution are few and far between. People don't certainly exercised their right to modify the source code as often as their usage. It's certainly an important right, but less often than the right to use the software as the user see fit. Arguably freedom zero is much more important in a world in which every business and companies are trying to nickel and dime you as an eternal income stream.
ken 7y ago
I'm not sure what these are examples of. Is Android "open-source"? Is macOS? I tried to compile Android from source this year, and spent weeks reading about it, finding distributions and tools to help, downloading packages, verifying signatures, and eventually running an enormous build command. I was ultimately unsuccessful. No matter what I fixed, there was something else that didn't work. Everything had the classic open-source excuses: it's being fixed soon, that's the wrong branch, you need to upgrade your tools, the docs are out of date, ... Android today is not anything like Andy Rubin's "the definition of open" from 2010. As far as I can tell, it's basically SAAS for smartphones. A corporation gets the benefits of open-source, but users don't.

fierarul 7y ago

This is a decent article that could stand on its own. It is also a PR piece by TimescaleDB which has all interest in convincing people/investors that an open-source company is a good deal: > (Disclaimer: Our company TimescaleDB is an open-source time-series database startup and shares investors with several of these companies, including Elastic, MongoDB, Hortonworks, Confluent, and Databricks.) There were more paragraphs, but I only picked 2 to comment: > If you are an individual, your project (or your contributions to someone else’s open-source project) will get you visibility and help your long-term career. If you want, you’ll travel the world, deliver talks on your work, and meet like-minded people along the way. I doubt this is still the case. With GitHub/Universities promoting open source contributions all over the place, it offers much less leverage. Maybe a very popular project helps the career but otherwise I think it's just a work out of passion. Might even hinder your career. >Some think that open-source foundations should fund open-source projects directly through stipends or fellowships. But these foundations are not money-making machines: e.g., the Apache Foundation barely made $500,000 in 2011. Perhaps these foundations can fund individual developers, but are extremely unlikely to be able to support open-source projects at scale. True. But some foundations do fund specific areas in need, eg. FreeBSD Foundation. Apache is a bad example as they don't fund anything. What do they need $500,000 for is unclear to me since infrastructure for projects can't cost so much (and nowadays it's offloaded to GitHub, etc).

akulkarni 7y ago
This comment is really funny. The way we (TimescaleDB) try to convince people (and investors) is with our product, not blog posts. But we write blog posts to transparently share our learnings with the rest of the world. That's just the open-source way. :-) Btw for others who are reading - contributing to open-source is still very much a way to build your career, travel the world, etc. I personally know people who are living their best lives because of this. It doesn't happen for everyone, but if you are early in your career then I very much recommend it.
- fierarul 7y ago
  It's not funny if you think that http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html is more or less mandatory reading on HN. I would like to see some data point towards the success related to open source involvement. I'm sure outliers exist just as there are people doing really well with their solo AppStore app or with their niche website. And I'm saying this as somebody involved in open source: better to see it as a hobby done out of passion. Any other benefits are random/luck and except if you get to feel some passion for a highly sought out niche (hello Machine Learning) you shouldn't expect anything out of it. Entering into it with the expectation of building your career, traveling the world, etc is going to lead to disappointment.

1996 7y ago

Ah, timescaledb. They are funny. I tried them really hard. I was rooting for them. Then it bit me: death by a thousand papercuts One of the many papercuts was actually more serious, to the point it was funny: I remember how in their stable versions, they had a humorous bug: if you did \copy instead of insert to a timescaledb, the timestamps looked right when you eyeballed them with a select, but acted wrong when you used them in a query. Theefore it passed tests, but took down production whenever than happened. Ouch. To their credit, they preserved this bug very well for several stable versions - for far longer than my patience with broken software. That's quite bad for a database that intends to do timeseries - something so basic you won't ever see in proprietary software. Then before there was pipelinedb which also had its fair share of bugs before going under. Some of them took a production database offline. But it was such a CPU hog that it had been anticipated. Still after that timescaledb bug, I banned the use of third party postgres extensions.

akulkarni 7y ago
Hey there, glad you think we are funny, but sorry to hear you are having problems. This problem you mentioned is new to me - have not seen it before. Did you file a Github issue for this? Happy to chat more there (or feel free to ping me directly - ajay (at) timescale.com).
- 1996 7y ago
  As timescaledb is now banned with all third party extensions, I don't have a server where I can reproduce that. But it was 100% reproducible on a very simple routine scenario (add many records to an existing timescale db) Just try to do a massive '\copy from' into a table that is already a timescaledb, using a tsv source with at least a few million records, make sure the dates are well spread out. Then use windowing functions to count the records per time unit. Compare date_trunc to time_bucket and select. Unless the issue was silently fixed, I'm sure you will be laughting too - but I recommend you wait until after xmas to have that good hearthy laugh, as it may cause you to want to fix the issue ASAP :) Once of the field was defaulting to NOW(), maybe that's what caused the funny bug but I didn't investigate much after that. It was the straw that broke the camel back. Thousand papercuts. Not worth the time investment.

throwaway49872 7y ago

More like: Proprietary software reinvents itself as corporate-driven Open Source with SaaS Lock-In

pyuser583 7y ago
Bingo. Look at Microsoft. Used to charge an arm and leg for software. Then ran up against competition from Apple and Google. 2000s were not good for Microsoft. They’re getting their act together now. But for a while they were very much old tech.
- ken 7y ago
  They realized there's a lot of technical people who like open-source software, so they found a way to insert themselves into the middle of that.
  - throwaway49872 7y ago
    The whole SaaS industry and most of "tech" companies are little more than middleman between open source software and end users.

gnufx 7y ago

I'm not sure about the general thesis, but some of the history is questionable. For one thing, I assume gumby would disagree about Red Hat being "the first company to build a successful business on top of open-source software" (for values of "open-source" equal to "free"), even if though became successful enough to buy Cygnus.

jpalomaki 7y ago

I think the ”original idea” behind open source was to enable collaboration. If two companies both need accounting system and they don’t see accounting system as something that would bring them competitive advantage, why not build the system together. In many other fields this collaboration is enabled through government. Companies pay taxes, taxes are used to fund infrastructure such as roads and railways. If I remember right for example Apache Software Foundation had a requirement that core team for project should not come from just single company. One way to categorize open source projects is to check how many companies really collaborate on the project. Is it a true joint effort or is it in practise dependent on one entity.

akulkarni 7y ago

Hi, author here. I wrote this over a year ago. I think I still agree with most of the points in the article, but if I were to write this today I'd emphasize the role of Cloud and SaaS even more. I think it's pretty clear that Cloud has become the dominant way to consume open-source for new projects. It's also true that SaaS is already replacing traditional proprietary "on premise" software. But I think there's a wrinkle here: open-source software can still build larger communities (and as a result, reduce reliance on a single vendor) than a SaaS company ever can. For example, look at Elasticsearch. Even if you don't want to run Elasticsearch yourself, you can choose to run it on Elastic Cloud or on AWS. So now you have at least two different companies who are invested in making Elasticsearch better for you. Compare this to Sumologic or Splunk, where you are clearly beholden to that vendor. In other words, SaaS is the new proprietary software. And I still believe that open-source is poised to "eat" it.

GnarfGnarf 7y ago

There are more Open Source projects than there are programmers with the time to collaborate. Some types of software lend themselves to Open Source, others don't. I once saw a disparaging comment in a forum attempting to create an open-source accounting package, "who would want to work on that boring stuff?" See http://progenygenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-open-source-mirage.html http://progenygenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-open-source...

smitty1e 7y ago

I take the syncretic view that the GPL/apache/proprietary categories of licenses are greater than their components. These three categories cover the spectrum of motives for doing software. What's key is to respect these motives and protect the legal regime that supports their creative tension.

Data_Junkie 7y ago

It's not eating business logic, it's enabling it. Grace be to God.

rstuart4133 7y ago

He is wrong. Proprietary software is near impossible to escape. Try running exclusively open source is impossible (sadly, for those of us who like to keep prying eyes out of our hardware). It's in the firmware blobs we load, embedded in ROM's in things like SSD, in the digital thermometer on my desk, the monitor my computer is connected to, the IP phone I use, in the modems in my mobile, in the batter control chip in my laptop. But to a programmer, I guess it may look like open source is replacing everything else. That's because we programmers have gradually have replaced everything we use with open source - compilers, editors, web servers, libraries for just about everything. Even stuff we use play with rather than get paid for is replaced - like photo and video editors, 3D printers, model plane piloting software. It's easy for us, and cheaper in the long run, and given enough time the end result is better quality than the proprietary stuff because we all pitch in to knock off the paper cuts. But it really is a case of "scratching itches", so if a programmer doesn't get itchy about something then it usually won't have an open source version. It's not hard to find examples. There are some usable PCB design tools out there - but 3D mechanic drafting tools weren't a thing until 3D printers tickled our interest in that area. Anything that requires specialised hardware is going to be out of reach - so you won't see open source MRI scanners, but I have no doubt you will see devices using 2 cheap web cams to do SLAM in the not too distant future. This has had the accidental effect of making us more efficient. Any tool we can conceive of that allows us to do our job done better is free. The tools we already constantly get better - for free. In any other industry this might be a problem as supply overwhelms demand, but we seem to be in the odd position of the world demanding what appears to be a near infinite amount of software. I am constantly amazed by how the demand for good programmers never seems to tail off. Even where I live (Australia) which has very high wages by international standards, and in the face of huge numbers of programmers coming out of low wage areas, _and_ in the face of jobs being some of the most transportable on earth, anyone competent programmer who wants a job gets one within weeks. I think we partially have open source to thank for that. But step outside of what programmers want, and we are as mercenary as the rest of them. We are more than happy to develop nice new shinies we use and give them away for free, but we know who butters our bread. We don't write code for them for free. And since we are all getting paid, that must mean most of the code we write isn't available for free.