13 ms·

The third wave of open source migration

205 points by ohjeez 7y ago

pinky07 7y ago
We are witnessing this since weeks at Odoo. (https://odoo.com https://odoo.com) Last month, we lost a big project against SAP (budget 5m€): the company choosed SAP because their holding was willing to pay for the project. Last week, the same prospect came back to Odoo: as the holding could not afford such a project anymore, the company has to pay from its own budget. So, they choose Odoo (<1m€ budget) I believe the next wave is a replacement of proprietary expensive business applications: ERP, SAS, BI...
- c-smile 7y ago
  Am I right that this has nothing with FOSS per se but just about "X is cheaper than Y" kind of reasoning?
  - pestaa 7y ago
    Yes. Odoo is open core, and many components are closed, and those are far from being free.
    - agustif 7y ago
      Is there any good resource on what addons are not open-source?
      - pestaa 7y ago
        https://www.odoo.com/page/editions https://www.odoo.com/page/editions Quite a few actually. If you're a software shop or digital agency, I think the Odoo Studio and marketing automation features are the big gaps. For the latter, there's Mautic. However, good CRUD builders are difficult to find. Seatable is promising, haven't evaluated it yet.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
prepend 7y ago
I think the growth is on a continuing streak and there’s not a need for a RedHat style support for every package. I think using these packages and projects requires more due diligence and planning on staff to pick and support, but I think the current highly variable support project by project works out well. And then for big stuff (Linux, Postgres, etc) some commercial support is brought in. I’d much rather see more support for companies donating developer hours to patches and features. Some way to recognize in kind and labor contributions and expand recognition for these kinds of contributions. I think this works better for software than trying to get every company to pay into some support fund. If you want to pay structured licenses for everyone, there’s a model for that. Trying to shoehorn license fees on top of open source loses a lot of the efficiencies, I think.
- freedomben 7y ago
  Disclosure: I work for Red Hat I think you're missing the real value here of the support model and services a company like Red Hat can provide to large orgs. It's not about having support for every package, it's more about having others do the hard, expensive work of presenting you a portfolio of projects known to work well together, so you can focus on adding your own business value rather than spending hours duplicating effort from others and debugging arcane issues. To some extent you can't out-source everything (and I personally wouldn't recommend that. I think having some in-house experts is really important), but not everybody should roll their own OS, DB, container orchestration, etc.[1], and finding consistent options that work together can be difficult when you have huge, diverse, engineering departments with different values/priorities. I don't disagree with you: I think contributions in either code or donations are a great way to support FOSS projects. I just think there is also a lot of business value in the support contract style method, because you're not just buying insurance, you're buying real value in the form of somebody presenting you with a portfolio of disparate open source projects that have been integrated and tested together. [1] Note I'm not talking about "React v. Vue" which I agree support wouldn't make sense for.
  - smichel17 7y ago
    Tangent: I appreciate when people put conflict of interest disclosures at the top of their post rather than the end. Thank you.
c-smile 7y ago
Could be, but only if companies that are behind OS products will survive by themselves. We hear crack sounds here and there already. Yet, "the rise of hosted cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure" is just "anti-pattern" for the subject of the article. Commercial companies that exploit (fuzzy term here but still) OS software.
- jamesblonde 7y ago
  I think the next wave of OSS products will be AGPL-v3 licensed. It's the "cloud condom" model - it protects you from the cloud vendors. They have internal bans on using it, as it forces them to open up their internal software architecture. But AGPL-v3 is still a valid open-source, despite what the shrills at AWS will tell you (they just want to operationalize open source projects, not lead them).
  - pabs3 7y ago
    AGPL-v3 isn't going to protect you from cloud vendors, they will just release the source and beat you with their marketing budget. Or they will just re-implement your APIs/interfaces from scratch and still win.
mooreds 7y ago
I think there's substantial value in replacing expensive system components with free alternatives. Things like FusionAuth / https://fusionauth.io/ https://fusionauth.io/ for user identity (full disclosure, I'm an employee) and Pentaho Kettle https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle for ETL and data transformations can help. It is important to recognize the value of developer time too, though. There's a cost in dev time for setting up a "free" project. That's why I think that any open source project that gets too popular will have to have a cloud vendor strategy, otherwise they'll get done to them what AWS did to Elastic Search. I also thought it was interesting that the author mentioned support for the various application libraries. I know that there have been several "tip" type applications (gittip, gitcoin.co) that try to align incentives and allow open source developers to make a living.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  >>> That's why I think that any open source project that gets too popular will have to have a cloud vendor strategy, This. In fact sadly one of the marks of a successful OSS project is ability to pay yourself, and even perhaps commercial success. In Linus' day it was enough to have a whip round online to buy a faster Pentium machine, but these days it's a foundation and cloud offering.
  - mooreds 7y ago
    I was at a conference last year and talked to someone who said that the investors he knew were shying away from investing in open source software companies because anything that was successful would just be copied and operationalized by AWS/GCP/Azure. I hope that isn't the case, but we'll see. Maybe the answer is niche operations that are too small or domain specific to be noticed by the big folks.
    - zerkten 7y ago
      There are lots of niche operations, but they tend to build their domain-specific work on top of these cloud providers. AWS's fork of Elasticsearch (ES) is a good example of the operationalization you talk about. If I was building a niche eDiscovery solution for the compliance market on top of ES I'm likely to want to offer that on AWS or another cloud provider at some point. If they offer their managed version of it, then I don't have to support it. You can make obvious arguments like special extensions, or all compliance customers don't use the public cloud, but ultimately many users are going in that direction. Any type of general-purpose tool like ES is ripe for the picking by any cloud provider when it gets popular. The only options I see are licensing it in a way that's prohibitive for adoption by cloud providers, or engaging them early to become their subcontracted maintainer for the product on their cloud so that you remain in the value chain. Ultimately, it's not the type of business that should be taking VC money because the upside is, so limited when you have the typical successful outcome. The only way to get to an outcome that VCs might like is to use the income stream, or talent acquisition, from the open source product to pivot into something that isn't as limited. Doing that is really hard.
okram 7y ago
The third wave of open source software is no software at all. It is only a matter of time before Amazon doesn't care whether it's licensed Apache2 or not. They will just take software and sell it. You have a problem with that? Have fun suing them... Year 1..2..3..oooo. you are quite the fish..4..5. broke. Out of money. Tech is dead.
- okram 7y ago
  Ha. The two comments that critique Amazon got down voted with negative points. Does Amazon have cronies patrolling Hacker News to squash dissidents?
  - speedgoose 7y ago
    Me too I realized that criticism towards AWS brings downvotes on HN. A bit strange because it's usually the opposite online. Maybe a lot of HN readers are working for AWS.
  - wisnesky 7y ago
    You must be referring to the "love-hate" relationship between Amazon and open source software as described eg here? https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-and-commercial-open-source-in-the-cloud-its-complicated/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-and-commercial-open-sou... "Vendors developing those open source products started accusing AWS of strip mining, i.e., reaping the benefits of the products, without contributing back to their development."
    - pabs3 7y ago
      I hate to defend Amazon, but it seems that they do contribute back to open source: https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ For example running `git shortlog -ne` in the Linux kernel git repository will show a number of Amazon folks with many commits to their name.
      - redis_mlc 7y ago
msoad 7y ago
If you work for a big engineering organization you will find yourself questioning things that are being built a lot. Open Source alternatives often have higher quality and better support, yet engineering organizations opt to build their own. You might wonder why? It's because growth is the name of the game. Any engineering leader wants bigger and bigger organization under her/him so what they do is they green light projects that mostly don't make sense but they can pretty much lie about how essential it is to build in house to the board/CEO. When winter comes, those projects don't make sense anymore because cost cutting measures are in mandate. The same leader might even make the case for the Open Source alternative. I've seen this enough times to know it is a pattern in our industry.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  Great point. Very simple explanation.
- vikiomega9 7y ago
  From your experiences, tell me more! How could this problem be avoided? How does one sniff out such glut?
  - neutronicus 7y ago
    If someone comes to you and says "we need to hire more people to do my job so I can move into a leadership role" say "sure, if you take a pay cut," or "no" If you are making a lot of money and one of your employees has performed well, and never asked you to hire more people to do their job, give them a God damn raise
  - golergka 7y ago
    Personally, I think this problem is inevitable as organization scales. So, if you don't want to fall into that, remedy is simple: don't scale. As in, you can scale in terms of revenue and user amount, but avoid reinvesting it into hiring more and more people. (Classic examples of companies that achieved that, at least to some extent and at a certain moment, are Instagram and Whatsapp, but there are many more less famous ones). I guess, when you're on the rocket part of the hockey stick it seems that you can solve anything by hiring more people. A lot of leaders kind of forget what they sacrifice when they do that.
mrfusion 7y ago
I’d love to see more open source hardware as the next wave. The ardiuno seems like it’s a success.
- m463 7y ago
  I don't care as much about open source hardware as open interfaces or drivers. I hate that every single thing you buy requires an app and a login and a shitty proprietary driver. (why does my mouse need a cloud account?) In general hardware folks don't do software well. Software is just a checkbox. Meanwhile there's a world of great folks out there that will make their hardware get up and dance given the chance. Honestly they should commoditize software to increase sales of their hardware.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  I think this wave may have been started by Arduino, but I mean... Raspberry Pi? Teensy? MBED? Any microcontroller manufacturers' dozens of reference designs? How much more open hardware do you want? I'll be thrilled once reasonably sized phones and laptops are reasonably straightforward to get with open hardware of course, but there is lots and lots of open source hardware.
jamesblonde 7y ago
This is a hilarious video that captures the state-of-play of open-source frameworks in Data Science: https://twitter.com/wdaali999/status/1161973951565881345?lang=en https://twitter.com/wdaali999/status/1161973951565881345?lan... Basically, anything not open-source is not cool any more - SAS, matlab, SPSS. Kids are not learning these frameworks in school and don't want to use them. I see open-source taking over Data Science by the time this recession is over: Jupyter, conda, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, RStudio, and even PySpark.
- oldsklgdfth 7y ago
  MATLAB still has a strong foothold in academic settings and in some industry. But it's really painful watching some of the smaller proprietary packages stay afloat.
  - xvilka 7y ago
    Octave[1] covers most of Matlab uses, and it's FOSS. And there is Sage Math[2] that integrates many different FOSS components to be something like Mathematica. Both are developed quite actively and covering many differences with proprietary analogs every year. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ [2] https://www.sagemath.org/ https://www.sagemath.org/
    - partyboat1586 7y ago
      I still don't understand why Wolfram Mathematica doesn't have wider adoption. imo its way better than Mathematica, Sage and Octave.
      - wolfgke 7y ago
        > I still don't understand why Wolfram Mathematica doesn't have wider adoption. High prices for hobbyists who are not students. The Wolfram store does not even give you the option to pay with anything else than credit card (in Germany, other methods of payment are strongly preferred), so you have to use a reseller if you don't have or don't want to use a credit card for payment. Side story concerning the previous paragraph: I got a voucher from Wolfram Research to update my Mathematica license via the Wolfram store for a price that seemed fair to me at that time. So I wrote to the support that I would love to accept their offer/voucher, but have no credit card. Wolfram Research support told me, this is not possible; I have to use a reseller in this case (for which the voucher does not apply). OK, I get it: Wolfram Research does not want me as a customer.
octorian 7y ago
One big area where open source unfortunately falls flat is end user application software. In this market, proprietary applications do add real value. Unfortunately, there isn't a very good business model to fund developers to work on such applications, when the application itself is not a sell-able product. These sorts of projects can work if there's a significant overlap between end-users and capable developers. If there isn't, then they're often woefully inferior to the commercial alternative.
- Mandatum 7y ago
  Open-source sucks at UX. I think because there's no community behind open-source UX like there is in the inner workings of systems, where people just want to get shit done.. You have to pay UX developers and designers to do their job, because it's generally not a job you'd do for free or in order to accomplish "something".
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    I wonder why UX designers don't want to work for free while software developers do work for free?
    - Mandatum 7y ago
      As a software developer, I'm writing to benefit me because I use the code I write. What I write and share is directly re-usable to others. We can walk a path and share our work, and others can take it and copy it immediately. Whereas with UX.. Most of the time it's written for the benefit of someone else. And it's not something that can be used elsewhere very easily.. Often needing to be completely re-worked to be useful anywhere else.
      - vbezhenar 7y ago
        You're talking about libraries. And parent answered to message about end user software. Sure, you might use your own end user software, but so can UX designer.
eric1293 7y ago
Open source is a two edge sword. If developers voluntarily contribute to the projects, it could be positive. But increasingly it's becoming a source of cheap labor. It used to be that you get a college degree and start a job. Now you need years of schooling, unpaid internships, postdoc and unpaid scientific contributions, an extensive GitHub page with open source contributions, etc to get the same job. The competition for better CVs will push individuals towards taking years of unpaid jobs against their will, which is negative.
- ketzo 7y ago
  I get that expectations have changed, but I have lots of friends graduating with a Computer Science BS, with nothing on their githubs, who do well on their interviews and get entry-level positions making six figures. Edited: And no one I know does unpaid internships -- most CS majors are making $20-40+/hr over the summer of their second or third years in college.
  - alex4864 7y ago
    I graduate this May with a CS degree, that about mirrors my experiences. The vast majority of competent and even semi-competent students have no problems getting good paying internships, and jobs out of college. I appreciate that unpaid internships are a really bad situation in some fields, but fortunately CS is pretty lucrative right now.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hekmatof 7y ago
I don't understand the second wave relation to open-source and free software. They moved to cloud platform to save cost and non of these platforms are open source.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
Kind of like “follow your passions”, “open source” is a great way for software developers to work at way below the market rate to provide provide great value to corporations for very cheap. Through github stars and “recognition” the corporate world has managed to gamify software development and get enthusiastic developers to develop and give away literally billions in software value. No wonder the MBA’s view software developers as suckers. Read through HN, and you see maintainers of hugely popular open source software that probably has saved corporations billions of dollars, burned out, mentally exhausted, living in poverty and begging for donations.
- CypherSnyper 7y ago
  So what would your view be? Having developers make everything proprietary so that the world's computing infrastructure would collapse? I find very doubtful your claim that corporations are "gamifying" or exploiting software developers in any way. It is fallacious to label corporations as inherently trying to steal from developers, or the developers as suckers. Rather, open source allows for the symbiosis of the two that creates billions in added value for everybody. Nobody loses.
aphextron 7y ago
>Now, after one of the longest bull market runs in history, the road ahead is again uncertain. The rumors of this bull market's death have been greatly exaggerated. The DJIA is still up over 18% over the last 3 years, or ~6% annually; barely a percent below average. The NASDAQ 100 has almost completely recovered its' losses from the initial COVID-19 crash. Major drivers of the market over the last 10 years like $FB, $AMZN, $MSFT, and $AAPL are through the roof. Granted that a lot of this is fed meddling, and yes a lot of people from the service and hospitality industry are out of work, but the primary engine of our economy is humming along. I would not be surprised to see a record Q3 this year.
- okareaman 7y ago
  Have you considered the possibility that momentum carries forward for a bit like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and hanging in the air for a moment before plunging? If consumers can't afford to spend then why advertise, why buy a new smartphone?
- rswail 7y ago
  Amazon's marketplace and delivery service have a "captive" market due to the closure of bricks and mortar retail. The general move to the cloud rewards AWS/GCP/Azure with the two primary "winners" currently being AWS and Azure. This will continue as companies move to the cloud, but expect there to be a flattening of growth. As for Facebook and Google, they rely on advertising, which relies on consumption. When there is 10+% unemployment and 20+% underemployment, consumption is highly likely to at least flatten if not fall off a cliff, particularly in elective consumption like high end electronics. The share market is not indicative of the economy and is a lagging indicator of company revenues.
killjoywashere 7y ago
I feel like now would be a good time for an open source FHIR-compliant electronic health record to start building integrations for any non-Cerner/Epic company in the market. Which the more I learn about healthcare is approximately all of them.
einpoklum 7y ago
That article was nearly content-free. Brief review of history and then some talk about a supposed "third wave" of migration is not clearly characterized, nor actually foreseen in any detail ("certainly X would be a good place to start" - thank you captain obvious). No discussion of anything signifcat: * Are commercial corporations contribution back to FOSS software they use? * * Additional functionality and bug fixes? * * Grants/donations of money, hardware or even developer time? ... Amazon, Google, MS run mostly FOSS on their clouds, and pocket billions, but certainly don't give much back. * Does "open source components" just mean FOSS inside but closed commercial outside, or do companies transition to making FOSS? * What about hardware? Or at least, device drivers and firmware? * What about all those SaaS and PaaS platforms even the article itself mentions? Their engineering setups, and software in particular, are mostly closed. Where's that promised "wave" for them?

205 points by ohjeez 7y ago

We are witnessing this since weeks at Odoo. (https://odoo.com https://odoo.com) Last month, we lost a big project against SAP (budget 5m€): the company choosed SAP because their holding was willing to pay for the project. Last week, the same prospect came back to Odoo: as the holding could not afford such a project anymore, the company has to pay from its own budget. So, they choose Odoo (<1m€ budget) I believe the next wave is a replacement of proprietary expensive business applications: ERP, SAS, BI...

c-smile 7y ago
Am I right that this has nothing with FOSS per se but just about "X is cheaper than Y" kind of reasoning?
- pestaa 7y ago
  Yes. Odoo is open core, and many components are closed, and those are far from being free.
  - agustif 7y ago
    Is there any good resource on what addons are not open-source?
    - pestaa 7y ago
      https://www.odoo.com/page/editions https://www.odoo.com/page/editions Quite a few actually. If you're a software shop or digital agency, I think the Odoo Studio and marketing automation features are the big gaps. For the latter, there's Mautic. However, good CRUD builders are difficult to find. Seatable is promising, haven't evaluated it yet.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

prepend 7y ago

I think the growth is on a continuing streak and there’s not a need for a RedHat style support for every package. I think using these packages and projects requires more due diligence and planning on staff to pick and support, but I think the current highly variable support project by project works out well. And then for big stuff (Linux, Postgres, etc) some commercial support is brought in. I’d much rather see more support for companies donating developer hours to patches and features. Some way to recognize in kind and labor contributions and expand recognition for these kinds of contributions. I think this works better for software than trying to get every company to pay into some support fund. If you want to pay structured licenses for everyone, there’s a model for that. Trying to shoehorn license fees on top of open source loses a lot of the efficiencies, I think.

freedomben 7y ago
Disclosure: I work for Red Hat I think you're missing the real value here of the support model and services a company like Red Hat can provide to large orgs. It's not about having support for every package, it's more about having others do the hard, expensive work of presenting you a portfolio of projects known to work well together, so you can focus on adding your own business value rather than spending hours duplicating effort from others and debugging arcane issues. To some extent you can't out-source everything (and I personally wouldn't recommend that. I think having some in-house experts is really important), but not everybody should roll their own OS, DB, container orchestration, etc.[1], and finding consistent options that work together can be difficult when you have huge, diverse, engineering departments with different values/priorities. I don't disagree with you: I think contributions in either code or donations are a great way to support FOSS projects. I just think there is also a lot of business value in the support contract style method, because you're not just buying insurance, you're buying real value in the form of somebody presenting you with a portfolio of disparate open source projects that have been integrated and tested together. [1] Note I'm not talking about "React v. Vue" which I agree support wouldn't make sense for.
- smichel17 7y ago
  Tangent: I appreciate when people put conflict of interest disclosures at the top of their post rather than the end. Thank you.

c-smile 7y ago

Could be, but only if companies that are behind OS products will survive by themselves. We hear crack sounds here and there already. Yet, "the rise of hosted cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure" is just "anti-pattern" for the subject of the article. Commercial companies that exploit (fuzzy term here but still) OS software.

jamesblonde 7y ago
I think the next wave of OSS products will be AGPL-v3 licensed. It's the "cloud condom" model - it protects you from the cloud vendors. They have internal bans on using it, as it forces them to open up their internal software architecture. But AGPL-v3 is still a valid open-source, despite what the shrills at AWS will tell you (they just want to operationalize open source projects, not lead them).
- pabs3 7y ago
  AGPL-v3 isn't going to protect you from cloud vendors, they will just release the source and beat you with their marketing budget. Or they will just re-implement your APIs/interfaces from scratch and still win.

mooreds 7y ago

I think there's substantial value in replacing expensive system components with free alternatives. Things like FusionAuth / https://fusionauth.io/ https://fusionauth.io/ for user identity (full disclosure, I'm an employee) and Pentaho Kettle https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle for ETL and data transformations can help. It is important to recognize the value of developer time too, though. There's a cost in dev time for setting up a "free" project. That's why I think that any open source project that gets too popular will have to have a cloud vendor strategy, otherwise they'll get done to them what AWS did to Elastic Search. I also thought it was interesting that the author mentioned support for the various application libraries. I know that there have been several "tip" type applications (gittip, gitcoin.co) that try to align incentives and allow open source developers to make a living.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago
>>> That's why I think that any open source project that gets too popular will have to have a cloud vendor strategy, This. In fact sadly one of the marks of a successful OSS project is ability to pay yourself, and even perhaps commercial success. In Linus' day it was enough to have a whip round online to buy a faster Pentium machine, but these days it's a foundation and cloud offering.
- mooreds 7y ago
  I was at a conference last year and talked to someone who said that the investors he knew were shying away from investing in open source software companies because anything that was successful would just be copied and operationalized by AWS/GCP/Azure. I hope that isn't the case, but we'll see. Maybe the answer is niche operations that are too small or domain specific to be noticed by the big folks.
  - zerkten 7y ago
    There are lots of niche operations, but they tend to build their domain-specific work on top of these cloud providers. AWS's fork of Elasticsearch (ES) is a good example of the operationalization you talk about. If I was building a niche eDiscovery solution for the compliance market on top of ES I'm likely to want to offer that on AWS or another cloud provider at some point. If they offer their managed version of it, then I don't have to support it. You can make obvious arguments like special extensions, or all compliance customers don't use the public cloud, but ultimately many users are going in that direction. Any type of general-purpose tool like ES is ripe for the picking by any cloud provider when it gets popular. The only options I see are licensing it in a way that's prohibitive for adoption by cloud providers, or engaging them early to become their subcontracted maintainer for the product on their cloud so that you remain in the value chain. Ultimately, it's not the type of business that should be taking VC money because the upside is, so limited when you have the typical successful outcome. The only way to get to an outcome that VCs might like is to use the income stream, or talent acquisition, from the open source product to pivot into something that isn't as limited. Doing that is really hard.

okram 7y ago

The third wave of open source software is no software at all. It is only a matter of time before Amazon doesn't care whether it's licensed Apache2 or not. They will just take software and sell it. You have a problem with that? Have fun suing them... Year 1..2..3..oooo. you are quite the fish..4..5. broke. Out of money. Tech is dead.

okram 7y ago
Ha. The two comments that critique Amazon got down voted with negative points. Does Amazon have cronies patrolling Hacker News to squash dissidents?
- speedgoose 7y ago
  Me too I realized that criticism towards AWS brings downvotes on HN. A bit strange because it's usually the opposite online. Maybe a lot of HN readers are working for AWS.
- wisnesky 7y ago
  You must be referring to the "love-hate" relationship between Amazon and open source software as described eg here? https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-and-commercial-open-source-in-the-cloud-its-complicated/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-and-commercial-open-sou... "Vendors developing those open source products started accusing AWS of strip mining, i.e., reaping the benefits of the products, without contributing back to their development."
  - pabs3 7y ago
    I hate to defend Amazon, but it seems that they do contribute back to open source: https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ For example running `git shortlog -ne` in the Linux kernel git repository will show a number of Amazon folks with many commits to their name.
    - redis_mlc 7y ago

msoad 7y ago

If you work for a big engineering organization you will find yourself questioning things that are being built a lot. Open Source alternatives often have higher quality and better support, yet engineering organizations opt to build their own. You might wonder why? It's because growth is the name of the game. Any engineering leader wants bigger and bigger organization under her/him so what they do is they green light projects that mostly don't make sense but they can pretty much lie about how essential it is to build in house to the board/CEO. When winter comes, those projects don't make sense anymore because cost cutting measures are in mandate. The same leader might even make the case for the Open Source alternative. I've seen this enough times to know it is a pattern in our industry.

mrfusion 7y ago
Great point. Very simple explanation.
vikiomega9 7y ago
From your experiences, tell me more! How could this problem be avoided? How does one sniff out such glut?
- neutronicus 7y ago
  If someone comes to you and says "we need to hire more people to do my job so I can move into a leadership role" say "sure, if you take a pay cut," or "no" If you are making a lot of money and one of your employees has performed well, and never asked you to hire more people to do their job, give them a God damn raise
- golergka 7y ago
  Personally, I think this problem is inevitable as organization scales. So, if you don't want to fall into that, remedy is simple: don't scale. As in, you can scale in terms of revenue and user amount, but avoid reinvesting it into hiring more and more people. (Classic examples of companies that achieved that, at least to some extent and at a certain moment, are Instagram and Whatsapp, but there are many more less famous ones). I guess, when you're on the rocket part of the hockey stick it seems that you can solve anything by hiring more people. A lot of leaders kind of forget what they sacrifice when they do that.

mrfusion 7y ago

I’d love to see more open source hardware as the next wave. The ardiuno seems like it’s a success.

m463 7y ago
I don't care as much about open source hardware as open interfaces or drivers. I hate that every single thing you buy requires an app and a login and a shitty proprietary driver. (why does my mouse need a cloud account?) In general hardware folks don't do software well. Software is just a checkbox. Meanwhile there's a world of great folks out there that will make their hardware get up and dance given the chance. Honestly they should commoditize software to increase sales of their hardware.
neltnerb 7y ago
I think this wave may have been started by Arduino, but I mean... Raspberry Pi? Teensy? MBED? Any microcontroller manufacturers' dozens of reference designs? How much more open hardware do you want? I'll be thrilled once reasonably sized phones and laptops are reasonably straightforward to get with open hardware of course, but there is lots and lots of open source hardware.

jamesblonde 7y ago

This is a hilarious video that captures the state-of-play of open-source frameworks in Data Science: https://twitter.com/wdaali999/status/1161973951565881345?lang=en https://twitter.com/wdaali999/status/1161973951565881345?lan... Basically, anything not open-source is not cool any more - SAS, matlab, SPSS. Kids are not learning these frameworks in school and don't want to use them. I see open-source taking over Data Science by the time this recession is over: Jupyter, conda, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, RStudio, and even PySpark.

oldsklgdfth 7y ago
MATLAB still has a strong foothold in academic settings and in some industry. But it's really painful watching some of the smaller proprietary packages stay afloat.
- xvilka 7y ago
  Octave[1] covers most of Matlab uses, and it's FOSS. And there is Sage Math[2] that integrates many different FOSS components to be something like Mathematica. Both are developed quite actively and covering many differences with proprietary analogs every year. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ [2] https://www.sagemath.org/ https://www.sagemath.org/
  - partyboat1586 7y ago
    I still don't understand why Wolfram Mathematica doesn't have wider adoption. imo its way better than Mathematica, Sage and Octave.
    - wolfgke 7y ago
      > I still don't understand why Wolfram Mathematica doesn't have wider adoption. High prices for hobbyists who are not students. The Wolfram store does not even give you the option to pay with anything else than credit card (in Germany, other methods of payment are strongly preferred), so you have to use a reseller if you don't have or don't want to use a credit card for payment. Side story concerning the previous paragraph: I got a voucher from Wolfram Research to update my Mathematica license via the Wolfram store for a price that seemed fair to me at that time. So I wrote to the support that I would love to accept their offer/voucher, but have no credit card. Wolfram Research support told me, this is not possible; I have to use a reseller in this case (for which the voucher does not apply). OK, I get it: Wolfram Research does not want me as a customer.

octorian 7y ago

One big area where open source unfortunately falls flat is end user application software. In this market, proprietary applications do add real value. Unfortunately, there isn't a very good business model to fund developers to work on such applications, when the application itself is not a sell-able product. These sorts of projects can work if there's a significant overlap between end-users and capable developers. If there isn't, then they're often woefully inferior to the commercial alternative.

Mandatum 7y ago
Open-source sucks at UX. I think because there's no community behind open-source UX like there is in the inner workings of systems, where people just want to get shit done.. You have to pay UX developers and designers to do their job, because it's generally not a job you'd do for free or in order to accomplish "something".
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  I wonder why UX designers don't want to work for free while software developers do work for free?
  - Mandatum 7y ago
    As a software developer, I'm writing to benefit me because I use the code I write. What I write and share is directly re-usable to others. We can walk a path and share our work, and others can take it and copy it immediately. Whereas with UX.. Most of the time it's written for the benefit of someone else. And it's not something that can be used elsewhere very easily.. Often needing to be completely re-worked to be useful anywhere else.
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      You're talking about libraries. And parent answered to message about end user software. Sure, you might use your own end user software, but so can UX designer.

eric1293 7y ago

Open source is a two edge sword. If developers voluntarily contribute to the projects, it could be positive. But increasingly it's becoming a source of cheap labor. It used to be that you get a college degree and start a job. Now you need years of schooling, unpaid internships, postdoc and unpaid scientific contributions, an extensive GitHub page with open source contributions, etc to get the same job. The competition for better CVs will push individuals towards taking years of unpaid jobs against their will, which is negative.

ketzo 7y ago
I get that expectations have changed, but I have lots of friends graduating with a Computer Science BS, with nothing on their githubs, who do well on their interviews and get entry-level positions making six figures. Edited: And no one I know does unpaid internships -- most CS majors are making $20-40+/hr over the summer of their second or third years in college.
- alex4864 7y ago
  I graduate this May with a CS degree, that about mirrors my experiences. The vast majority of competent and even semi-competent students have no problems getting good paying internships, and jobs out of college. I appreciate that unpaid internships are a really bad situation in some fields, but fortunately CS is pretty lucrative right now.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hekmatof 7y ago

I don't understand the second wave relation to open-source and free software. They moved to cloud platform to save cost and non of these platforms are open source.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

Kind of like “follow your passions”, “open source” is a great way for software developers to work at way below the market rate to provide provide great value to corporations for very cheap. Through github stars and “recognition” the corporate world has managed to gamify software development and get enthusiastic developers to develop and give away literally billions in software value. No wonder the MBA’s view software developers as suckers. Read through HN, and you see maintainers of hugely popular open source software that probably has saved corporations billions of dollars, burned out, mentally exhausted, living in poverty and begging for donations.

CypherSnyper 7y ago
So what would your view be? Having developers make everything proprietary so that the world's computing infrastructure would collapse? I find very doubtful your claim that corporations are "gamifying" or exploiting software developers in any way. It is fallacious to label corporations as inherently trying to steal from developers, or the developers as suckers. Rather, open source allows for the symbiosis of the two that creates billions in added value for everybody. Nobody loses.

aphextron 7y ago

>Now, after one of the longest bull market runs in history, the road ahead is again uncertain. The rumors of this bull market's death have been greatly exaggerated. The DJIA is still up over 18% over the last 3 years, or ~6% annually; barely a percent below average. The NASDAQ 100 has almost completely recovered its' losses from the initial COVID-19 crash. Major drivers of the market over the last 10 years like $FB, $AMZN, $MSFT, and $AAPL are through the roof. Granted that a lot of this is fed meddling, and yes a lot of people from the service and hospitality industry are out of work, but the primary engine of our economy is humming along. I would not be surprised to see a record Q3 this year.

okareaman 7y ago
Have you considered the possibility that momentum carries forward for a bit like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and hanging in the air for a moment before plunging? If consumers can't afford to spend then why advertise, why buy a new smartphone?
rswail 7y ago
Amazon's marketplace and delivery service have a "captive" market due to the closure of bricks and mortar retail. The general move to the cloud rewards AWS/GCP/Azure with the two primary "winners" currently being AWS and Azure. This will continue as companies move to the cloud, but expect there to be a flattening of growth. As for Facebook and Google, they rely on advertising, which relies on consumption. When there is 10+% unemployment and 20+% underemployment, consumption is highly likely to at least flatten if not fall off a cliff, particularly in elective consumption like high end electronics. The share market is not indicative of the economy and is a lagging indicator of company revenues.

killjoywashere 7y ago

I feel like now would be a good time for an open source FHIR-compliant electronic health record to start building integrations for any non-Cerner/Epic company in the market. Which the more I learn about healthcare is approximately all of them.

einpoklum 7y ago

That article was nearly content-free. Brief review of history and then some talk about a supposed "third wave" of migration is not clearly characterized, nor actually foreseen in any detail ("certainly X would be a good place to start" - thank you captain obvious). No discussion of anything signifcat: * Are commercial corporations contribution back to FOSS software they use? * * Additional functionality and bug fixes? * * Grants/donations of money, hardware or even developer time? ... Amazon, Google, MS run mostly FOSS on their clouds, and pocket billions, but certainly don't give much back. * Does "open source components" just mean FOSS inside but closed commercial outside, or do companies transition to making FOSS? * What about hardware? Or at least, device drivers and firmware? * What about all those SaaS and PaaS platforms even the article itself mentions? Their engineering setups, and software in particular, are mostly closed. Where's that promised "wave" for them?