8 ms·

Large Corporations Aren’t Going to Save the Real Linux Community

74 points by URfejk 6y ago

drummer 6y ago
> WHEN the Linux Foundation (LF) let Microsoft in about 4 years ago we knew it was the beginning of the end The good thing is that they knew. Now they hopefully will rush to regroup in a new setting before it is too late.
game_the0ry 6y ago
Who ever assumed corporations were going to save the Linux community?
- phkahler 6y ago
  All the people who think VScode on Linux is great, and think it's nice that MS money backing github is not risky, and that WSL is cool and we should let them bring DirextX to Linux too. In isolation any of those could be cool, but some see the totality of it as awesome rather than a full assault.
  - qz2 6y ago
    You forgot PowerShell and SQL Server. This whole situation makes me feel a little sick if I'm honest. It's ok to have platforms, but it's not ok to blur the lines because everyone needs an exit plan.
    - phkahler 6y ago
      I also forgot .net
  - disown 6y ago
    Even worse, if you mention the "telemetry" in VSCode, you get a PR barrage of downvotes and comments saying it's "optional" and Microsoft isn't like facebook and they don't depend on data. Nevermind that data is the direction nadella wants to take microsoft - free windows 10, linkedin, github, etc. The "love" you see for microsoft, gates, etc here is bizarre.
  - nip180 6y ago
    > we should let them bring DirextX to Linux too. The thing I like about open source is that you don’t need to ask permission to modify, expand, or target. Still, I would never run DirectX on my computers.
  - lightweight 6y ago
    Microsoft "Loves" Linux and open source the same way a tapeworm loves a healthy digestive system.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  There seem to be some such people in this very discussion who think corporations might.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Red Hat is exceptional.
fxtentacle 6y ago
I'm not surprised that these open source communities are dying. They were founded based on the ideals of free speech and selfless sharing of technology. Both of these ideals are dying. The GNU project makes it very clear that they are striving for the freedom of the user to modify and adapt the software that they use. So every time a GNU tool is used in the private back-end part of a SaaS webapp, that's directly opposite to the spirit of the GNU project, because you, the end user, have no way of modifying said SaaS. And it's not only free speech in source code, it appears to me that free speech in general is under attack, now that people have noticed that a twitter storm and a supposed code of conduct violation is enough to wield immense power, for example by destroying someone's reputation, job, and life. We have effectively handed loaded guns to random strangers on the internet and, predictably, the results were bad. The spirit of selfless sharing is also dying quickly, which I would blame onto the greed of internet startups and onto the entitlement of users that don't understand that GMail isn't truly free, just because there's no credit card charge. I myself try to stay away from open source nowadays, because it ruins my mood if I get an entitled email from some random stranger who is insulting me because my free app did not solve his/her problem. In my case, a big company was kinda guilty in creating this problem, because they advocated my FOSS module on their homepage as if it was part of their expensive paid offering. So some of their customers feel like it's my duty to offer support... Also, I would be very hesitant to release anything valuable with LGPL or even GPL these days. Chances are, it'll become the next cool "service" that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will offer in their clouds, and I as the author of the software actually providing the service, will get nothing. Case in point, one of my consulting clients is paying like $30,000 annually to Microsoft for hosted PostgreSQL. But apparently, re-selling PostgreSQL as a service with presumably millions in revenue is not enough for Microsoft to become an official sponsor... https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/
- ianai 6y ago
  Just myself, I saw an increase in FOSS activity seemingly due to the Great Recession leaving so many unemployed. People had so much time on their hands that contributing to a FOSS project made sense for all sorts of reasons. After years of recovery, people are (were?) back employed and don’t have such time on their hands. FOSS is pretty interesting as a way for otherwise non-cooperatives to make something useful together. Also seems like something similar to academics. Unfortunately, our economic system might force it to be a fluke.
greatgib 6y ago
From my point of view, the open source and free software succeeded and went to it's apogee. But now, as noticed by this article, companies noticed that they could make a lot of money with that, and so there is a corporate take over of companies that don't have the core values but see the marketing interest of the oss. So, little by little they used their money to get control of the main oss software/stacks and impose their flawed values. Look at npmjs, github bought by Microsoft, the Linux community that is now mostly corporate, os like Ubuntu, shitty tools like docker and mongodb and co...
amelius 6y ago
So, we need an open source license that makes the software not free for large corporations (say > $10M revenue).
- ghaff 6y ago
  You can write any license you want and claim it's an open source license. It won't be OSI approved of course and, you almost certainly won't build a meaningful community around it but there's nothing keeping you from creating one.
  - petra 6y ago
    Why won't you build any meaningful community ? If you only charge from big companies , why does it matter for some lone developer? And as for big companies , as long as there's decent value and reasonable fees, why won't they contribute(to also help themselves) ?
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Many big companies (especially vendors) do contribute with people and otherwise--because, as you say, it does often help themselves--and most significant developers of major open source projects are doing it as part of their day job. There's a long history of licenses in the PC freeware/shareware space of being only for personal use/educational use/etc. That usage-based restrictions did not make it into the FOSS world is an important reason that it's been so successful IMO.
  - amelius 6y ago
    But what if I could pay members of the community using profit made from selling licenses to corporations?
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I hate to be flippant, but that's a well-known business model called "contracting". It's possible, absolutely, but it requires a substantial investment of time and effort in business concerns on top of the actual software development. In practice, most leaders of contracting businesses don't have time to write code, and most contracting businesses end up deciding they need to release closed-source extensions.
naveen99 6y ago
Pytorch and matplotlib managed to unseat matlab, which I didn’t think would ever happen. Bitcoin, git are open source. docker, kubernetes will just add a level of abstraction over any proprietary os. Things are not so bad!
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  "Pytorch and matplotlib managed to unseat matlab" From what I know, most companies use MATLAB for real-time simulation or its VHDL code generation, which means you can put your algorithms into FPGA with relative ease. I don't see Pytorch helping there anytime soon. That said, I agree with you that a lot of mathematical computing is moving to Python, especially now that there's multiple frameworks with GPU support. And yes, that's a great development :)
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    Whoa, matlab has vhdl? I never knew, that's cool.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    I came here to say something similar, but with a different industry. None of the people/groups I know using matlab have moved to pytorch, or even gnu octave which is a much closer fit. Because its not really about matlab so much has the huge collection of library/extensions for matlab or its close relationship to simulink. Decades of industry specific modeling/simulation/tooling built into peoples workflows are hard to change. If you look at the "applications" section here https://www.mathworks.com/products.html?s_tid=gn_ps https://www.mathworks.com/products.html?s_tid=gn_ps pytorch really only touches on a couple of them AFAIK. Deep engineering tooling is one of the places where opensource really hasn't yet made inroads. From the lack of a good solidworks/cad toolchain to the modeling/simulation space. Even EDA remains deeply dependent on proprietary tooling despite the recent success in a number of places. So while board level design with kicad may start eating into the Altium space now that its beginning to get RF/etc capabilities. I don't see it biting into the cadence/synopsis/mentor space anytime in the near future if ever due to the secrecy of the foundries. I think a large part of that is there is a lot of breath in this space, and the customer base is generally quite small. So I think a good opensource PCB layout/modeling tool, and a decent parametric 3d cad program will happen a lot sooner.

74 points by URfejk 6y ago

> WHEN the Linux Foundation (LF) let Microsoft in about 4 years ago we knew it was the beginning of the end The good thing is that they knew. Now they hopefully will rush to regroup in a new setting before it is too late.

game_the0ry 6y ago

Who ever assumed corporations were going to save the Linux community?

phkahler 6y ago
All the people who think VScode on Linux is great, and think it's nice that MS money backing github is not risky, and that WSL is cool and we should let them bring DirextX to Linux too. In isolation any of those could be cool, but some see the totality of it as awesome rather than a full assault.
- qz2 6y ago
  You forgot PowerShell and SQL Server. This whole situation makes me feel a little sick if I'm honest. It's ok to have platforms, but it's not ok to blur the lines because everyone needs an exit plan.
  - phkahler 6y ago
    I also forgot .net
- disown 6y ago
  Even worse, if you mention the "telemetry" in VSCode, you get a PR barrage of downvotes and comments saying it's "optional" and Microsoft isn't like facebook and they don't depend on data. Nevermind that data is the direction nadella wants to take microsoft - free windows 10, linkedin, github, etc. The "love" you see for microsoft, gates, etc here is bizarre.
- nip180 6y ago
  > we should let them bring DirextX to Linux too. The thing I like about open source is that you don’t need to ask permission to modify, expand, or target. Still, I would never run DirectX on my computers.
- lightweight 6y ago
  Microsoft "Loves" Linux and open source the same way a tapeworm loves a healthy digestive system.
bigbubba 6y ago
There seem to be some such people in this very discussion who think corporations might.
fomine3 6y ago
Red Hat is exceptional.

fxtentacle 6y ago

I'm not surprised that these open source communities are dying. They were founded based on the ideals of free speech and selfless sharing of technology. Both of these ideals are dying. The GNU project makes it very clear that they are striving for the freedom of the user to modify and adapt the software that they use. So every time a GNU tool is used in the private back-end part of a SaaS webapp, that's directly opposite to the spirit of the GNU project, because you, the end user, have no way of modifying said SaaS. And it's not only free speech in source code, it appears to me that free speech in general is under attack, now that people have noticed that a twitter storm and a supposed code of conduct violation is enough to wield immense power, for example by destroying someone's reputation, job, and life. We have effectively handed loaded guns to random strangers on the internet and, predictably, the results were bad. The spirit of selfless sharing is also dying quickly, which I would blame onto the greed of internet startups and onto the entitlement of users that don't understand that GMail isn't truly free, just because there's no credit card charge. I myself try to stay away from open source nowadays, because it ruins my mood if I get an entitled email from some random stranger who is insulting me because my free app did not solve his/her problem. In my case, a big company was kinda guilty in creating this problem, because they advocated my FOSS module on their homepage as if it was part of their expensive paid offering. So some of their customers feel like it's my duty to offer support... Also, I would be very hesitant to release anything valuable with LGPL or even GPL these days. Chances are, it'll become the next cool "service" that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will offer in their clouds, and I as the author of the software actually providing the service, will get nothing. Case in point, one of my consulting clients is paying like $30,000 annually to Microsoft for hosted PostgreSQL. But apparently, re-selling PostgreSQL as a service with presumably millions in revenue is not enough for Microsoft to become an official sponsor... https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/

ianai 6y ago
Just myself, I saw an increase in FOSS activity seemingly due to the Great Recession leaving so many unemployed. People had so much time on their hands that contributing to a FOSS project made sense for all sorts of reasons. After years of recovery, people are (were?) back employed and don’t have such time on their hands. FOSS is pretty interesting as a way for otherwise non-cooperatives to make something useful together. Also seems like something similar to academics. Unfortunately, our economic system might force it to be a fluke.

greatgib 6y ago

From my point of view, the open source and free software succeeded and went to it's apogee. But now, as noticed by this article, companies noticed that they could make a lot of money with that, and so there is a corporate take over of companies that don't have the core values but see the marketing interest of the oss. So, little by little they used their money to get control of the main oss software/stacks and impose their flawed values. Look at npmjs, github bought by Microsoft, the Linux community that is now mostly corporate, os like Ubuntu, shitty tools like docker and mongodb and co...

amelius 6y ago

So, we need an open source license that makes the software not free for large corporations (say > $10M revenue).

ghaff 6y ago
You can write any license you want and claim it's an open source license. It won't be OSI approved of course and, you almost certainly won't build a meaningful community around it but there's nothing keeping you from creating one.
- petra 6y ago
  Why won't you build any meaningful community ? If you only charge from big companies , why does it matter for some lone developer? And as for big companies , as long as there's decent value and reasonable fees, why won't they contribute(to also help themselves) ?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Many big companies (especially vendors) do contribute with people and otherwise--because, as you say, it does often help themselves--and most significant developers of major open source projects are doing it as part of their day job. There's a long history of licenses in the PC freeware/shareware space of being only for personal use/educational use/etc. That usage-based restrictions did not make it into the FOSS world is an important reason that it's been so successful IMO.
- amelius 6y ago
  But what if I could pay members of the community using profit made from selling licenses to corporations?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I hate to be flippant, but that's a well-known business model called "contracting". It's possible, absolutely, but it requires a substantial investment of time and effort in business concerns on top of the actual software development. In practice, most leaders of contracting businesses don't have time to write code, and most contracting businesses end up deciding they need to release closed-source extensions.

naveen99 6y ago

Pytorch and matplotlib managed to unseat matlab, which I didn’t think would ever happen. Bitcoin, git are open source. docker, kubernetes will just add a level of abstraction over any proprietary os. Things are not so bad!

fxtentacle 6y ago
"Pytorch and matplotlib managed to unseat matlab" From what I know, most companies use MATLAB for real-time simulation or its VHDL code generation, which means you can put your algorithms into FPGA with relative ease. I don't see Pytorch helping there anytime soon. That said, I agree with you that a lot of mathematical computing is moving to Python, especially now that there's multiple frameworks with GPU support. And yes, that's a great development :)
- im3w1l 6y ago
  Whoa, matlab has vhdl? I never knew, that's cool.
- StillBored 6y ago
  I came here to say something similar, but with a different industry. None of the people/groups I know using matlab have moved to pytorch, or even gnu octave which is a much closer fit. Because its not really about matlab so much has the huge collection of library/extensions for matlab or its close relationship to simulink. Decades of industry specific modeling/simulation/tooling built into peoples workflows are hard to change. If you look at the "applications" section here https://www.mathworks.com/products.html?s_tid=gn_ps https://www.mathworks.com/products.html?s_tid=gn_ps pytorch really only touches on a couple of them AFAIK. Deep engineering tooling is one of the places where opensource really hasn't yet made inroads. From the lack of a good solidworks/cad toolchain to the modeling/simulation space. Even EDA remains deeply dependent on proprietary tooling despite the recent success in a number of places. So while board level design with kicad may start eating into the Altium space now that its beginning to get RF/etc capabilities. I don't see it biting into the cadence/synopsis/mentor space anytime in the near future if ever due to the secrecy of the foundries. I think a large part of that is there is a lot of breath in this space, and the customer base is generally quite small. So I think a good opensource PCB layout/modeling tool, and a decent parametric 3d cad program will happen a lot sooner.