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Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't m

by zpeti 6y ago

Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough products. What I think internet 3.0 will be is websites and services segregated politically, just like the media is. Just like we have CNN and Fox, we will have Twitter and [Parler?] Facebook and Rightbook. It will take time to build. But the assault on half the country will result in the market taking care of this. Just like parler almost did. (It's not clear exactly what Ben means by his internet 3.0, his article could be interpreted this way as he says "decentralised".)

seneca 6y ago
> non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough products. How do you reconcile that statement with the absolute dominance of Linux? I don't think they this is universally true. Maybe with the qualification "... for consumer products". I think the rest of your comment is probably, sadly, accurate.
- geodel 6y ago
  Seems to me Linux success is largely due to commercial vendors developing many features as aggressively as they would do for closed source products. If it were just engineers working gratis on saturday afternoon Linux wouldn't be where it is today.
  - dgb23 6y ago
    Isn't that an argument for it being free and open? Whether contributors get paid is orthogonal to freedom and openness. It's hard to imagine what would have happened if there was no GNU Linux, Apache, SQLite... [insert gigantic list of open source technology that almost everyone in our field relies on].
mkr-hn 6y ago
I think the events of the last week will give a boost to things like ActivityPub. It has over a million active users, and two of the big projects (Mastodon and PeerTube) came out of EU countries. They have their problems, but if I were an official looking to reduce dependence on the US, that's where I would start.
conradev 6y ago
You are presenting true entrepreneurship and open protocols as a false dichotomy This has been changing for some time now: MongoDB switched to an open source model a decade ago, and a number of companies have followed suit. The strategy is hard to pull off, but even in the case where Docker the company very much failed, Docker the technology did not. The next wave of these are blockchain companies. I think the jury is still out on these open source companies becoming breakout successes, but they did succeed so far in one critical aspect: the funding model. These companies have tens of millions of dollars at their disposal to build open protocols, and a plan for how to make more once they ship usable products. Yes, building centralized tech is easier. No, that doesn’t mean it will inevitably win. These things take time.
- Pet_Ant 6y ago
  > MongoDB switched to an open source model a decade ago ...and then moved back 2 years ago. From the https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/README https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/README : > MongoDB is free and the source is available. Versions released prior to October 16, 2018 are published under the AGPL. All versions released after October 16, 2018, including patch fixes for prior versions, are published under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) v1. AGPL is open source: https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0 SSPLv1 is not listed, and SSPLv2 does not seem to have been approved either at last mention https://opensource.org/LicenseReview122018 https://opensource.org/LicenseReview122018
api 6y ago
You're not wrong, but the reason is more fundamental: open source and open protocols do not have an economic model sufficient to finance the immense amount of brutal work required to make products that are easy to use and appealing for the general public. FOSS and open systems will always lose (outside nerds and certain power user audiences) because closed systems have an economic model in the form of either paid SaaS, commercial licenses, advertising, or surveillance capitalism (or some mix of these things). ... or in the case of Parler perhaps paid propaganda financing from far-right wealthy financiers...? Of course political propaganda is a form of advertising so it fits under the adware / surveillanceware category. In software, making something work in the algorithmic and technical sense is usually less than a quarter of the work. In the case of social networks and chat apps and similar stuff it's probably only a single digit percentage of the work. The vast majority of the work is in the domain of user interface, user experience, and product design. Even worse, this is usually the type of work that programmers don't enjoy. It involves endless tweaking, endless rewrites of user interfaces to hone in on something people like or to chase trends, and the soul crushing drudgery of bug fixes and workarounds to edge cases. Because this work is not fun, people generally must be paid to do it. Because it's the majority of the work, the cost of paying people to do it dwarfs the cost of building the technical underpinnings of the product. I used to think that the failure of decentralization was a technical problem. I wasn't totally wrong there either. There are major technical challenges around decentralization, but I've realized since then that the lack of an economic driver to finance the UI/UX aspects are the real issue. This issue is not solvable because nobody is willing to actually pay for software.
- jchanimal 6y ago
  Does anyone else think building product is not that hard? You make or break on the Alpha release when the direction of the product is set. The hard work comes after you know you’ve got a good bet.
- dgb23 6y ago
  Aside: Some people pay tons of money for software due to addictive game design, social and UX patterns. But I agree. Building good UX is hard, iterative work and requires a connection of right and left brain thinking via communication or generalists. Graphic, UI, UX and game designers are typically not as engaged with open source as programmers and engineers. Is this a cultural issue or is it inherent? Ultimately any given UI is a concretion, but I've noticed a strong trend to abstraction in these fields. Design Systems/Language, Design Thinking and so on. I mean the term "UX" is in of itself an abstraction. And the digital tools that designers use today are much more powerful and varied than just a decade ago. Maybe it is a matter of time until there is more engagement in open source from the design world.
generalk 6y ago
> Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will > never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore > entrepreneurs creating products. Nginx and Apache httpd are, in that order, the most used web servers. Both are FOSS, and both serve HTTP, an open protocol. There were definitely attempts to build proprietary protocols, none of which were successful, and in the long run the proprietary web servers ended up second place to the open source projects. Here in the US, I get reminders via SMS from my bank or my doctor telling me that payments went through or that I have an upcoming appointment. More thorough messages are sent via Email. Every form I've filled out since the turn of the millennium asks for my email address, none of them have asked for my MySpace, Twitter, or Facebook handles. I edit my code in either Emacs, Vim, or Visual Studio Code -- one of those is an open-source product by a very much for-profit company, the other two have survived decades as powerful editors/IDEs. If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that over time open protocols will end up winning -- not because of some kind of ideological purity, but because they permit people to build platforms that interoperate with one another. The Fediverse is young yet, and Twitter/Instagram/FB are making adversarial interoperability hard, but the entire history of the Internet and the World Wide Web is one where open has won over the long haul.
- haolez 6y ago
  Entrepreneurship is not about putting a price tag on everything and making closed proprietary stuff. It's about making a profitable business using the tools at your disposal, which might even be open source (like in the "open core" business model). It may be part of your strategy to open source your product, as many do.
- blippage 6y ago
  > If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that over time open protocols will end up winning I think Alan Kay made a prediction to that effect a few years ago, so you're in good company. I certainly hope you're both right. Patience is required, though. I imagine it's something of a cycle. Companies try to lock users into their ecosystem, but there are opposing forces that want the protocols to be free. I certainly hope that the internet of the future looks a lot different than its current form. We regularly hear of data breaches; something that people take in their stride. When will people wake up that the current model is not a good one? I don't know. It's not certain that they will, but my sense is that current practises are not sustainable long term. We now have "IoT" devices that are beholden to company servers. That's utter insanity, in my books. Will we wake up to the fact that it is a deeply flawed idea?
gumby 6y ago
> What I think internet 3.0 will be is websites and services segregated politically, just like the media is. Just like we have CNN and Fox, we will have Twitter and [Parler?] Facebook and Rightbook. That defeats the connection desire of user-generated content. I'm on FB mainly to learn what my friends/family are up to (and see cute animal pix and some maths jokes). If a bunch of them were on {right,left}book and I were on the other I'd miss out as would they. If the political claptrap self-segregated into verticals that would be fine by me. FB would still work. Of course such arrangements are not stable as terms like "left" and "right" aren't really meaningful (the 1950s "right" and "left" enthusiasts would not recognize how those terms are used today).
shrimp_emoji 6y ago
>Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough products. The best products don't win (Windows's monopoly is proof of that, Linux not being based on Plan 9 is another), and then you have the game theoretic threat (lock-in, insecurity, existential jeopardy) of proprietary products thrown in to boot. Those are usually more important for fundamental, backbone kind of things though (OSes, browsers, servers, crypto, etc. -- as opposed to your music player or a game).
leppr 6y ago
Just a nitpick but not "half of the US population" follows Trump. Not even getting into the fallacy of attributing more than can be to participants of a binary choice dilemma, the American Republic presidential elections are not "1 person 1 vote" like most other democratic Republics.
msla 6y ago
> Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. Meditate on the fact you're posting this on the Internet, as opposed to CompuServe's or AOL's own networks, and say that again. In addition to the fact you're drawing a false dichotomy between Open Source and open protocols and business, no business has ever created a fundamental communications network of the scale or success of the Internet, and none have even come close even though they tried. AOL, CompuServe, Tymshare... they're all dead and buried or absorbed into the Internet to the point they no longer have an independent existence on the technical level. You can say this about programming languages: Compare the success of Python to the success of AutoLISP or even the success of Lisp Machine Lisp to the success of Emacs Lisp. I can't think of a single widely-used programming language which is only available in a proprietary implementation. (And by widely-used I mean beyond a single OS and beyond a single industry.)

by zpeti 6y ago

seneca 6y ago

> non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough products. How do you reconcile that statement with the absolute dominance of Linux? I don't think they this is universally true. Maybe with the qualification "... for consumer products". I think the rest of your comment is probably, sadly, accurate.

geodel 6y ago
Seems to me Linux success is largely due to commercial vendors developing many features as aggressively as they would do for closed source products. If it were just engineers working gratis on saturday afternoon Linux wouldn't be where it is today.
- dgb23 6y ago
  Isn't that an argument for it being free and open? Whether contributors get paid is orthogonal to freedom and openness. It's hard to imagine what would have happened if there was no GNU Linux, Apache, SQLite... [insert gigantic list of open source technology that almost everyone in our field relies on].

mkr-hn 6y ago

I think the events of the last week will give a boost to things like ActivityPub. It has over a million active users, and two of the big projects (Mastodon and PeerTube) came out of EU countries. They have their problems, but if I were an official looking to reduce dependence on the US, that's where I would start.

conradev 6y ago

You are presenting true entrepreneurship and open protocols as a false dichotomy This has been changing for some time now: MongoDB switched to an open source model a decade ago, and a number of companies have followed suit. The strategy is hard to pull off, but even in the case where Docker the company very much failed, Docker the technology did not. The next wave of these are blockchain companies. I think the jury is still out on these open source companies becoming breakout successes, but they did succeed so far in one critical aspect: the funding model. These companies have tens of millions of dollars at their disposal to build open protocols, and a plan for how to make more once they ship usable products. Yes, building centralized tech is easier. No, that doesn’t mean it will inevitably win. These things take time.

Pet_Ant 6y ago
> MongoDB switched to an open source model a decade ago ...and then moved back 2 years ago. From the https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/README https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/README : > MongoDB is free and the source is available. Versions released prior to October 16, 2018 are published under the AGPL. All versions released after October 16, 2018, including patch fixes for prior versions, are published under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) v1. AGPL is open source: https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0 SSPLv1 is not listed, and SSPLv2 does not seem to have been approved either at last mention https://opensource.org/LicenseReview122018 https://opensource.org/LicenseReview122018

api 6y ago

You're not wrong, but the reason is more fundamental: open source and open protocols do not have an economic model sufficient to finance the immense amount of brutal work required to make products that are easy to use and appealing for the general public. FOSS and open systems will always lose (outside nerds and certain power user audiences) because closed systems have an economic model in the form of either paid SaaS, commercial licenses, advertising, or surveillance capitalism (or some mix of these things). ... or in the case of Parler perhaps paid propaganda financing from far-right wealthy financiers...? Of course political propaganda is a form of advertising so it fits under the adware / surveillanceware category. In software, making something work in the algorithmic and technical sense is usually less than a quarter of the work. In the case of social networks and chat apps and similar stuff it's probably only a single digit percentage of the work. The vast majority of the work is in the domain of user interface, user experience, and product design. Even worse, this is usually the type of work that programmers don't enjoy. It involves endless tweaking, endless rewrites of user interfaces to hone in on something people like or to chase trends, and the soul crushing drudgery of bug fixes and workarounds to edge cases. Because this work is not fun, people generally must be paid to do it. Because it's the majority of the work, the cost of paying people to do it dwarfs the cost of building the technical underpinnings of the product. I used to think that the failure of decentralization was a technical problem. I wasn't totally wrong there either. There are major technical challenges around decentralization, but I've realized since then that the lack of an economic driver to finance the UI/UX aspects are the real issue. This issue is not solvable because nobody is willing to actually pay for software.

jchanimal 6y ago
Does anyone else think building product is not that hard? You make or break on the Alpha release when the direction of the product is set. The hard work comes after you know you’ve got a good bet.
dgb23 6y ago
Aside: Some people pay tons of money for software due to addictive game design, social and UX patterns. But I agree. Building good UX is hard, iterative work and requires a connection of right and left brain thinking via communication or generalists. Graphic, UI, UX and game designers are typically not as engaged with open source as programmers and engineers. Is this a cultural issue or is it inherent? Ultimately any given UI is a concretion, but I've noticed a strong trend to abstraction in these fields. Design Systems/Language, Design Thinking and so on. I mean the term "UX" is in of itself an abstraction. And the digital tools that designers use today are much more powerful and varied than just a decade ago. Maybe it is a matter of time until there is more engagement in open source from the design world.

generalk 6y ago

> Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will > never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore > entrepreneurs creating products. Nginx and Apache httpd are, in that order, the most used web servers. Both are FOSS, and both serve HTTP, an open protocol. There were definitely attempts to build proprietary protocols, none of which were successful, and in the long run the proprietary web servers ended up second place to the open source projects. Here in the US, I get reminders via SMS from my bank or my doctor telling me that payments went through or that I have an upcoming appointment. More thorough messages are sent via Email. Every form I've filled out since the turn of the millennium asks for my email address, none of them have asked for my MySpace, Twitter, or Facebook handles. I edit my code in either Emacs, Vim, or Visual Studio Code -- one of those is an open-source product by a very much for-profit company, the other two have survived decades as powerful editors/IDEs. If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that over time open protocols will end up winning -- not because of some kind of ideological purity, but because they permit people to build platforms that interoperate with one another. The Fediverse is young yet, and Twitter/Instagram/FB are making adversarial interoperability hard, but the entire history of the Internet and the World Wide Web is one where open has won over the long haul.

haolez 6y ago
Entrepreneurship is not about putting a price tag on everything and making closed proprietary stuff. It's about making a profitable business using the tools at your disposal, which might even be open source (like in the "open core" business model). It may be part of your strategy to open source your product, as many do.
blippage 6y ago
> If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that over time open protocols will end up winning I think Alan Kay made a prediction to that effect a few years ago, so you're in good company. I certainly hope you're both right. Patience is required, though. I imagine it's something of a cycle. Companies try to lock users into their ecosystem, but there are opposing forces that want the protocols to be free. I certainly hope that the internet of the future looks a lot different than its current form. We regularly hear of data breaches; something that people take in their stride. When will people wake up that the current model is not a good one? I don't know. It's not certain that they will, but my sense is that current practises are not sustainable long term. We now have "IoT" devices that are beholden to company servers. That's utter insanity, in my books. Will we wake up to the fact that it is a deeply flawed idea?

gumby 6y ago

> What I think internet 3.0 will be is websites and services segregated politically, just like the media is. Just like we have CNN and Fox, we will have Twitter and [Parler?] Facebook and Rightbook. That defeats the connection desire of user-generated content. I'm on FB mainly to learn what my friends/family are up to (and see cute animal pix and some maths jokes). If a bunch of them were on {right,left}book and I were on the other I'd miss out as would they. If the political claptrap self-segregated into verticals that would be fine by me. FB would still work. Of course such arrangements are not stable as terms like "left" and "right" aren't really meaningful (the 1950s "right" and "left" enthusiasts would not recognize how those terms are used today).

shrimp_emoji 6y ago

>Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. They just can't move as quickly, or deliver good enough products. The best products don't win (Windows's monopoly is proof of that, Linux not being based on Plan 9 is another), and then you have the game theoretic threat (lock-in, insecurity, existential jeopardy) of proprietary products thrown in to boot. Those are usually more important for fundamental, backbone kind of things though (OSes, browsers, servers, crypto, etc. -- as opposed to your music player or a game).

leppr 6y ago

Just a nitpick but not "half of the US population" follows Trump. Not even getting into the fallacy of attributing more than can be to participants of a binary choice dilemma, the American Republic presidential elections are not "1 person 1 vote" like most other democratic Republics.

msla 6y ago

> Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore entrepreneurs creating products. Meditate on the fact you're posting this on the Internet, as opposed to CompuServe's or AOL's own networks, and say that again. In addition to the fact you're drawing a false dichotomy between Open Source and open protocols and business, no business has ever created a fundamental communications network of the scale or success of the Internet, and none have even come close even though they tried. AOL, CompuServe, Tymshare... they're all dead and buried or absorbed into the Internet to the point they no longer have an independent existence on the technical level. You can say this about programming languages: Compare the success of Python to the success of AutoLISP or even the success of Lisp Machine Lisp to the success of Emacs Lisp. I can't think of a single widely-used programming language which is only available in a proprietary implementation. (And by widely-used I mean beyond a single OS and beyond a single industry.)