4 ms·

...not what the author of this article expects, in my opinion. (the viability of the Microsoft developer ecosystem, despite its' attempts to clamber onto the o

by jka 5y ago

...not what the author of this article expects, in my opinion. (the viability of the Microsoft developer ecosystem, despite its' attempts to clamber onto the open source bandwagon, will continue to degrade thanks to free market economics, zero-cost-of-copy, and the fact that the FOSS community eventually fills any technology gaps that appear. Many within that ecosystem will continue to deny this, and they have a few more years -- perhaps a decade -- or so where that will be a workable strategy)

emodendroket 5y ago
Can't really see why .NET doesn't have a place in that future. You can run it in the same dockerized setups as everything else.
- jka 5y ago
  Good point; I wrote this a little carelessly, reacting a little bit, and should elaborate my thoughts. The open source .NET ecosystem - and hopefully Microsoft supporting that - does have a continued place as long as it can remain relevant to the technology audience. The .NET framework has pushed plenty of boundaries in programming language research, features and functionality, for example. What I should have focused on is the sense that I picked up from the article that free is somehow bad, and that it's justified to punish and deride people who have a (in my view, reasonable) expectation of free and open source software. It is self-evidently true that we can and do make and distribute all kinds of free and open source software at no cost. The tendency to belittle people for expecting zero cost appears as a result, I think, of a kind of gaslighting and stockholm syndrome where people in the ecosystem have _expected_ to have to pay large amounts for software that is in many ways no better than FOSS alternatives - especially as time continues on, resulting in convergence of defect analysis, fixes, and features in popular FOSS projects. That's a background that skews towards corporate and first-world experiences, and it's not (I don't think) aligned with the expectations of the next few generations of developers worldwide. What .NET and other popular technologies - proprietary or otherwise - will do for those future generations is shape their ideas and visions about what technology is capable of. And I hope everyone would want that to be as optimistic as possible.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I can see your point. People will go where they can get the best deal and nobody likes having the rug pulled out from under them and suddenly having to solve licensing problems. But I can see the article’s standpoint too. Building multi-million or -billion dollar edifices on top of the free labor of FOSS maintainers is arguably exploitative and unsustainable, and the idea of being unwilling to pay a small fee for something “critical to the business” is somewhat absurd on its face.
    - jka 5y ago
      Sure, and I hear the concern regarding exploitation of (potentially overworked, underpaid) developers and maintainers. But if a thousand people receive a free (perhaps sugar-addled) lunch from one of a few providers -- while collectively having the resources to feed each other free lunches (more sustainably, long-term) -- it doesn't seem fair to attack and blame those people for asking difficult questions about their food source. Even if they might seem entitled today, they're asking questions that will probably appear more than fair in retrospect. (I realize these analogies don't fit perfectly, and I'm aware I'm reframing the issue, perhaps awkwardly) With software, fortunately, it may be business critical, but it's rarely personal-health critical the way that nutrition is (unless, perhaps, we have already incorporated infrastructure too deeply into ourselves as humans).
tester756 5y ago
What makes you think so?
- jka 5y ago
  If a company wants to improve their margins, then eventually - in the absence of other opportunities, or in an environment that pursues efficiencies - they will reduce costs. If a market entrant wants to get an edge on existing incumbents, they will look for opportunities to operate at lower costs. If a non-free component can be rewritten and redistributed at a lower cost, then eventually it will be, either to improve margins or by a market entrant. This is why I expect that the article's proposition that the marketplace should expect to pay for a component will crumble over time.
  - tester756 5y ago
    but what is this "cost" you're talking about? is .NET paid somehow? could it be cheaper? maybe in terms of hardware, but overall?
    - jka 5y ago
      In the context of the article, the costs I'm referring to are related to a third-party component (integrated easily by default in a framework) that is moving to a pay-sometimes license. (you also make a very observant hint: total cost of ownership includes hardware-level resource provisioning)
  - thu2111 5y ago
    That doesn't make sense. It's never cheaper to rewrite a product from scratch yourself unless the pricing is truly messed up. People justify writing and giving away open source code in all sorts of ways but not that it's cheaper than buying.

by jka 5y ago

emodendroket 5y ago

Can't really see why .NET doesn't have a place in that future. You can run it in the same dockerized setups as everything else.

jka 5y ago
Good point; I wrote this a little carelessly, reacting a little bit, and should elaborate my thoughts. The open source .NET ecosystem - and hopefully Microsoft supporting that - does have a continued place as long as it can remain relevant to the technology audience. The .NET framework has pushed plenty of boundaries in programming language research, features and functionality, for example. What I should have focused on is the sense that I picked up from the article that free is somehow bad, and that it's justified to punish and deride people who have a (in my view, reasonable) expectation of free and open source software. It is self-evidently true that we can and do make and distribute all kinds of free and open source software at no cost. The tendency to belittle people for expecting zero cost appears as a result, I think, of a kind of gaslighting and stockholm syndrome where people in the ecosystem have _expected_ to have to pay large amounts for software that is in many ways no better than FOSS alternatives - especially as time continues on, resulting in convergence of defect analysis, fixes, and features in popular FOSS projects. That's a background that skews towards corporate and first-world experiences, and it's not (I don't think) aligned with the expectations of the next few generations of developers worldwide. What .NET and other popular technologies - proprietary or otherwise - will do for those future generations is shape their ideas and visions about what technology is capable of. And I hope everyone would want that to be as optimistic as possible.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I can see your point. People will go where they can get the best deal and nobody likes having the rug pulled out from under them and suddenly having to solve licensing problems. But I can see the article’s standpoint too. Building multi-million or -billion dollar edifices on top of the free labor of FOSS maintainers is arguably exploitative and unsustainable, and the idea of being unwilling to pay a small fee for something “critical to the business” is somewhat absurd on its face.
  - jka 5y ago
    Sure, and I hear the concern regarding exploitation of (potentially overworked, underpaid) developers and maintainers. But if a thousand people receive a free (perhaps sugar-addled) lunch from one of a few providers -- while collectively having the resources to feed each other free lunches (more sustainably, long-term) -- it doesn't seem fair to attack and blame those people for asking difficult questions about their food source. Even if they might seem entitled today, they're asking questions that will probably appear more than fair in retrospect. (I realize these analogies don't fit perfectly, and I'm aware I'm reframing the issue, perhaps awkwardly) With software, fortunately, it may be business critical, but it's rarely personal-health critical the way that nutrition is (unless, perhaps, we have already incorporated infrastructure too deeply into ourselves as humans).

tester756 5y ago

What makes you think so?

jka 5y ago
If a company wants to improve their margins, then eventually - in the absence of other opportunities, or in an environment that pursues efficiencies - they will reduce costs. If a market entrant wants to get an edge on existing incumbents, they will look for opportunities to operate at lower costs. If a non-free component can be rewritten and redistributed at a lower cost, then eventually it will be, either to improve margins or by a market entrant. This is why I expect that the article's proposition that the marketplace should expect to pay for a component will crumble over time.
- tester756 5y ago
  but what is this "cost" you're talking about? is .NET paid somehow? could it be cheaper? maybe in terms of hardware, but overall?
  - jka 5y ago
    In the context of the article, the costs I'm referring to are related to a third-party component (integrated easily by default in a framework) that is moving to a pay-sometimes license. (you also make a very observant hint: total cost of ownership includes hardware-level resource provisioning)
- thu2111 5y ago
  That doesn't make sense. It's never cheaper to rewrite a product from scratch yourself unless the pricing is truly messed up. People justify writing and giving away open source code in all sorts of ways but not that it's cheaper than buying.