6 ms·

Swinging back to open standards

97 points by jrepinc 4y ago

pphysch 4y ago
I think the reason the pendulum swings back is more mundane: reduced availability of capital. Companies that survive must "do more with less" and will no longer be paying out the ear for a SaaS that barely gets the job done. Most SaaS will go out of business. Dev cycles will shift proportionally to working more on enterprise systems and the open standards that support them.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  So, our freedom of association was yet another thing that the wash of free capital on the US was harming. Good to know.
- hinkley 4y ago
  There's a derivative there with fashions too. When the gold rush is on people line up to invent a wheel. After a while the Trough of Disillusionment kicks in and you get either late adopters or people who expect hazard pay for continuing to work on things, so at the same time the money is drying up, the money you do have begins to buy less and less, which is a feedback loop. People are not wanting to roll their own cloud, or index their own logs. They want to chew on other problems.
BackBlast 4y ago
The web is, frankly, the most open and level information and business playing field in the history of the earth. The ability for Joe Random to start a business on that platform, run compatible tools, and get in front of worldwide customers has simply never been greater or easier. Yes, there are a lot of proprietary players today. Particularly all mobile platforms, and some gatekeepers like search and attention claiming groups in social media. But the web still dominates as the primary platform, and it remains quite available to everyone. We don't have to "swing back", it's already here in front of us. We could utilize it better, and reject some of the platforms holding us back. But that's up to each individual.
- lambic 4y ago
  Until I can chat with all my friends regardless of which chat app they happen to use, we need to swing back. Open internet standards aren't just about the web.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > Until I can chat with all... regardless of which chat app I should remind you that your application and their application will share your messages but may have very different privacy policies. (Some problems will persist and still require further assessment and decision and possibly division.)
    - bamboozled 4y ago
      There should be no privacy concerns , there should be encryption
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        ? When your message is readable on the other side, on the app which we are supposing has a "problematic" privacy policy, it is unencrypted. Encryption is a matter in transmission. The data acted upon (e.g. displayed) on the other application has to be finally unencrypted, or decrypted. Alice sends message "Hi" to Bob through app Alpha; it is encrypted during transmission; Bob receives it on his app named Beta - but Beta manages the message in fully readable form, "'H'-'i'", and does what its coders want with it.
        pavel_lishin 4y ago
        Hannu Rajaniemi's "The Quantum Thief" had a fun take on this, in the form of the Gevulot technology. It's a great book.
  - vkou 4y ago
    And I won't be satisfied until Emacs can run Windows 95 binaries [1], but I'm not sure that it's either on Microsoft or on Richard Stallman to make this happen. There is no shortage of open protocols that you can use to communicate with all your friends. I don't see that you should be able to compel application vendors, that all build on top of open protocols into any interop they don't want. [1] Emacs is, after all, an operating system with ambitions of being a text editor.
focusgroup0 4y ago
Check out Urbit. It has a decentralized app store that anyone can publish to. Write once, deploy to all users.
- echelon 4y ago
  Doesn't help with Apple App Store and Google Play Store, which is how the majority of American consumers conduct their computing. Deploying software to mobile devices should be the same as desktop computing. Apple and Google argue their stance is for user privacy and security, but they can still maintain a central catalog of malware and remove bad apps by signature. Permissions flags and controls can work without a store. Apps can be required to report their provenance, which opens up means for manual or automated review. Google technically allows apk downloads, but they're "scary" and most users don't know how to perform them. This is as good as disallowing open installs outright. Google and Apple won't ever do this unless the DOJ tells them they must. I would argue that an antitrust action against these two app stores is essential to remove an undue tax on innovation and to strengthen the market for competition. It's not like money cannot be made on devices and services and that neither company doesn't already have the upper leg on these fronts as well.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    > Google technically allows apk downloads, but they're "scary" and most users don't know how to perform them. No matter what happens, this will continue to be true for some percentage of users because they've come to associate downloading software from random sites with things like malware and adware, and not without reason; while there are perfectly legitimate software packages that can't be distributed on the Play Store for one reason or another, by far and away the most common reason for APKs not being on the Play Store or users sideloading is because the app in question is doing something shady or the user is pirating apps from dubious sources that turn the apps in question into trojans. Even in the desktop world there's some level of trepidation with downloading from websites, particularly on Windows where search results are littered with things like shady SEO-optimized download sites, and that problem pre-dates all modern app stores. The question is how to solve that. I don't think the answer is to give up and say it's unsolvable and just has to be lived with, especially since doing so isn't going to engender support from those who cling to app stores for safety purposes.
jancsika 4y ago
With regard to Purism the company: Folks should be wary about ordering from Purism until/unless Purism shows clear signs in the future that it will give timely refunds to customers who do not want to continue waiting for the Librem 5 device they ordered years ago. (For the purposes of this post, let's assign the value of timely to be no more than 30 business days from the original request for a refund.) Worse, Purism continually sets new deadlines which they continue to fail to meet. As it stands, there are lots of reports of Purism telling the customer that they may only receive a refund when Purism claims that particular device is ready to ship to that customer. This is against their original terms of service and AFAICT isn't legal in the U.S. Many users have contacted their state's attorney general to complain about this business practice. I'm confident I can simply link to the purism subreddit and readers here will instantly find relevant reports about the difficulty of receiving a refund: https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/ To be clear-- my complaint isn't about Purism not being able to ship Librem 5 on time. My complaint is about their unethical practice of withholding refunds from customers who clearly and reasonably request one after patiently waiting to receive their devices. In fact, a number of the complaints on that subreddit were posted only after the customer claimed they had been emailing Purism for over a year to obtain a refund for the device they ordered but never received. Edit: clarification with the word "timely" added, a definition of "timely" provided, and a few other stray clarifications to be maximally generous.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I fear this is another setup where you're not buying a product, you're actually financing a company that is going to pay back the loan with a product that they haven't built yet.
  - abhorrence 4y ago
    It’s sad though, since the laptop was such a refreshing experience when I had one many years ago.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    To add some context: the Librem 5 project started with a crowdfunding campaign at the end of 2017. The initial projected release date was early 2019, but the project caught delays and eventually started shipping preorders in quantity in late 2020 (early revisions started shipping to backers who opted in for those at the turn of 2019/2020 already). At this point, however, the world was well into component shortage, which ended up severely impacting the production. Right now the shipping queue is at the preorders from early 2019 (with some thousands of phones already shipped) and is expected to reach the present somewhere in the first half of 2023. The product is certainly "built yet", it's just shipping slower than anticipated and, in turn, still has a queue of preorders from years ago to fulfill (I believe the most dense preorder periods have been handled by now though). Disclosure: I work for Purism as a software dev.
simonblack 4y ago
If you're going to invest in the latest fad proprietary 'thing', you have to be prepared to lose all your investment in that 'thing'. Companies fail. All too often that proprietary 'thing' they had becomes non-supported and you have to just throw away everything you have connected with that 'thing' such as files written in formats that nothing can access, or hardware that there are no supplies for, etc, etc. When was the last time that you were able to buy a 16-hard-sectored 8-inch floppy? When were you last able to access that Wang-written word-processing file? Can you even buy a fresh video-tape for a Betamax video recorder? If you stick to open hardware and open software formats, you can still find them useful even decades after their makers have turned to dust.
truemotive 4y ago
LOL pretty ironic conversation in these here comments on open standards
LoganDark 4y ago
This article says close to nothing at all. It's just a statement about the industry.

97 points by jrepinc 4y ago

I think the reason the pendulum swings back is more mundane: reduced availability of capital. Companies that survive must "do more with less" and will no longer be paying out the ear for a SaaS that barely gets the job done. Most SaaS will go out of business. Dev cycles will shift proportionally to working more on enterprise systems and the open standards that support them.

marcosdumay 4y ago
So, our freedom of association was yet another thing that the wash of free capital on the US was harming. Good to know.
hinkley 4y ago
There's a derivative there with fashions too. When the gold rush is on people line up to invent a wheel. After a while the Trough of Disillusionment kicks in and you get either late adopters or people who expect hazard pay for continuing to work on things, so at the same time the money is drying up, the money you do have begins to buy less and less, which is a feedback loop. People are not wanting to roll their own cloud, or index their own logs. They want to chew on other problems.

BackBlast 4y ago

The web is, frankly, the most open and level information and business playing field in the history of the earth. The ability for Joe Random to start a business on that platform, run compatible tools, and get in front of worldwide customers has simply never been greater or easier. Yes, there are a lot of proprietary players today. Particularly all mobile platforms, and some gatekeepers like search and attention claiming groups in social media. But the web still dominates as the primary platform, and it remains quite available to everyone. We don't have to "swing back", it's already here in front of us. We could utilize it better, and reject some of the platforms holding us back. But that's up to each individual.

lambic 4y ago
Until I can chat with all my friends regardless of which chat app they happen to use, we need to swing back. Open internet standards aren't just about the web.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > Until I can chat with all... regardless of which chat app I should remind you that your application and their application will share your messages but may have very different privacy policies. (Some problems will persist and still require further assessment and decision and possibly division.)
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    There should be no privacy concerns , there should be encryption
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      ? When your message is readable on the other side, on the app which we are supposing has a "problematic" privacy policy, it is unencrypted. Encryption is a matter in transmission. The data acted upon (e.g. displayed) on the other application has to be finally unencrypted, or decrypted. Alice sends message "Hi" to Bob through app Alpha; it is encrypted during transmission; Bob receives it on his app named Beta - but Beta manages the message in fully readable form, "'H'-'i'", and does what its coders want with it.
      - pavel_lishin 4y ago
        Hannu Rajaniemi's "The Quantum Thief" had a fun take on this, in the form of the Gevulot technology. It's a great book.
- vkou 4y ago
  And I won't be satisfied until Emacs can run Windows 95 binaries [1], but I'm not sure that it's either on Microsoft or on Richard Stallman to make this happen. There is no shortage of open protocols that you can use to communicate with all your friends. I don't see that you should be able to compel application vendors, that all build on top of open protocols into any interop they don't want. [1] Emacs is, after all, an operating system with ambitions of being a text editor.

focusgroup0 4y ago

Check out Urbit. It has a decentralized app store that anyone can publish to. Write once, deploy to all users.

echelon 4y ago
Doesn't help with Apple App Store and Google Play Store, which is how the majority of American consumers conduct their computing. Deploying software to mobile devices should be the same as desktop computing. Apple and Google argue their stance is for user privacy and security, but they can still maintain a central catalog of malware and remove bad apps by signature. Permissions flags and controls can work without a store. Apps can be required to report their provenance, which opens up means for manual or automated review. Google technically allows apk downloads, but they're "scary" and most users don't know how to perform them. This is as good as disallowing open installs outright. Google and Apple won't ever do this unless the DOJ tells them they must. I would argue that an antitrust action against these two app stores is essential to remove an undue tax on innovation and to strengthen the market for competition. It's not like money cannot be made on devices and services and that neither company doesn't already have the upper leg on these fronts as well.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  > Google technically allows apk downloads, but they're "scary" and most users don't know how to perform them. No matter what happens, this will continue to be true for some percentage of users because they've come to associate downloading software from random sites with things like malware and adware, and not without reason; while there are perfectly legitimate software packages that can't be distributed on the Play Store for one reason or another, by far and away the most common reason for APKs not being on the Play Store or users sideloading is because the app in question is doing something shady or the user is pirating apps from dubious sources that turn the apps in question into trojans. Even in the desktop world there's some level of trepidation with downloading from websites, particularly on Windows where search results are littered with things like shady SEO-optimized download sites, and that problem pre-dates all modern app stores. The question is how to solve that. I don't think the answer is to give up and say it's unsolvable and just has to be lived with, especially since doing so isn't going to engender support from those who cling to app stores for safety purposes.

jancsika 4y ago

With regard to Purism the company: Folks should be wary about ordering from Purism until/unless Purism shows clear signs in the future that it will give timely refunds to customers who do not want to continue waiting for the Librem 5 device they ordered years ago. (For the purposes of this post, let's assign the value of timely to be no more than 30 business days from the original request for a refund.) Worse, Purism continually sets new deadlines which they continue to fail to meet. As it stands, there are lots of reports of Purism telling the customer that they may only receive a refund when Purism claims that particular device is ready to ship to that customer. This is against their original terms of service and AFAICT isn't legal in the U.S. Many users have contacted their state's attorney general to complain about this business practice. I'm confident I can simply link to the purism subreddit and readers here will instantly find relevant reports about the difficulty of receiving a refund: https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/ To be clear-- my complaint isn't about Purism not being able to ship Librem 5 on time. My complaint is about their unethical practice of withholding refunds from customers who clearly and reasonably request one after patiently waiting to receive their devices. In fact, a number of the complaints on that subreddit were posted only after the customer claimed they had been emailing Purism for over a year to obtain a refund for the device they ordered but never received. Edit: clarification with the word "timely" added, a definition of "timely" provided, and a few other stray clarifications to be maximally generous.

pessimizer 4y ago
I fear this is another setup where you're not buying a product, you're actually financing a company that is going to pay back the loan with a product that they haven't built yet.
- abhorrence 4y ago
  It’s sad though, since the laptop was such a refreshing experience when I had one many years ago.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  To add some context: the Librem 5 project started with a crowdfunding campaign at the end of 2017. The initial projected release date was early 2019, but the project caught delays and eventually started shipping preorders in quantity in late 2020 (early revisions started shipping to backers who opted in for those at the turn of 2019/2020 already). At this point, however, the world was well into component shortage, which ended up severely impacting the production. Right now the shipping queue is at the preorders from early 2019 (with some thousands of phones already shipped) and is expected to reach the present somewhere in the first half of 2023. The product is certainly "built yet", it's just shipping slower than anticipated and, in turn, still has a queue of preorders from years ago to fulfill (I believe the most dense preorder periods have been handled by now though). Disclosure: I work for Purism as a software dev.

simonblack 4y ago

If you're going to invest in the latest fad proprietary 'thing', you have to be prepared to lose all your investment in that 'thing'. Companies fail. All too often that proprietary 'thing' they had becomes non-supported and you have to just throw away everything you have connected with that 'thing' such as files written in formats that nothing can access, or hardware that there are no supplies for, etc, etc. When was the last time that you were able to buy a 16-hard-sectored 8-inch floppy? When were you last able to access that Wang-written word-processing file? Can you even buy a fresh video-tape for a Betamax video recorder? If you stick to open hardware and open software formats, you can still find them useful even decades after their makers have turned to dust.

truemotive 4y ago

LOL pretty ironic conversation in these here comments on open standards

LoganDark 4y ago

This article says close to nothing at all. It's just a statement about the industry.