3 ms·

I thought the article was arguing that say Redis was while “open” the codebase is owned by one company and hence that’s no different to proprietary. To which I

I thought the article was arguing that say Redis was while “open” the codebase is owned by one company and hence that’s no different to proprietary. To which I say, yeah we know. I mean I can fork Linux kernel tonight and announce my big new plans, and there will be zero installs. Big FOSS software is there because they built a reputation of constant quality over years (as successful proprietary companies should and sometimes do) That social capital is immensely hard to compete against (the Hashicorp forking might manage?) And that is what “the big players” are trying to exploit - that for a decade they have led / organised / helped / whatever the development of this software and now they want to monetise It’s also why I think the “foundation” model works surprisingly well - we can trust that to keep software going so it’s a better ask for cash (even if the support model is the “best” imo)

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
There are tons of forks of the Linux kernel. For example, Debian ships their own, and Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, ships a different one. These are kept mostly in sync with upstream but it's completely plausible that if upstream made a change they didn't like they'd just revert it. The actual problems are with things like systemd, which are enormous and lack standardization but get integrated into numerous parts of the system. Then you can't replace a piece of it or your piece has to integrate with all of the things the original did, but since none of the integrations follow any standards they can change at any time and people can add new ones that only work with the original and -- surprise -- your replacement is suddenly broken.
- margorczynski 3y ago
  The thing is most of those changes are minimal and it is completely unrealistic for any non-megacorp to maintain their own implementation of it. The example here would be Google and Android. Another great example is Redis - where the main competing product is now not a fork of the original but a new thing by none other than MS, as they have the cash and resources like Google to pull something like this off.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The general problem here is monorepo disease. Instead of composable components with standard interfaces, you get a single huge project which is too big for anyone to replace as a whole but also has shifting internal interdependencies that prevent you from replacing only a part of it.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

There are tons of forks of the Linux kernel. For example, Debian ships their own, and Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, ships a different one. These are kept mostly in sync with upstream but it's completely plausible that if upstream made a change they didn't like they'd just revert it. The actual problems are with things like systemd, which are enormous and lack standardization but get integrated into numerous parts of the system. Then you can't replace a piece of it or your piece has to integrate with all of the things the original did, but since none of the integrations follow any standards they can change at any time and people can add new ones that only work with the original and -- surprise -- your replacement is suddenly broken.

margorczynski 3y ago
The thing is most of those changes are minimal and it is completely unrealistic for any non-megacorp to maintain their own implementation of it. The example here would be Google and Android. Another great example is Redis - where the main competing product is now not a fork of the original but a new thing by none other than MS, as they have the cash and resources like Google to pull something like this off.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The general problem here is monorepo disease. Instead of composable components with standard interfaces, you get a single huge project which is too big for anyone to replace as a whole but also has shifting internal interdependencies that prevent you from replacing only a part of it.