10 ms·

Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

166 points by lhoff 2y ago

thierrydamiba 2y ago
Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech. Hard to be an alternative when you serve the same master.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  That the „commodify your complements“ strategy
  - jeffreygoesto 2y ago
    I cite that essay always when "but this should be open source" comes up in a corporate context... https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement
    - tnahga 2y ago
      The famous original is here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- hresvelgr 2y ago
  And it's also not great when companies that are positioned as implementation open source and cloud closed (read: AWS/Azure/GCP reseller) also construct strange licenses that are inherently against traditional OSS values.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  It's more of a symbiotic relationship. The open source community depends on commercial support. Essentially all of the bigger projects indeed get a lot of their contributions from the companies that use, build, and depend on these projects. It's how the software world can collaborate with their competitors on the things they don't compete directly on. This isn't charity, they are literally using more OSS software than they produce their own software. By several orders of magnitude in most cases. Companies like Google have many millions of lines of code in proprietary in house code. But they depend on an even larger amount of code in OSS form. E.g. Android and Chrome OS are based on Linux. Those products are built on many thousands of open source packages. And of course Google is contributing to lots of them and created a few themselves. Chrome is open source because webkit was open source because Apple forked KHTML from the KDE project. Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing. VC funded OSS companies are a bit more challenging. These companies are perpetually confused about their licensing and need to keep things proprietary and open at the same time. These projects get a lot of attention because of the VC money but technically they only represent a tiny fraction of the OSS community.
  - DeathArrow 2y ago
    > Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing. My conjecture is that open source is polished enough for most customers to use when there are commercial interests implied. Linux on the server is a resounding success, Linux desktop not so much.
    - jillesvangurp 2y ago
      Even on the server, the commercial distributions dominate. Probably because of things like support. And I wouldn't agree Linux desktop is unsuccessful. It's actually growing quite a bit in the last few years. And of course ChromeOS is also Linux based and capable of running Linux software. Likewise, MS bundles Linux with Windows and it is widely used by developers using Windows that way. But even without that Linux Market share is now 4.5%. Quite a few gamers are discovering Linux works pretty well lately. With ChromeOS included it's closer to 6-7%. Linux on the Desktop is bigger than ChromeOS. I'd say it is getting better.
    - kalaksi 2y ago
      I disagree about the desktop not being a success but I guess it depends on how you define success. It's true that it's not as popular as some other OSes.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Even on the server you're better off with the custom cloud offerings than using an off-the-shelf image. That is the thing, what really won on server and embedded was UNIX/POSIX, and while GNU/Linux is the cheapest and more flexible way to achieve that, it isn't the only one, and the best experience is anyway with vendor custom distributions with their special sauce, not the pure FOSS one.
      - kalaksi 2y ago
        What benefits do the vendor distros provide? The downsides include at least increased vendor lock-in. I think one can attribute many things to the success of Linux (incl. POSIX) but it's not about one single thing and the whole shouldn't be discounted.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  > Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech. People have to put food on their table and can't work for free. Someone has to pay for that work. Nobody will pay for it if he can't extract some benefits from doing so.
Guthur 2y ago
Countries have run nationalise infrastructure before, and successfully. The problem is if they did not view it as nationalised infrastructure and instead viewed it as some sort of mana that would fall from open source heaven. Open source software is the building blocks used by large rent (service fee) seeking corporations. They will extract large profits from any of these contracts and that is a demonstrable fact, they are also nearly all from the USA and so those profits will flow in one particular direction. It is also a historical fact that governments have run successful large scale infrastructure. Make your choice.
- 6510 2y ago
  But it does run it in a particular way that isn't necessarily as profitable which in this example is a good thing. imho the question should be if the country continues to function if the project goes bankrupt. If it is so essential that it needs to be saved by the government (even in theory) then it lives outside the domain of capitalism.
- JimDabell 2y ago
  The point of going to big businesses for software services and support is that most customers don’t have needs that are large enough to justify the full-time staff needed for top-notch support. So companies that provide services amortise this over many customers and can employ n dozen full-time staff for a particular subsystem when the average customer might only need them a few times a year. So the tradeoff makes sense – even with a big profit margin, the customers still save money compared with DIY. This logic doesn’t really hold when it comes to large governments. Their needs are large enough that they can justify employing specialists. At that point, the profit margin the service business is capturing is just inefficiency. Internal services should be more common in large governments.
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    It depends? Sometimes it is the feature set, but for example with future VMware pricing we'd be cheaper off hiring two full-time staff and running proxmox, which is currently being evaluated.
larodi 2y ago
Been ranting about this for years, did a keynote about it, actually did two notes at several venues, including an open culture festival, and all I got was a silent dis. every now and then open source is suggested as superior, because being free. Zero comment on code quality, who wrote it, why it came to be in the first place. Even the argument that a host running open source makes delivery more trustworthy is super biased - major cognitive dissonance is that services based on open tech are very often not open, neither auditable. There’s a lot of open source being controlled by same large corporations and the part that is not, does not constitute a service on its own. Then we must admit it takes a lot of care taking care of services nobody else cares about (by means of support). While open source is important for academia, I think open results are more important for government. Like I don’t care what somebody used to cater to this geospatial data, or that image. I care about the data that went in and went out. Open data is much more important in the era of open weights and closed sources training sets. The general public is often misled to equate open source to free beer. Well that is also not entirely correct given plethora of not so free licenses. Asp not correct as costs are greater when you put the personnel running that service in the equation. I can see how this argument does not fly well with socialist ideologies, but that’s problem of ideology, not of costs or technology. Even if we consider only those open projects which are also free - these come with less guaranties than a pair of second hand shoes bought from random store. Don’t get me wrong - open source is great and we use it daily, but comparing means of distribution with quality of service is really like comparing ябълки и круши (apples and pears in Bulgarian). So it’s indeed time to stop blindly waving the open source flag, but actually try to understand the benefits and challenges it comes with.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 2y ago
It was a pipe dream, because at the end of the day not everything can be a side job, to compete against those that spend at least 8h day producing code. Then the whole issue with non-copyleft licenses, that are nothing other than the old Whateverware or Public Domain licenses from the 16 bit home computer days. We already had access to source code back then. And for a large crowd this is already good enough, they aren't into it for religious definitions.
wazoox 2y ago
EU is a digital colony and that's entirely down to the lack of political will.
- devjab 2y ago
  I don’t think it’s a digital will. I think it’s an advisory layer which is completely incompetent and will always try to lead decisions toward proprietary software solutions because they “job hop” between the public and private sectors. I do not mean this as corruption or shady, but simply that they have powerful roles because they have a lot of private sector jobs behind them. Business leaders who employ thousands of people, and the decisions makers and advisors in their vicinity are always going to have a big role in political decisions. Coupled with many of the FFOS advocates and NGOs being far too “all or nothing” in their approach, where what you would need to be successful is not to swap everything at once but to take small incremental steps so that you can build clear successes. It simply leads to a landscape where the political layer makes bad decisions despite a decade long will and commitment to advance both EU tech and Open Source solutions.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Yes it is about a lack of political will. US companies have been illegal in the EU for a decade now (Schrems II), but the enforcement of this is hardly anywhere to be seen. It's the same kind of political denial as with being "concerned" about climate change, but still trading with China (even worse when this allows for fake self-congratulations about decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, when it mostly comes from most of the industry having been exported).
- okanat 2y ago
  I think it will take way more than political will. The USA is enjoying the wealth they gained in both world wars and they also kept their defacto colonies in the South America and Pacific. Europeans destroyed their wealth in the world wars and they lost their colonies. Of course the end of the colonialism has ended some of the human suffering but it has a cold-hearted economic impact. The American venture capitalists are all coming from the industries that got stronger at and after the world wars. They invested silicon and then the tech industries that built the wealth exponentially. The Europeans had to rebuild their countries until 70s and the investments they made are smaller. Similarly the US spent its government money to nuclear and space programs that further strengthened the economy. EU spent its surplus to improve post-Soviet countries which may or may not pay dividends in the future. It may require significant reallocation of resources from certain places to tech. It may require diverting the resources spent on old pensioners who are the biggest voting block. It is not a simple lack of political will. It requires reshaping a century of decisions.
la_fayette 2y ago
You are mentioning that an experiment with nextcloud has failed? I cannot find any evidence regarding that, even more I see it highly used among governments and municipalities in the EU.
- larodi 2y ago
  I’m also aware of one Drupal failed experiment somewhere in the same organisation…
- sirdvd 2y ago
  Tangentially, although there's been sporadic setbacks, as Limux[1] in 2017, there are new commitments to linux[2] that I hope will lead the way, at least in Europe. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/german-state-gov-ditching-windows-for-linux-30k-workers-migrating/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/germa...
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    I can tell that a few years ago a couple of NRW libraries used a SuSE variant in kiosk mode, apparently not everyone found that great, as some of the ones I regularly visit now have Windows in kiosk mode, with the usual set of Office, Adobe and other packages.
- macbr 2y ago
  I’m aware of a party in Germany which, at some levels, uses Nextcloud to great success so I could imagine them pushing for it in their fraction. No idea why that wouldn’t work though given that they have tons of experience
keelhaule 2y ago
I think the author is not learned in the technology economics. IBM to save it's business had to merge with Red hat almost 50% 50% in 2018. Microsoft it's security and cloud offering had to, open source it's .net framework, aquire GitHub, ditch Visual Studio fot Visual Studio Code, ARM is eating the world, it over hauled the x86_x64 architecture, and became the Defacto architecture. We can go on and on and on and on,that the Open Source business model, became necessary to survive in tech, not just to exist. If you don't open it, they will eat you up.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  ARM is not open source.
  - anthk 2y ago
    ARM broke WIntel.
    - Qwertious 2y ago
      Smartphones broke Wintel, their ISA didn't need to be ARM as long as it was power-efficient.
    - notpushkin 2y ago
      Yeah, but how exaxtly is that relevant here?
    - oblio 2y ago
      And who cares? Functionally there is Apple ARM with its extensions and Qualcomm ARM with its extensions. If anything, the x86 world was more open and more compatible. We have enterprise distros running on both Intel and AMD, supported by their hardware makers. Who in their right mind runs 3rd party Linux distributions on smartphones in production environments (i.e. the CEO's smartphone)?
- nrnrjrjrj 2y ago
  Open source won those battles but the war doesn't end. The next fight is AI and thanks to a leak we have open source (weights and inference) models now. Without that leak we would not have the ecosystem evolving around Llama.
apples_oranges 2y ago
Big tech relies on open source and, often enough, vice versa
7bit 2y ago
> The regular IT environment in the European Parliament is managed by whole teams of professionals, it comes with training, and is supported by Microsoft partners and ultimately by Microsoft itself. There are also large amounts of computing power available to make things work well. > An Open Source experiment meanwhile is typically operated by an enthusiastic hobbyist with borrowed equipment. Rolled out without training and without professional support, by someone who likely did this for the first time, it’s no wonder things often don’t work out well. > After the experiment, the faction was disappointed and concluded that Nextcloud was no good. And that was also their lived experience. “Let’s not do that again!” This is a rhetorical trick known as implication or insinuation. By presenting information indirectly, the author prompts readers to make a connection themselves without explicitly stating it. The author implies that the European Parliament's failed experiment with Nextcloud was due to a lack of professional resources and expertise, suggesting it was handled similarly to typical open-source projects led by hobbyists without proper support. However, he doesn’t provide any factual evidence that the Parliament’s Nextcloud experiment actually lacked professional resources, training, or adequate equipment. Instead, he hints at this by describing common issues with open-source setups, leaving readers to assume the experiment suffered from similar shortcomings. I would have appreciated some facts, or even sources for his claims, but there are none. And I couldn't find any information about the Nextcloud deployment having failed.
nrnrjrjrj 2y ago
Thw problem is big tech can offer free as in beer hosted services. You can use Google docs for free so it takes some dedication to self host that and pay for the server. Now if big tech charged for everything things would be more like the old days where you might use small tech, such as a local hosting provider that does open source installs.
devjab 2y ago
I think the article should have started off different considering that it actually concludes with a semi-positive stance on how open source “is” an alternative to big tech. It’s an area we take rather serious here in Denmark. Now, I won’t get into the irony of everyone wanting to replace Chromebooks in our school systems because Google is evil when the replacement is very likely to be Microsoft who is as much of a snoop these days since Google actually sells similar forms of privacy to our education. What we do have as a real working alternative to both is locally developed education solutions which will work as well, if not better? Than Google’s Educational tools on Chromebooks. What we lack is a political leadership that will commit to this. Part of this is because we’ve only recently gotten a digitalisation minister, even though people spend far more time on computers than they do on their daily commute and we’ve had a transportation minister since basically forever. Another part is that many of the top advisors in public service tend to “job hop” between our leading industry companies and public service, leaving to many contracts heading toward closed software. What our educational alternatives show, and they have been implemented in some places and in Greenland I believe. Is very much in line with what the article recommends at the end, as far as small incremental useful changes with clear and cut goals. What would you achieve with Nextcloud? Replacing everything you have in Azure AWS in one big step? Obviously that is going to go horribly. That’s not even how we migrated into Azure from on prem. What you can do, is to start by slowly moving your applications and services into moveable parts, by container rising them. Writing your run-books in Python rather than Powershell and so on. Then there is the change management, which the article touches on, and which is always forgotten by decision makers. Partly because decision makers don’t know what IT is, well… I guess that is it really. Where in the past (and I’ve written about this a lot) SysAdmins and supporters were unlikely to want to leave their Microsoft training, I think we’re at a point in IT history where that is less of a case because so much is now done on Linux even if you’re deep into the Microsoft ecosystem. Similarity the Office365 platform is not in as much ownership of your employee base because many people under 30 will not have “grown up” with it. Where it would have been inconceivable to not use Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook 5-10 years ago we’ve entered a world where we actively have to train employees in Office products because they are used to iOS, Android and MacOS and not “PCs”. Again, you should start by doing things in small steps. Our Libraries have switched to Ubuntu on every public PC, and it has been a non-issue because many library users are equally unfamiliar with Ubuntu and Windows, and since most things happen in a browser anyway, the underlying OS isn’t an issue. That is how you do it. Slowly with small steps, and yes, some of those steps don’t need to be open source. If you want to replace Azure or AWS then it’s much better to head to Hetzner (or similar) rather than to try and do it with NextCloud or similar. Because then your SysAdmins will not really need much retraining as that is not very different from what they already do in many cases where moving into the cloud has really just been moving a bunch of VMs.
anthk 2y ago
IDK about 'open source', but 'libre software' is what fueled tons of propietary software from the 80's until today. Without that software tons of propietary software (even console games) woudn't even exist. I remind you all Emacs powered some German airline's ATC in the early 90's, and it used to be used under Amazon for tons of stuff thanks to its easy widget UI to achieve tasks with very little Elisp.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
snowstormsun 2y ago
So, almost all servers running Linux around the world is just ignored by the author?
- skrebbel 2y ago
  The entire article is about office IT. Productivity software, etc. Basically, people emailing excel sheets to each other. I don't see how the OS running on servers is related to that.
bruce511 2y ago
I think the key point is this; >> (By the way, all new software without accompanying support & guidance is doomed to fail. And if that software comes from a dominant player, you’ll just have to deal with that by the way.) There's a temptation to conflate the software license with the software business. This is natural, but places software as the primary value in the chain. From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part. I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. And a big part of that effectiveness is that staff can run it. And when it all goes wrong there's someone to call. I'm buying a -relationship-, not software. Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc. In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it.
- kmac_ 2y ago
  That's the main point. No one buys software, they buy solutions. Accounting is a good example. I use a SaaS solution, but it doesn't matter because I could also take all my invoices to an accountant, and the effect would be the same. Also, mixing open licenses into business doesn't usually make sense. I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source.
  - quonn 2y ago
    > I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source. I totally agree with this. And not just businesses, individuals too.
  - nvk6 2y ago
    Large Corps arent exactly well known to handle the Explore part of the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff. On the flip side lot of open source devs are going to get 100x more productive in the Exploit part than the avg coder monkey at large corp. Nothing is obvious and predictable about where that story goes in an ever growing ever changing system. Large corps will keep funding whoever gets the job done. While AI might replace lot of Large Corps activity which is basically on the Exploit side of the Tradeoff.
consumerx 2y ago
Just migrated from GitHub to Gitlab, also finally made the move away from macOS towards Ubuntu as my primary machine. Ive been using Macs since almost 15 years, enjoyed it all the way but FOSS comms snd tech is the future.
dtquad 2y ago
80% of Linux code contributions come from US big tech.
- jazz9k 2y ago
  If you look at well maintained OSS projects (apache, php, etc). It's the same. Companies with the cash to hire developers are the reason they are successful.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    So this means the system is working pretty ok, tech companies are sharing the common burden of things that affect them but don't confer competitive advantage? It seems more active participation by governments (if they can figure out how to do it) would only make things better?
axegon_ 2y ago
As much as it pains me to say it, it's true. I use predominantly open source software on all my computers with some small exceptions. I used to rely on some cloud services because of the convenience and nothing else. But leaks started becoming way too common and what I can say about all places that I've worked at, data is handled really badly. If you pair that with some OSINT skills, you can learn pretty much anything about anyone from a single leak. So over the past few years I've been slowly cutting down my dependency on cloud services. Nextcloud was the first big step, a zfs pool for backups, a few custom protocols for alerting and kill switches and that's it. On paper this sounds really good but there's a lot of overhead when it comes to maintenance. "Yeah, it's just one more docker-compose.yml, big whoop"(yes kubernetes is pointless overkill if you are the sole user). I've said that too many times and it's not true cause it only takes one small thing that you overlooked and you have to spend a day or two to put everything back up together. Another thing worth mentioning is that open source can be a good alternative but open source does not mean free or cheap. For instance, I've gotten really into drones and radio communications lately. Take hackrf and the baby brother that is flipper zero - they are both completely open source but neither of them is cheap. In fact, they are really expensive - they are effectively open source ASIC's. I'm willing to bet that north of 80% of the cost is down to the software and not the hardware - because polishing a piece of software to the point where you can pick up a product and use it without effort or a steep learning curve, involves a ton of work on behalf of developers and UX/I people. And you can't really cut off all big tech - open source phones are BAD, you don't really have a good alternative to google maps and waze, you still heavily rely on search engines and a few dozen services if you start digging deeper. There are also a number of services which do not have an even half-decent open source alternative. Also not everyone has the skills to set up and run these things. I think the big case in favor of self-hosting whatever you can is that while open source is far from immune to leaks, if it resides in your private network(which it should) without access to the rest of the world, those holes will eventually be patched and you can take action in the meantime - stop the service, block a few ports, etc. The odds of you personally getting affected are pretty low. Now if a leak happens in big tech, there's nothing you can do about it and by the time you learn about it, it's often too late. Honestly, this is the number one reason I'm doing this to myself.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
kkfx 2y ago
Let's simplify: FLOSS domain is the internet domain, where anyone own a desktop, a homeserver, a company machine room etc. The big tech model is the old mainframe model, or the modern web where only few own anything. Try to mimicking them is a waste of time and can't work, pushing the society toward ownership and freedom might work, because in a way or another we will end up there being technically the sole solution.
- eesmith 2y ago
  FLOSS is the personal computer model, where you own the computer and have final say on what data is processed on your machine. If you can't try to make your software or computer lie in on your behalf, it is not FOSS. The big tech model where trust is in the company, not the person. Business love the big tech model because it's easier to let a few credit card companies deal with the trust issue than establish a trust relationship with everyone directly (or deal with cash), because surveillance capitalism is more profitable, and because it's more profitable to rent than to sell. The big tech model can profit first on that cost difference, and later on switching costs which would otherwise inhibit abuse. It has essentially nothing to do with the internet, as mainframes were networked long before personal computers. Even back in the 1980s, POS terminals used dial-up to verify credit card transactions.
  - kkfx 2y ago
    I mean the "mainframe model" of a single large system and many dumb terminals, now dumb terminals are named enpoints and the mainframe is someone else computer across the world. The trust problem is easy to solve, with an open society: as long as payments got processed with open APIs and the government takes care of the frauds there is no trust problem. I do not need to trust a third party with eCash, I only need to trust my State protections. The idea is already tempted, see not only the historic eCash, witch are the modern GNU Taler chosen (it seems) by the EU for the digital Euro https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/ https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/ and https://social.network.europa.eu/@EC_NGI/111499172838284606 https://social.network.europa.eu/@EC_NGI/111499172838284606 but also https://openfisca.org https://openfisca.org and https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala or few others alike. That's still embrional but in FLOSS terms we have already more than enough, we just miss the law enforcing it and the schools teaching it to the masses.
DeathArrow 2y ago
Open source and big tech are orthogonal concepts. Open source is about licensing, big tech is about scale.
BoredPositron 2y ago
The problem is that docker compose starts 20 containers and the fans go full bore just because you wanted to try a new wiki or notes app. The complexity of relatively simple software is getting insane.
- Pooge 2y ago
  I am one of the 10 users[1] in the world that uses Docker Swarm (container orchestrator like Kubernetes or Nomad), and I disagree with that statement. I have over 25 containers running (including Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Gitea, TeamSpeak, ...) and it barely uses 10GB of RAM (Jellyfin is eating up more than half of this). Most of my Compose files contain 2 services (1 for app + 1 for database), but some contain 3 and some contain 1. It's incredibly easy to install new software and incredibly easy to shut it down temporarily if you don't need to use it all day. I'd even argue that some companies would benefit more from using Swarm than Kubernetes. There is a lot of things to take into account when using Kubernetes (let alone setting it up for GitOps), but Docker Swarm can be managed by 1 person. [1]: A joke, obviously, but it really isn't popular at all
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    We are talking about normal users.
    - Pooge 2y ago
      Starting one wiki/note-taking software is not going to make your fans go crazy more than running your favorite JetBrains IDE. I had a non-Arm MacBook Pro and sometimes the fans would go crazy for no reasons, so all my Arm-based colleagues who had an M1 were laughing.
  - globular-toast 2y ago
    I think k8s can be managed by one person too, if you are only using it like docker swarm. Especially if you use something like k3s with SQL database. I found setting up gitops via flux quite easy, apart from order of operations, like installing controllers and custom resource definitions before resources that need those CRDs etc. What were you thinking of things to take into account for k8s over swarm? The main difference for me is k8s needs a hell of a lot more boilerplate yaml for doing basically anything.
submeta 2y ago
I work in the health sector at a company with nearly 1,000 employees. In our IT department, we rely on a wide range of proprietary software and spend substantial amounts on Oracle, MS SQL, and other licenses. I’ve been trying to convince management that PostgreSQL could be a solid alternative for many of our use cases, but it’s consistently dismissed as “not an option.” Meanwhile, we continue to pour money into Oracle licenses, not just for basic access but for additional features—like enabling data reading and analysis on the Oracle-embedded database in our main app. And, if we need to allocate more CPU cores on our VMs, we face yet another round of licensing fees. Sometimes you don’t need much support. Yet pay tons of money.
- DandyDev 2y ago
  Every time I hear a story like this - "management says 'no'" - I wonder if anyone cared/dared to ask follow up questions. Why was PostgreSQL not an option according to management? I would not take their dismissal at face value. I'd want to know why not. But that might be Dutch culture.
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    Insurance. The piece of paper that states who the buck stops with when there's a claim or lawsuit.
    - DandyDev 2y ago
      Let's say that is the reason, then that seems a very valid reason, right? Accountability is important, especially in large organizations. I guess what ticks me off a bit is the trope of dissing on management for saying 'no' but leaving out all the relevant context that might show management to be right. Don't get me wrong, I've seen my own fair share of bad management. But it's not so black and white when it comes to grand sweeping decisions like "should we invest in PostgreSQL or keep paying Oracle big license fees?"
      - vanviegen 2y ago
AlienRobot 2y ago
My litmus test for whether an open source application is reliable is whether it has a website or it links to its github page (sourceforge is ok).
pyeri 2y ago
Not open source but Free Libre (GPL) can become a genuine alternative provided it's implemented widely and followed honestly.
majkinetor 2y ago
I don't buy this argument. It's simplistic and IMO wrong on multiple accounts. Big tech can totally sell "FOSS services" and provide ground works for it, like some of it do - you don't have to lock people with proprietary stuff. Even more, big IT tech couldn't exist without FOSS in this form and shape, while the opposite is not true.
hggigg 2y ago
They are missing something major here and getting bogged down in some technicalities. Open source has no alternative to big tech because big tech commoditised stuff that's useful whereas open source commoditised stuff that is interesting to the developers. When I sit down at my mac, I have a working and very polished calendar, mail client, todo list, contacts, note taking app, music player, browser, photo editing and library management tools, video call and conferencing software etc. And all of it syncs with my phone and my tablet out of the box. When I sit down at a Linux machine, I have a calendar that breaks every 5 minutes and I can't share anything with anyone without futzing with iCal feeds and hiring another provider, a mail client that is ugly as sin and doesn't integrate with the calendaring or contact management stuff at all, a job and a half to find a note taking app that actually works properly, a todo list app that syncs with nothing, a spreadsheet package that crashes whenever I try and print something and oh hell I give up by then. And the answer to this? Roll out nextcloud on a VPS. Kill me, with a spoon. This is not freedom, it's just slavery of another kind. I just want to get shit done. Big tech covers that. Please take this as a recommendation to tidy up all this hell and just help people to get shit done and then it will be an alternative to big tech.
- rubymamis 2y ago
  Very much agree. I made a cross-platform and open-source note-taking app[1] in Qt C++ but never really talked to common end users and their needs, just built for myself. Now that I'm working on a proprietary version[2] (with a block editor I rewrote from scratch), I'm talking to these end users and understand their frustration in using my product. For example, many users had issues discovering the different features of the app, so I created a toolbar, which much helped. This is just one example. [1] https://notes-foss.com/ https://notes-foss.com/ [2] https://get-notes.com/ https://get-notes.com/
arianvanp 2y ago
But European businesses should utilise open source to more easily compete with big tech. Big tech is definitely using it to kill European businesses. Yet they dont. The problem is not big tech. Not open source. It's that the European tech economy crippled itself and cries wolf about it all day.
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
> Experimenting is useful, but know that Open Source is the underdog, and there are many people waiting for an opportunity to enthusiastically declare that it has failed. almost the entire world and industry is literally running on open source.
tnahga 2y ago
Do we need big tech? The only thing I need is a search engine. I prefer privately hosted web and mail servers. Before "the cloud", the economy worked just fine and companies had enough money for in-house IT. By using the nextcloud example, the author of the article is asking the wrong question.
throwaway19972 2y ago
This is excellent. It's also worth noting we don't need to fund services via supporting private enterprise, either—many services should arguably be operated by zero-profit entities. For the most part, after paying infrastructure bills and salaries, the profit motive is contrary to providing quality service over time (see: enshittification)
sylware 2y ago
Yep, we don't need open source anymore but LEAN open source and that, including the SDK.
sunshine-o 2y ago
I was sincerely wondering what the EU institutions use as a productivity suite but it seems they are on Microsoft 365 ! [0] I would be very curious to know if the data are stored on their own data center or Microsoft's. - [0] https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/press-releases/2024/european-commissions-use-microsoft-365-infringes-data-protection-law-eu-institutions-and-bodies_en https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre...
openrisk 2y ago
The alternative to "big tech" is not "open source". The alternative to big tech is a healthy "small and medium" tech economy, or at least a more sane distribution of market power. Imagine if you had to compete producing widgets in a market landscape where some hyper-conglomerate would source and distribute all power, define and install all plug standards and, in addition, produce and rent any widgets that saw consumer traction. For decades this is what has come to pass as normal in this domain. Openness (of varying degrees), standards-adherence, interoperability and competitive markets are connected attributes. In this context open source is an extreme productivity multiplier. Maybe the most potent such development in modern human history. Entities that adopt open source would collectively out-compete in innovation and usefulness any proprietary offering. But for this mechanism of sharing knowledge to thrive and reach its full potential there has to be a real market for digital technology.
dmd 2y ago
[flagged]
- pabs3 2y ago
  How about the first result for "museum cataloging software" in DuckDuckGo, CollectiveAccess? This was without adding an "open source" qualifier. It seems to be in use in the industry too. https://www.collectiveaccess.org/ https://www.collectiveaccess.org/ https://www.dublincore.org/groups/tools/dc2008/dc2008_seth_kaufman.pdf https://www.dublincore.org/groups/tools/dc2008/dc2008_seth_k... Another one apparently in use in the UK is CollectionSpace: https://collectionstrust.org.uk/software/collectionspace/ https://collectionstrust.org.uk/software/collectionspace/ http://www.collectionspace.org/ http://www.collectionspace.org/ Also: https://omeka.org/s/ https://omeka.org/s/ https://www.museumplanner.org/free-museum-collection-software/ https://www.museumplanner.org/free-museum-collection-softwar...
  - dmd 2y ago
    Yes, there are plenty of them. That is not the point I was making.
    - pabs3 2y ago
      Hmm, then your point wasn't clear.
paulnpace 2y ago
A sales position I was working in 2017 was the first time I'd used Windows 10. I had a very urgent issue with a customer who needed our small business to confirm a change they were requesting. I needed to go through the technical details of the customer's request by reviewing their documents over the phone on my computer. As I was on the phone and going through their documents, Windows 10 decided to install updates. I'd experienced this before and had done everything I could to try and configure Windows 10 to require my permission to run updates, but it doesn't work that way at least when you are a small business without an I.T. team. After a few minutes I told the customer I would call them back when my computer completed its updates. The update ended up taking over 40 minutes to complete. What really bothered me the most is that Microsoft is setting the priorities of our organization - software update instead of resolving a critical customer issue. I've never had a Linux update require so much time and definitely I've never been spontaneously and without requesting my permission locked out of my computer so Linux could run an update. "Big Tech", as discussed in the article, appears to me to be no longer concerned with small customers and operating in such a way as to assume we are all just their guaranteed customers so they are free to do with us as they please.
- ThrowawayR2 2y ago
  If you did have a proper IT department, they would have forced you to keep your computer up to date with security and other patches anyway. All that posts like this do is document people's irresponsibility in keeping their business-owned computer secured.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    Isn't this post describing exactly the situation of a forced update interrupting work, though? Doesn't matter who does it, the effect is the same. The difference is if your IT department controls the software you at least have the option to make it less intrusive.
  - paulnpace 2y ago
    This rates among the most arrogant pompous asshole responses I've ever encountered on HN. I ran updates exery single morning to avoid exactly this problem.
teddyh 2y ago
“Open Source” is an alternative to Big Tech in the same way that “open standards” is a preferable alternative to proprietary technology. In fact, it is largely the same issue.
benjamaan 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  Can you please stop? We're getting tons of complaints about these posts.
from-nibly 2y ago
I always hear people say things like there needs to be support for the thing I'm using or, it costs time to implement open source. I hate to break it to you but it takes time to implement closed source solutions as well. They also always have terrible documentation, because they make money on support. Purely open source stuff lives and dies on how easy it is to start up. Closed source paid stuff doesn't need to be easy. Often a decision has been made before implementation, and there are people to help you through it. It's also easier to get approval for open source most of the time because there isnt a new bill, just my time. I usually reach for open source first.
prmoustache 2y ago
I have the feeling this blog post is a response to something that nobody ever said.
tpoacher 2y ago
This just in: if you like hollywood movies, free speech is no alternative to movie-producing hollywood studios. More news at 11.
AIFounder 2y ago
[dead]
worik 2y ago
The key part is "on its own". A necessary, not sufficient, piece of the alternative We need to work on our orginistaional structures

166 points by lhoff 2y ago

Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech. Hard to be an alternative when you serve the same master.

portaouflop 2y ago
That the „commodify your complements“ strategy
- jeffreygoesto 2y ago
  I cite that essay always when "but this should be open source" comes up in a corporate context... https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement
  - tnahga 2y ago
    The famous original is here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
hresvelgr 2y ago
And it's also not great when companies that are positioned as implementation open source and cloud closed (read: AWS/Azure/GCP reseller) also construct strange licenses that are inherently against traditional OSS values.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
It's more of a symbiotic relationship. The open source community depends on commercial support. Essentially all of the bigger projects indeed get a lot of their contributions from the companies that use, build, and depend on these projects. It's how the software world can collaborate with their competitors on the things they don't compete directly on. This isn't charity, they are literally using more OSS software than they produce their own software. By several orders of magnitude in most cases. Companies like Google have many millions of lines of code in proprietary in house code. But they depend on an even larger amount of code in OSS form. E.g. Android and Chrome OS are based on Linux. Those products are built on many thousands of open source packages. And of course Google is contributing to lots of them and created a few themselves. Chrome is open source because webkit was open source because Apple forked KHTML from the KDE project. Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing. VC funded OSS companies are a bit more challenging. These companies are perpetually confused about their licensing and need to keep things proprietary and open at the same time. These projects get a lot of attention because of the VC money but technically they only represent a tiny fraction of the OSS community.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  > Open source without commercial companies contributing would be much more of a fringe thing. My conjecture is that open source is polished enough for most customers to use when there are commercial interests implied. Linux on the server is a resounding success, Linux desktop not so much.
  - jillesvangurp 2y ago
    Even on the server, the commercial distributions dominate. Probably because of things like support. And I wouldn't agree Linux desktop is unsuccessful. It's actually growing quite a bit in the last few years. And of course ChromeOS is also Linux based and capable of running Linux software. Likewise, MS bundles Linux with Windows and it is widely used by developers using Windows that way. But even without that Linux Market share is now 4.5%. Quite a few gamers are discovering Linux works pretty well lately. With ChromeOS included it's closer to 6-7%. Linux on the Desktop is bigger than ChromeOS. I'd say it is getting better.
  - kalaksi 2y ago
    I disagree about the desktop not being a success but I guess it depends on how you define success. It's true that it's not as popular as some other OSes.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Even on the server you're better off with the custom cloud offerings than using an off-the-shelf image. That is the thing, what really won on server and embedded was UNIX/POSIX, and while GNU/Linux is the cheapest and more flexible way to achieve that, it isn't the only one, and the best experience is anyway with vendor custom distributions with their special sauce, not the pure FOSS one.
    - kalaksi 2y ago
      What benefits do the vendor distros provide? The downsides include at least increased vendor lock-in. I think one can attribute many things to the success of Linux (incl. POSIX) but it's not about one single thing and the whole shouldn't be discounted.
DeathArrow 2y ago
> Another elephant in the room is that many of the popular open source projects are funded by big tech. People have to put food on their table and can't work for free. Someone has to pay for that work. Nobody will pay for it if he can't extract some benefits from doing so.

Guthur 2y ago

Countries have run nationalise infrastructure before, and successfully. The problem is if they did not view it as nationalised infrastructure and instead viewed it as some sort of mana that would fall from open source heaven. Open source software is the building blocks used by large rent (service fee) seeking corporations. They will extract large profits from any of these contracts and that is a demonstrable fact, they are also nearly all from the USA and so those profits will flow in one particular direction. It is also a historical fact that governments have run successful large scale infrastructure. Make your choice.

6510 2y ago
But it does run it in a particular way that isn't necessarily as profitable which in this example is a good thing. imho the question should be if the country continues to function if the project goes bankrupt. If it is so essential that it needs to be saved by the government (even in theory) then it lives outside the domain of capitalism.
JimDabell 2y ago
The point of going to big businesses for software services and support is that most customers don’t have needs that are large enough to justify the full-time staff needed for top-notch support. So companies that provide services amortise this over many customers and can employ n dozen full-time staff for a particular subsystem when the average customer might only need them a few times a year. So the tradeoff makes sense – even with a big profit margin, the customers still save money compared with DIY. This logic doesn’t really hold when it comes to large governments. Their needs are large enough that they can justify employing specialists. At that point, the profit margin the service business is capturing is just inefficiency. Internal services should be more common in large governments.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  It depends? Sometimes it is the feature set, but for example with future VMware pricing we'd be cheaper off hiring two full-time staff and running proxmox, which is currently being evaluated.

larodi 2y ago

Been ranting about this for years, did a keynote about it, actually did two notes at several venues, including an open culture festival, and all I got was a silent dis. every now and then open source is suggested as superior, because being free. Zero comment on code quality, who wrote it, why it came to be in the first place. Even the argument that a host running open source makes delivery more trustworthy is super biased - major cognitive dissonance is that services based on open tech are very often not open, neither auditable. There’s a lot of open source being controlled by same large corporations and the part that is not, does not constitute a service on its own. Then we must admit it takes a lot of care taking care of services nobody else cares about (by means of support). While open source is important for academia, I think open results are more important for government. Like I don’t care what somebody used to cater to this geospatial data, or that image. I care about the data that went in and went out. Open data is much more important in the era of open weights and closed sources training sets. The general public is often misled to equate open source to free beer. Well that is also not entirely correct given plethora of not so free licenses. Asp not correct as costs are greater when you put the personnel running that service in the equation. I can see how this argument does not fly well with socialist ideologies, but that’s problem of ideology, not of costs or technology. Even if we consider only those open projects which are also free - these come with less guaranties than a pair of second hand shoes bought from random store. Don’t get me wrong - open source is great and we use it daily, but comparing means of distribution with quality of service is really like comparing ябълки и круши (apples and pears in Bulgarian). So it’s indeed time to stop blindly waving the open source flag, but actually try to understand the benefits and challenges it comes with.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

pjmlp 2y ago

It was a pipe dream, because at the end of the day not everything can be a side job, to compete against those that spend at least 8h day producing code. Then the whole issue with non-copyleft licenses, that are nothing other than the old Whateverware or Public Domain licenses from the 16 bit home computer days. We already had access to source code back then. And for a large crowd this is already good enough, they aren't into it for religious definitions.

wazoox 2y ago

EU is a digital colony and that's entirely down to the lack of political will.

devjab 2y ago
I don’t think it’s a digital will. I think it’s an advisory layer which is completely incompetent and will always try to lead decisions toward proprietary software solutions because they “job hop” between the public and private sectors. I do not mean this as corruption or shady, but simply that they have powerful roles because they have a lot of private sector jobs behind them. Business leaders who employ thousands of people, and the decisions makers and advisors in their vicinity are always going to have a big role in political decisions. Coupled with many of the FFOS advocates and NGOs being far too “all or nothing” in their approach, where what you would need to be successful is not to swap everything at once but to take small incremental steps so that you can build clear successes. It simply leads to a landscape where the political layer makes bad decisions despite a decade long will and commitment to advance both EU tech and Open Source solutions.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Yes it is about a lack of political will. US companies have been illegal in the EU for a decade now (Schrems II), but the enforcement of this is hardly anywhere to be seen. It's the same kind of political denial as with being "concerned" about climate change, but still trading with China (even worse when this allows for fake self-congratulations about decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, when it mostly comes from most of the industry having been exported).
okanat 2y ago
I think it will take way more than political will. The USA is enjoying the wealth they gained in both world wars and they also kept their defacto colonies in the South America and Pacific. Europeans destroyed their wealth in the world wars and they lost their colonies. Of course the end of the colonialism has ended some of the human suffering but it has a cold-hearted economic impact. The American venture capitalists are all coming from the industries that got stronger at and after the world wars. They invested silicon and then the tech industries that built the wealth exponentially. The Europeans had to rebuild their countries until 70s and the investments they made are smaller. Similarly the US spent its government money to nuclear and space programs that further strengthened the economy. EU spent its surplus to improve post-Soviet countries which may or may not pay dividends in the future. It may require significant reallocation of resources from certain places to tech. It may require diverting the resources spent on old pensioners who are the biggest voting block. It is not a simple lack of political will. It requires reshaping a century of decisions.

la_fayette 2y ago

You are mentioning that an experiment with nextcloud has failed? I cannot find any evidence regarding that, even more I see it highly used among governments and municipalities in the EU.

larodi 2y ago
I’m also aware of one Drupal failed experiment somewhere in the same organisation…
sirdvd 2y ago
Tangentially, although there's been sporadic setbacks, as Limux[1] in 2017, there are new commitments to linux[2] that I hope will lead the way, at least in Europe. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/german-state-gov-ditching-windows-for-linux-30k-workers-migrating/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/germa...
- pjmlp 2y ago
  I can tell that a few years ago a couple of NRW libraries used a SuSE variant in kiosk mode, apparently not everyone found that great, as some of the ones I regularly visit now have Windows in kiosk mode, with the usual set of Office, Adobe and other packages.
macbr 2y ago
I’m aware of a party in Germany which, at some levels, uses Nextcloud to great success so I could imagine them pushing for it in their fraction. No idea why that wouldn’t work though given that they have tons of experience

keelhaule 2y ago

I think the author is not learned in the technology economics. IBM to save it's business had to merge with Red hat almost 50% 50% in 2018. Microsoft it's security and cloud offering had to, open source it's .net framework, aquire GitHub, ditch Visual Studio fot Visual Studio Code, ARM is eating the world, it over hauled the x86_x64 architecture, and became the Defacto architecture. We can go on and on and on and on,that the Open Source business model, became necessary to survive in tech, not just to exist. If you don't open it, they will eat you up.

saagarjha 2y ago
ARM is not open source.
- anthk 2y ago
  ARM broke WIntel.
  - Qwertious 2y ago
    Smartphones broke Wintel, their ISA didn't need to be ARM as long as it was power-efficient.
  - notpushkin 2y ago
    Yeah, but how exaxtly is that relevant here?
  - oblio 2y ago
    And who cares? Functionally there is Apple ARM with its extensions and Qualcomm ARM with its extensions. If anything, the x86 world was more open and more compatible. We have enterprise distros running on both Intel and AMD, supported by their hardware makers. Who in their right mind runs 3rd party Linux distributions on smartphones in production environments (i.e. the CEO's smartphone)?
nrnrjrjrj 2y ago
Open source won those battles but the war doesn't end. The next fight is AI and thanks to a leak we have open source (weights and inference) models now. Without that leak we would not have the ecosystem evolving around Llama.

apples_oranges 2y ago

Big tech relies on open source and, often enough, vice versa

7bit 2y ago

> The regular IT environment in the European Parliament is managed by whole teams of professionals, it comes with training, and is supported by Microsoft partners and ultimately by Microsoft itself. There are also large amounts of computing power available to make things work well. > An Open Source experiment meanwhile is typically operated by an enthusiastic hobbyist with borrowed equipment. Rolled out without training and without professional support, by someone who likely did this for the first time, it’s no wonder things often don’t work out well. > After the experiment, the faction was disappointed and concluded that Nextcloud was no good. And that was also their lived experience. “Let’s not do that again!” This is a rhetorical trick known as implication or insinuation. By presenting information indirectly, the author prompts readers to make a connection themselves without explicitly stating it. The author implies that the European Parliament's failed experiment with Nextcloud was due to a lack of professional resources and expertise, suggesting it was handled similarly to typical open-source projects led by hobbyists without proper support. However, he doesn’t provide any factual evidence that the Parliament’s Nextcloud experiment actually lacked professional resources, training, or adequate equipment. Instead, he hints at this by describing common issues with open-source setups, leaving readers to assume the experiment suffered from similar shortcomings. I would have appreciated some facts, or even sources for his claims, but there are none. And I couldn't find any information about the Nextcloud deployment having failed.

nrnrjrjrj 2y ago

Thw problem is big tech can offer free as in beer hosted services. You can use Google docs for free so it takes some dedication to self host that and pay for the server. Now if big tech charged for everything things would be more like the old days where you might use small tech, such as a local hosting provider that does open source installs.

devjab 2y ago

I think the article should have started off different considering that it actually concludes with a semi-positive stance on how open source “is” an alternative to big tech. It’s an area we take rather serious here in Denmark. Now, I won’t get into the irony of everyone wanting to replace Chromebooks in our school systems because Google is evil when the replacement is very likely to be Microsoft who is as much of a snoop these days since Google actually sells similar forms of privacy to our education. What we do have as a real working alternative to both is locally developed education solutions which will work as well, if not better? Than Google’s Educational tools on Chromebooks. What we lack is a political leadership that will commit to this. Part of this is because we’ve only recently gotten a digitalisation minister, even though people spend far more time on computers than they do on their daily commute and we’ve had a transportation minister since basically forever. Another part is that many of the top advisors in public service tend to “job hop” between our leading industry companies and public service, leaving to many contracts heading toward closed software. What our educational alternatives show, and they have been implemented in some places and in Greenland I believe. Is very much in line with what the article recommends at the end, as far as small incremental useful changes with clear and cut goals. What would you achieve with Nextcloud? Replacing everything you have in Azure AWS in one big step? Obviously that is going to go horribly. That’s not even how we migrated into Azure from on prem. What you can do, is to start by slowly moving your applications and services into moveable parts, by container rising them. Writing your run-books in Python rather than Powershell and so on. Then there is the change management, which the article touches on, and which is always forgotten by decision makers. Partly because decision makers don’t know what IT is, well… I guess that is it really. Where in the past (and I’ve written about this a lot) SysAdmins and supporters were unlikely to want to leave their Microsoft training, I think we’re at a point in IT history where that is less of a case because so much is now done on Linux even if you’re deep into the Microsoft ecosystem. Similarity the Office365 platform is not in as much ownership of your employee base because many people under 30 will not have “grown up” with it. Where it would have been inconceivable to not use Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook 5-10 years ago we’ve entered a world where we actively have to train employees in Office products because they are used to iOS, Android and MacOS and not “PCs”. Again, you should start by doing things in small steps. Our Libraries have switched to Ubuntu on every public PC, and it has been a non-issue because many library users are equally unfamiliar with Ubuntu and Windows, and since most things happen in a browser anyway, the underlying OS isn’t an issue. That is how you do it. Slowly with small steps, and yes, some of those steps don’t need to be open source. If you want to replace Azure or AWS then it’s much better to head to Hetzner (or similar) rather than to try and do it with NextCloud or similar. Because then your SysAdmins will not really need much retraining as that is not very different from what they already do in many cases where moving into the cloud has really just been moving a bunch of VMs.

anthk 2y ago

IDK about 'open source', but 'libre software' is what fueled tons of propietary software from the 80's until today. Without that software tons of propietary software (even console games) woudn't even exist. I remind you all Emacs powered some German airline's ATC in the early 90's, and it used to be used under Amazon for tons of stuff thanks to its easy widget UI to achieve tasks with very little Elisp.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

snowstormsun 2y ago

So, almost all servers running Linux around the world is just ignored by the author?

skrebbel 2y ago
The entire article is about office IT. Productivity software, etc. Basically, people emailing excel sheets to each other. I don't see how the OS running on servers is related to that.

bruce511 2y ago

I think the key point is this; >> (By the way, all new software without accompanying support & guidance is doomed to fail. And if that software comes from a dominant player, you’ll just have to deal with that by the way.) There's a temptation to conflate the software license with the software business. This is natural, but places software as the primary value in the chain. From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part. I don't pick say accounting software based on price. Or access to the source code. I base it on effectiveness. And a big part of that effectiveness is that staff can run it. And when it all goes wrong there's someone to call. I'm buying a -relationship-, not software. Thats why RedHat is a business. They're not selling Linux, they're selling the reliability, longevity, services, support etc. In truth the license doesn't matter. My accounting software might be open or closed. My supplier doesn't sell me based on the license. They sell me by convincing me that everything just works, and when it doesn't they'll be there to fix it.

kmac_ 2y ago
That's the main point. No one buys software, they buy solutions. Accounting is a good example. I use a SaaS solution, but it doesn't matter because I could also take all my invoices to an accountant, and the effect would be the same. Also, mixing open licenses into business doesn't usually make sense. I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source.
- quonn 2y ago
  > I also think that mass source scraping for ML/AI training will make businesses less likely to participate in open source. I totally agree with this. And not just businesses, individuals too.
- nvk6 2y ago
  Large Corps arent exactly well known to handle the Explore part of the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff. On the flip side lot of open source devs are going to get 100x more productive in the Exploit part than the avg coder monkey at large corp. Nothing is obvious and predictable about where that story goes in an ever growing ever changing system. Large corps will keep funding whoever gets the job done. While AI might replace lot of Large Corps activity which is basically on the Exploit side of the Tradeoff.

consumerx 2y ago

Just migrated from GitHub to Gitlab, also finally made the move away from macOS towards Ubuntu as my primary machine. Ive been using Macs since almost 15 years, enjoyed it all the way but FOSS comms snd tech is the future.

dtquad 2y ago

80% of Linux code contributions come from US big tech.

jazz9k 2y ago
If you look at well maintained OSS projects (apache, php, etc). It's the same. Companies with the cash to hire developers are the reason they are successful.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  So this means the system is working pretty ok, tech companies are sharing the common burden of things that affect them but don't confer competitive advantage? It seems more active participation by governments (if they can figure out how to do it) would only make things better?

axegon_ 2y ago

As much as it pains me to say it, it's true. I use predominantly open source software on all my computers with some small exceptions. I used to rely on some cloud services because of the convenience and nothing else. But leaks started becoming way too common and what I can say about all places that I've worked at, data is handled really badly. If you pair that with some OSINT skills, you can learn pretty much anything about anyone from a single leak. So over the past few years I've been slowly cutting down my dependency on cloud services. Nextcloud was the first big step, a zfs pool for backups, a few custom protocols for alerting and kill switches and that's it. On paper this sounds really good but there's a lot of overhead when it comes to maintenance. "Yeah, it's just one more docker-compose.yml, big whoop"(yes kubernetes is pointless overkill if you are the sole user). I've said that too many times and it's not true cause it only takes one small thing that you overlooked and you have to spend a day or two to put everything back up together. Another thing worth mentioning is that open source can be a good alternative but open source does not mean free or cheap. For instance, I've gotten really into drones and radio communications lately. Take hackrf and the baby brother that is flipper zero - they are both completely open source but neither of them is cheap. In fact, they are really expensive - they are effectively open source ASIC's. I'm willing to bet that north of 80% of the cost is down to the software and not the hardware - because polishing a piece of software to the point where you can pick up a product and use it without effort or a steep learning curve, involves a ton of work on behalf of developers and UX/I people. And you can't really cut off all big tech - open source phones are BAD, you don't really have a good alternative to google maps and waze, you still heavily rely on search engines and a few dozen services if you start digging deeper. There are also a number of services which do not have an even half-decent open source alternative. Also not everyone has the skills to set up and run these things. I think the big case in favor of self-hosting whatever you can is that while open source is far from immune to leaks, if it resides in your private network(which it should) without access to the rest of the world, those holes will eventually be patched and you can take action in the meantime - stop the service, block a few ports, etc. The odds of you personally getting affected are pretty low. Now if a leak happens in big tech, there's nothing you can do about it and by the time you learn about it, it's often too late. Honestly, this is the number one reason I'm doing this to myself.

jcgrillo 2y ago

kkfx 2y ago

Let's simplify: FLOSS domain is the internet domain, where anyone own a desktop, a homeserver, a company machine room etc. The big tech model is the old mainframe model, or the modern web where only few own anything. Try to mimicking them is a waste of time and can't work, pushing the society toward ownership and freedom might work, because in a way or another we will end up there being technically the sole solution.

eesmith 2y ago
FLOSS is the personal computer model, where you own the computer and have final say on what data is processed on your machine. If you can't try to make your software or computer lie in on your behalf, it is not FOSS. The big tech model where trust is in the company, not the person. Business love the big tech model because it's easier to let a few credit card companies deal with the trust issue than establish a trust relationship with everyone directly (or deal with cash), because surveillance capitalism is more profitable, and because it's more profitable to rent than to sell. The big tech model can profit first on that cost difference, and later on switching costs which would otherwise inhibit abuse. It has essentially nothing to do with the internet, as mainframes were networked long before personal computers. Even back in the 1980s, POS terminals used dial-up to verify credit card transactions.
- kkfx 2y ago
  I mean the "mainframe model" of a single large system and many dumb terminals, now dumb terminals are named enpoints and the mainframe is someone else computer across the world. The trust problem is easy to solve, with an open society: as long as payments got processed with open APIs and the government takes care of the frauds there is no trust problem. I do not need to trust a third party with eCash, I only need to trust my State protections. The idea is already tempted, see not only the historic eCash, witch are the modern GNU Taler chosen (it seems) by the EU for the digital Euro https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/ https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/ and https://social.network.europa.eu/@EC_NGI/111499172838284606 https://social.network.europa.eu/@EC_NGI/111499172838284606 but also https://openfisca.org https://openfisca.org and https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala or few others alike. That's still embrional but in FLOSS terms we have already more than enough, we just miss the law enforcing it and the schools teaching it to the masses.

DeathArrow 2y ago

Open source and big tech are orthogonal concepts. Open source is about licensing, big tech is about scale.

BoredPositron 2y ago

The problem is that docker compose starts 20 containers and the fans go full bore just because you wanted to try a new wiki or notes app. The complexity of relatively simple software is getting insane.

Pooge 2y ago
I am one of the 10 users[1] in the world that uses Docker Swarm (container orchestrator like Kubernetes or Nomad), and I disagree with that statement. I have over 25 containers running (including Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Gitea, TeamSpeak, ...) and it barely uses 10GB of RAM (Jellyfin is eating up more than half of this). Most of my Compose files contain 2 services (1 for app + 1 for database), but some contain 3 and some contain 1. It's incredibly easy to install new software and incredibly easy to shut it down temporarily if you don't need to use it all day. I'd even argue that some companies would benefit more from using Swarm than Kubernetes. There is a lot of things to take into account when using Kubernetes (let alone setting it up for GitOps), but Docker Swarm can be managed by 1 person. [1]: A joke, obviously, but it really isn't popular at all
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  We are talking about normal users.
  - Pooge 2y ago
    Starting one wiki/note-taking software is not going to make your fans go crazy more than running your favorite JetBrains IDE. I had a non-Arm MacBook Pro and sometimes the fans would go crazy for no reasons, so all my Arm-based colleagues who had an M1 were laughing.
- globular-toast 2y ago
  I think k8s can be managed by one person too, if you are only using it like docker swarm. Especially if you use something like k3s with SQL database. I found setting up gitops via flux quite easy, apart from order of operations, like installing controllers and custom resource definitions before resources that need those CRDs etc. What were you thinking of things to take into account for k8s over swarm? The main difference for me is k8s needs a hell of a lot more boilerplate yaml for doing basically anything.

submeta 2y ago

I work in the health sector at a company with nearly 1,000 employees. In our IT department, we rely on a wide range of proprietary software and spend substantial amounts on Oracle, MS SQL, and other licenses. I’ve been trying to convince management that PostgreSQL could be a solid alternative for many of our use cases, but it’s consistently dismissed as “not an option.” Meanwhile, we continue to pour money into Oracle licenses, not just for basic access but for additional features—like enabling data reading and analysis on the Oracle-embedded database in our main app. And, if we need to allocate more CPU cores on our VMs, we face yet another round of licensing fees. Sometimes you don’t need much support. Yet pay tons of money.

DandyDev 2y ago
Every time I hear a story like this - "management says 'no'" - I wonder if anyone cared/dared to ask follow up questions. Why was PostgreSQL not an option according to management? I would not take their dismissal at face value. I'd want to know why not. But that might be Dutch culture.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Insurance. The piece of paper that states who the buck stops with when there's a claim or lawsuit.
  - DandyDev 2y ago
    Let's say that is the reason, then that seems a very valid reason, right? Accountability is important, especially in large organizations. I guess what ticks me off a bit is the trope of dissing on management for saying 'no' but leaving out all the relevant context that might show management to be right. Don't get me wrong, I've seen my own fair share of bad management. But it's not so black and white when it comes to grand sweeping decisions like "should we invest in PostgreSQL or keep paying Oracle big license fees?"
    - vanviegen 2y ago

AlienRobot 2y ago

My litmus test for whether an open source application is reliable is whether it has a website or it links to its github page (sourceforge is ok).

pyeri 2y ago

Not open source but Free Libre (GPL) can become a genuine alternative provided it's implemented widely and followed honestly.

majkinetor 2y ago

I don't buy this argument. It's simplistic and IMO wrong on multiple accounts. Big tech can totally sell "FOSS services" and provide ground works for it, like some of it do - you don't have to lock people with proprietary stuff. Even more, big IT tech couldn't exist without FOSS in this form and shape, while the opposite is not true.

hggigg 2y ago

They are missing something major here and getting bogged down in some technicalities. Open source has no alternative to big tech because big tech commoditised stuff that's useful whereas open source commoditised stuff that is interesting to the developers. When I sit down at my mac, I have a working and very polished calendar, mail client, todo list, contacts, note taking app, music player, browser, photo editing and library management tools, video call and conferencing software etc. And all of it syncs with my phone and my tablet out of the box. When I sit down at a Linux machine, I have a calendar that breaks every 5 minutes and I can't share anything with anyone without futzing with iCal feeds and hiring another provider, a mail client that is ugly as sin and doesn't integrate with the calendaring or contact management stuff at all, a job and a half to find a note taking app that actually works properly, a todo list app that syncs with nothing, a spreadsheet package that crashes whenever I try and print something and oh hell I give up by then. And the answer to this? Roll out nextcloud on a VPS. Kill me, with a spoon. This is not freedom, it's just slavery of another kind. I just want to get shit done. Big tech covers that. Please take this as a recommendation to tidy up all this hell and just help people to get shit done and then it will be an alternative to big tech.

rubymamis 2y ago
Very much agree. I made a cross-platform and open-source note-taking app[1] in Qt C++ but never really talked to common end users and their needs, just built for myself. Now that I'm working on a proprietary version[2] (with a block editor I rewrote from scratch), I'm talking to these end users and understand their frustration in using my product. For example, many users had issues discovering the different features of the app, so I created a toolbar, which much helped. This is just one example. [1] https://notes-foss.com/ https://notes-foss.com/ [2] https://get-notes.com/ https://get-notes.com/

arianvanp 2y ago

But European businesses should utilise open source to more easily compete with big tech. Big tech is definitely using it to kill European businesses. Yet they dont. The problem is not big tech. Not open source. It's that the European tech economy crippled itself and cries wolf about it all day.

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

> Experimenting is useful, but know that Open Source is the underdog, and there are many people waiting for an opportunity to enthusiastically declare that it has failed. almost the entire world and industry is literally running on open source.

tnahga 2y ago

Do we need big tech? The only thing I need is a search engine. I prefer privately hosted web and mail servers. Before "the cloud", the economy worked just fine and companies had enough money for in-house IT. By using the nextcloud example, the author of the article is asking the wrong question.

throwaway19972 2y ago

This is excellent. It's also worth noting we don't need to fund services via supporting private enterprise, either—many services should arguably be operated by zero-profit entities. For the most part, after paying infrastructure bills and salaries, the profit motive is contrary to providing quality service over time (see: enshittification)

sylware 2y ago

Yep, we don't need open source anymore but LEAN open source and that, including the SDK.

sunshine-o 2y ago

I was sincerely wondering what the EU institutions use as a productivity suite but it seems they are on Microsoft 365 ! [0] I would be very curious to know if the data are stored on their own data center or Microsoft's. - [0] https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/press-releases/2024/european-commissions-use-microsoft-365-infringes-data-protection-law-eu-institutions-and-bodies_en https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre...

openrisk 2y ago

The alternative to "big tech" is not "open source". The alternative to big tech is a healthy "small and medium" tech economy, or at least a more sane distribution of market power. Imagine if you had to compete producing widgets in a market landscape where some hyper-conglomerate would source and distribute all power, define and install all plug standards and, in addition, produce and rent any widgets that saw consumer traction. For decades this is what has come to pass as normal in this domain. Openness (of varying degrees), standards-adherence, interoperability and competitive markets are connected attributes. In this context open source is an extreme productivity multiplier. Maybe the most potent such development in modern human history. Entities that adopt open source would collectively out-compete in innovation and usefulness any proprietary offering. But for this mechanism of sharing knowledge to thrive and reach its full potential there has to be a real market for digital technology.

dmd 2y ago

[flagged]

pabs3 2y ago
How about the first result for "museum cataloging software" in DuckDuckGo, CollectiveAccess? This was without adding an "open source" qualifier. It seems to be in use in the industry too. https://www.collectiveaccess.org/ https://www.collectiveaccess.org/ https://www.dublincore.org/groups/tools/dc2008/dc2008_seth_kaufman.pdf https://www.dublincore.org/groups/tools/dc2008/dc2008_seth_k... Another one apparently in use in the UK is CollectionSpace: https://collectionstrust.org.uk/software/collectionspace/ https://collectionstrust.org.uk/software/collectionspace/ http://www.collectionspace.org/ http://www.collectionspace.org/ Also: https://omeka.org/s/ https://omeka.org/s/ https://www.museumplanner.org/free-museum-collection-software/ https://www.museumplanner.org/free-museum-collection-softwar...
- dmd 2y ago
  Yes, there are plenty of them. That is not the point I was making.
  - pabs3 2y ago
    Hmm, then your point wasn't clear.

paulnpace 2y ago

A sales position I was working in 2017 was the first time I'd used Windows 10. I had a very urgent issue with a customer who needed our small business to confirm a change they were requesting. I needed to go through the technical details of the customer's request by reviewing their documents over the phone on my computer. As I was on the phone and going through their documents, Windows 10 decided to install updates. I'd experienced this before and had done everything I could to try and configure Windows 10 to require my permission to run updates, but it doesn't work that way at least when you are a small business without an I.T. team. After a few minutes I told the customer I would call them back when my computer completed its updates. The update ended up taking over 40 minutes to complete. What really bothered me the most is that Microsoft is setting the priorities of our organization - software update instead of resolving a critical customer issue. I've never had a Linux update require so much time and definitely I've never been spontaneously and without requesting my permission locked out of my computer so Linux could run an update. "Big Tech", as discussed in the article, appears to me to be no longer concerned with small customers and operating in such a way as to assume we are all just their guaranteed customers so they are free to do with us as they please.

ThrowawayR2 2y ago
If you did have a proper IT department, they would have forced you to keep your computer up to date with security and other patches anyway. All that posts like this do is document people's irresponsibility in keeping their business-owned computer secured.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  Isn't this post describing exactly the situation of a forced update interrupting work, though? Doesn't matter who does it, the effect is the same. The difference is if your IT department controls the software you at least have the option to make it less intrusive.
- paulnpace 2y ago
  This rates among the most arrogant pompous asshole responses I've ever encountered on HN. I ran updates exery single morning to avoid exactly this problem.

teddyh 2y ago

“Open Source” is an alternative to Big Tech in the same way that “open standards” is a preferable alternative to proprietary technology. In fact, it is largely the same issue.

benjamaan 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago
Can you please stop? We're getting tons of complaints about these posts.

from-nibly 2y ago

I always hear people say things like there needs to be support for the thing I'm using or, it costs time to implement open source. I hate to break it to you but it takes time to implement closed source solutions as well. They also always have terrible documentation, because they make money on support. Purely open source stuff lives and dies on how easy it is to start up. Closed source paid stuff doesn't need to be easy. Often a decision has been made before implementation, and there are people to help you through it. It's also easier to get approval for open source most of the time because there isnt a new bill, just my time. I usually reach for open source first.

prmoustache 2y ago

I have the feeling this blog post is a response to something that nobody ever said.

tpoacher 2y ago

This just in: if you like hollywood movies, free speech is no alternative to movie-producing hollywood studios. More news at 11.

AIFounder 2y ago

[dead]

worik 2y ago

The key part is "on its own". A necessary, not sufficient, piece of the alternative We need to work on our orginistaional structures