6 ms·

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.

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.