6 ms·

Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

61 points by ekaln 13y ago

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
Good. I do not want open source to prevail. I want free software. On a less provocative note, I don't understand the argument about web apps. There's tons of FOSS web application frameworks and widget toolkits, and the web is slowly conquering the desktop, for better or for worse. Has it not dominated?
- bitwize 13y ago
  No, it has not. The future of computing is on apps coded against one of two proprietary platforms: Apple's or Google's.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    The future of computing is on apps coded against one of two proprietary platforms: Apple's or Google's That's an overly narrow view that seems to equate all of "computing" with "smart phones / tablets". I don't think that's a very accurate view. A lot of what happens on computers has nothing to with either.
    - tluyben2 13y ago
      It's quite accurate for consumer computing though. I just don't see that Android is closed source in that way; the implementation you program against to make the software people use on their tablets/phones is Open Source. Same with ChromeOS. Not so with Windows or iOS or OS X.
      - dippyskoodlez 13y ago
        You do get a lot of the standard opensource tools with OS X, though. Since Apple uses Obj-C they own the frameworks but if you follow their development models, everything is cake. It's not like Google isn't providing closed source api's too, though.
      - gress 13y ago
        Since you can't use that open source implementation to make Android devices, it's effectively just an SDK. Android itself is closed.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Similar to bitwize, I think the desktop is, for better or worse, for the largest population of users, dead. The cohort of 'casual' or 'everyday' users interaction model/experience is mobile and/or Tablet. And in those eco-systems favor closed source Apps. There are a number of factors that make that true at the moment, from the UX of owning the whole screen, to App store policies that forbid 'simply visits a webpage' type app submissions, and everywhere in between.
- camus2 13y ago
  > Has it not dominated? Yes in term of lob/100 page "fairly large" form apps, No in term of native apps that actually do something. When people show me a Photoshop,Indesign,Final Cut or a 3ds Max (fully featured,not just 3 edit tools hanging around) built in HTML,that work OFFLINE,that can open gigabytes of datas, with great performances on low end hardware, i will agree ( Which my old macbook does with no problem with these native apps). Let's just take the many text editors built in HTML/JS , try to open a 10/15 mb text file(an apache log file for instance),execute a search/replace with it and see how it performs. HTML everything is a promise, an idea that can be only fulfilled if the browser engines(not just the javascript engines,the DOM is not javascript) are as fast as native os(and hardware becomes faster too). That's not the case today. So people can say javascript 'is fast' all they want,that's not the bottleneck anymore.
spindritf 13y ago
Mobile: dominated by Apple and the faux-open Android. I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  For all the reasons everyone keeps mentioning here: the top apps people want for Android are not open source.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    It's not so much that, it's that a rather large percentage of the apps people want for Android won't run on AOSP. They require Android + Google Services, which are all closed.
    - tluyben2 13y ago
      I think that's what I meant or maybe you mean something else; what kind of thing are you talking about? People want the Google services apps but which apps people want which are not Google apps require Google services?
      - JohnTHaller 13y ago
        A large number of apps require Google Services be installed and won't work with bare AOSP anymore. Location services is part of Google Services now, so apps that require it need GS. Every app with in-app purchasing won't work without Google services, so you can forget about most games working on AOSP. There isn't one Android anymore. There's the base pure open source Android, aka AOSP. There's Android with Google services, which supports things like the Play Store, in-app purchases, location services, etc. There's Amazon's Android fork which has some of their own APIs inserted for in-app purchases and location, but Play Store, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc are unavailable for it. Now there's Nokia's new Android fork which will have its own set of APIs for location, in-app purchases, etc.
romanovcode 13y ago
Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal? No thanks.
- woah 13y ago
  No comment on Joomla or Drupal, but I am currently building out a large marketing and documentation site for a client, and Wordpress is extremely well-suited for the job. I do laugh at its hacked together nature, inconsistent naming conventions and multiple functions that do almost the same thing. Still, at the end of the day, I'm able to crank out pages very fast, and the writers are able to easily customize and populate them with content. I went through a WP-hating phase for a while too, but at this point, I've realized that it is THE tool for your standard, somewhat-dynamic, large to medium sized website.
sdegutis 13y ago
Who made that chart? It doesn't even mention Rails so I'm assuming it's pretty much made up.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  It only mentions the very biggest players. While Rails is popular on HN, it doesn't surprise me that compared to PHP, ASP, and Java, it doesn't have much market share.
- Pacabel 13y ago
  Keep in mind that the level of hype often doesn't correspond to the actual amount of usage a technology experiences. Yes, Ruby on Rails has been widely and frequently publicized. Yes, there are some people who have a semi-religious devotion to Ruby on Rails, and are quite vocal about it. Yes, a number of books have been written about it. Yes, training is available for it. But in reality, we really don't see it used all that much, at least compared to PHP, Java, and ASP.NET. The numbers given in that graphic may not be exact, but I wouldn't be so quick to rule them out, either.
  - sdegutis 13y ago
    Out of every professional programmer I know, probably 1% use PHP and 90% use Rails. (The other 9% use either Python or Clojure or something more exotic.)
- filipedeschamps 13y ago
  Who made that chart? Where's Node.js? Just kidding, Node fan here ;)
saosebastiao 13y ago
Android is such a miserable experience that it has made me turn in my phone for the first closed-source computing device I have owned in 9 years. The latency on everything is at least 200-300ms, which makes typing consistently difficult (as if the moronic autocorrect didn't make it impossible anyways). The battery consumption is terrible (I have never been able to go more than 12 hours without a charge, and after a year, it is more like 3-4 hours). The apps are buggy as hell, and crash all the time. And they are always riddled with bloatware and carrier apps that are not removable. If you don't like giving away ever-expanding permissions to random apps, you either get pinged about it daily as everything tries to auto-upgrade, or you have to delete the app (which, like I said before, isn't always possible). I hate apple, and I hate that I'm giving them my money, but just the latency issue alone is enough for me to give up on Android. Help me Mozilla, you are my only hope.
- dmxt 13y ago
  Seriously? Are you implying that there's one and only one type of Android device? My Galaxy S4 is rooted and flashed to semi-vanilla Android with no extra application bundled. I charge my phone every 3 days. Using my preference of keyboard software makes typing much faster and easier and my keyboard is more efficient than keyboard on iOS 7. Regarding your latency issue, this is probably the hardware fault. It's not a "known" issue with Android. However what you were saying might make sense if the last time you tried Android device was 4+ years ago, in this case, Android has really improved greatly lately.
- hhsnopek 13y ago
  Not sure what android phone you were using, but my Nexus 4 has definitely provided an amazing android experience. Your phone must of been $50 because my latency close to none. Be smart and download apps that are trusted, not one of the thousand "flappy bird" clones that just give you ads. Also bloatware only gets on your phone if you put it there. I've removed all the carrier apps on my family's T-Mobile phones(all android). Giving permissions up? I believe I can tell apps what to use from me, just edit their permissions in the settings. Pick a phone that's reliable and then complain.
  - 13y ago
ochekurishvili 13y ago
Just remembered, read it somewhere: "Open source, as rock'n'roll, will never die." Truism. I believe in it.
mwfunk 13y ago
There was no battle and there is no war. Different methodologies and philosophies surrounding software development have different pros and cons, which themselves change over time as the tech industry changes. If people want to choose to view the tech world through a filter that projects everything into some open source vs. proprietary software conflict, fine. There are many such filters though. Someone could have a similar filter that only cares about vertical vs. horizontal integration. It might even be instructive! Microsoft was on top of their game in the '80s and '90s because they had the right business model (horizontal integration- sell the OS and have everyone else make the hardware it runs on and the apps that run on top of it). Other companies have more recently had more success with a more vertically integrated approach, where the hardware and the software are explicitly designed with each other in mind to maximize things like performance, power management, size, shape, and UX of the resultant products. As things like the mobile industry continue to evolve, we may be moving back into an era where horizontal integration becomes dominant again. And maybe that will lead to another era where it goes back to being dominated by vertical. Who knows. But at no point did vertical or horizontal ever "win" (although plenty of pundits said it did in the '90s), and there is no endgame where one does. It's just a pendulum that swings back and forth. If it ever stops, that means that the entire industry has ground to a halt. The exact same things can be said about open source vs. proprietary, including the fact that the two are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of things have open source as well as proprietary components, and plenty of companies have some mix of vertical and horizontal integration. I'm not saying these perceived dualities in our industry are comparable, as they describe very different things, only that describing it as a war with an ultimate winner or loser is futile for the exact same reasons. People should absolutely love open source and be inspired to be proponents of it wherever possible, but I always take great exception to philosophies like RMS', which seem less about emphasizing a particular set of virtues (freedom, openness, sharing, etc.) and much more about demonizing something else. RMS' life goal is not to promote free software, it's to destroy proprietary software. Do what you do because you love something, not because you hate the opposite of that thing. That always leads down very unfruitful paths, including casting everything in binary terms and thinking about things like imaginary battles and wars instead of simply doing great things in the manner that most inspires you and encourages others.
- 13y ago
knappador 13y ago
Linux is younger than I am. GNU is two years older than I am. Anyone making smart statements about the long-term prospects of a spontaneously organizing tidal wave erupting from a vacuum needs to take a step back, stop talking, and find something worth working on to them personally. Web is mostly a distraction for proponents of FOSS. Web developers consume the foundation of FOSS and, without moving past web development, cannot contribute to that foundation. I don't honestly look to domination of web software components as a source of open source growth or an indicator of open source health. Web developers are users and FOSS is powered by developers. Put more stock in Valve and Crytek's long-term influence on developers using Linux to game on. They subsequently can learn to program Linux, and that's way more influential than 99% of the garbage out there about web being some egalitarian magic kingdom where open source and individuals can thrive, so there. Gaming is one of the last great bastions of totally proprietary software platforms where users with the natural propensity to do so do not eventually become developers.
- woah 13y ago
  Most web developers are not writing servers or browsers in C, but within the web ecosystem open source is really the only choice (to build with). There could be more people open sourcing their whole startups, but in terms of building blocks, open source reigns supreme in the world of web. I mean, look at the HN frontpage on any given day. A good half of the posts will be about some new open source module or framework that someone has put hundreds of hours into. Closed frameworks are regularly scoffed at and treated with great suspicion. In the Node community, it is a common practice to open-source modules without giving it a second thought, just part of a day's work. I'm not sure I really understand your point, could you explain?
  - knappador 13y ago
    The behavior in the node community as you have described can be taken as an example of just how community-minded FOSS developers naturally become, and not necessarily even slightly out of some sense of geek-altruism. The choice to support the FOSS community or more closed-source development is as clear-cut to developers as choosing between a lush rain forest or bio-domes scattered throughout the desert. Imagine a world where every developer learns to program using open source tools and has participated in one open source community prior to college or on-the-job training. Does any individual developer choose to use closed source and become embedded in a bio-dome where their capability to survive is permanently bound to the decisions of the bubble around them? Does any manager of developers expect to be able to direct developers to do this? Does any executive expect to retain even part of their personnel by telling them to willfully extract themselves from the rich ecosystem in which such demands cannot be made of them? Let's take OpenGL vs Direct X for example. MS says, "Learn Direct X or else your games are doomed to only use 50% of the display's luminosity range!" This is obviously crap, and MS will make tons of moves specifically to implement their software as a yoke upon developers captured by their tool-chain treadmill. You like Active X. You really do, and because you've learned to use it, now you will have a little sign on your website that tells people that IE is required to use your government service. You will specify it in job ads. You will recommend it as a developer, a manager, an executive, a South Korean politician. Your investment will chain you, your users, perhaps your entire country to tribute payments. Oh, the company can make money. So can the developers, and there is no union necessary because there are no scabs, no hard manufacturing assets, or any other reason other than entrenched, slowly eroding fiefdoms that can convince developers to choose the bio-dome over the rain forest. Corporate, closed-source software development is in a quite precarious arrangement compared to manufacturing and amorphous labor. This is true, even withstanding the still-entrenched gorillas like Apple, MS, Oracle, Google, etc etc etc. The point of this is that if everyone develops with FOSS first, get ready to see major hemorrhaging of anachronistic bio-domes until their glass is shattered and the ecosystem thrives straight through them. This is bigger than web. Imagine how many wasted resources will be recovered and how productive new companies can be. This is a quite attractive future depending on who you are. Web can't take us there. Web is not the thing that breaks down all walls. Mozilla can try and try and try. Web is always going to be waiting on standards while other programmers just do, no call for comments required. The other thing I'm getting at is that web is not a primary indicator of the growth of FOSS because not everyone who uses web has access to the tools that can be used to create web. Web is more Gutenberg Bible than printing press. You need access to the press to become more than just a consumer of the fruit. In the sense that drawing nascent developers, before they even think of programming, into the FOSS community, forever freeing them from the illusion that rowing the monopolist corporate bireme is a necessary part of life, what Valve and Crytek are doing by improving their strategic relationship with FOSS might as well be the invention of artillery in a land of castles. Linux as a gaming platform fuels a new wave of Linux users with a strong propensity to find joy in programming, the users most likely to become developers. What's going on in gaming on Linux is what leads humanity to a FOSSier world. Valve is one of the rare companies that is in position to push this change and benefit if this change becomes reality.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
krick 13y ago
That's a screaming headline, but not a lot of meaning within. Actually, I understand what author is trying to say, but it's pretty pointless. Yeah, I also see a problem out there, but it's a little deeper than "only Mozilla understands". Open Source Software is there because somebody is writing it, software isn't going to write itself. And mostly it's alive not (at least "not only") because somebody is financing it, but because there are people that both can and want to write it. And, oh, I should've said "make", not "write", because making it is so much more than just writing it. Especially when we talk about general purpose client-side apps author cares about so much. And here we have problems with both "can" and "want". Generally, people that are actually able to write software prefer slightly different stuff from your "typical end user". Actually I don't know a single browser that I would still like and it's pretty obvious that your "typical user" won't be so much delighted by my beloved CLI apps. But what really makes me sad is that "can" problem. There might be enough of those who can do some simple coding in community, but it still takes large company to hire somebody who will cooperate with programmers to make beautiful design for their app or some folks that can do some serious math/programming. FOSS apps still generally suck in terms of UX and visual design (at least for that typical end-user). There's no FOSS that could compete against Photoshop or Cubase or be even close to quality of Google's text-to-speech services. Of course there's no one to blame except ourselves, but if you want to see the problem — here it is. It's about us improving our skills to be able to build something outstanding, to build it for free and make it open source.
spiralpolitik 13y ago
What's interesting is that the 4 markets that the article listed have reached commodity status so we can infer that open source dominates once the market reaches the point that there is insufficient profit in the mass market for proprietary solutions to dominate. See the Java IDE market as another example. (If you are playing in the high end of the market and can bring something other than technology to the fight, quality, user experience, ease of use for example then proprietary can keep a foothold). So the question then becomes can the other layers become commoditized to the point that Open source wins out in those ?
cwp 13y ago
Why does it have be a war? Why is open source only considered a success if it drives proprietary software out of business? Don't get me wrong. I love open-source. I've been using and contributing to it for 15 years. But to me, success is having a high-quality product, a vibrant ecosystem surrounding it and an active, engaged community using and contributing to it. As long as all those things are true, who cares what everybody else does?
treenyc 13y ago
We will NEVER win the FREE software war, no matter how many battles we have won or will win. It will all be irrelevant, as long as the current economic, Geo-political paradigms (central banking model) are in place, then Free/Open Software will never grew to its' maximum effectiveness. In smaller countries like Scandinavia centralization works VERY well. That is due to their homogeneous nature. In US, we may require something decentralized and more resilient model to have the Free/Open Source software movement. Something where people have incentive to work on good software without wanting to get bought out by the next google or facebook.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Why does FLOSS need to be centralized?
  - treenyc 13y ago
    Sorry, maybe I miscommunicated something. They don't need to be centralized. Although I do think TRANSPARENT centralization can play a benefit part of the ecosystem. I just meant in other aspects of government, everything is very centralized in Scandinavia, and it seems to be work very well there. However, that should not be translated to US, where we have much larger and diverse population. I hope that make sense?

61 points by ekaln 13y ago

Good. I do not want open source to prevail. I want free software. On a less provocative note, I don't understand the argument about web apps. There's tons of FOSS web application frameworks and widget toolkits, and the web is slowly conquering the desktop, for better or for worse. Has it not dominated?

bitwize 13y ago
No, it has not. The future of computing is on apps coded against one of two proprietary platforms: Apple's or Google's.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  The future of computing is on apps coded against one of two proprietary platforms: Apple's or Google's That's an overly narrow view that seems to equate all of "computing" with "smart phones / tablets". I don't think that's a very accurate view. A lot of what happens on computers has nothing to with either.
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    It's quite accurate for consumer computing though. I just don't see that Android is closed source in that way; the implementation you program against to make the software people use on their tablets/phones is Open Source. Same with ChromeOS. Not so with Windows or iOS or OS X.
    - dippyskoodlez 13y ago
      You do get a lot of the standard opensource tools with OS X, though. Since Apple uses Obj-C they own the frameworks but if you follow their development models, everything is cake. It's not like Google isn't providing closed source api's too, though.
    - gress 13y ago
      Since you can't use that open source implementation to make Android devices, it's effectively just an SDK. Android itself is closed.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Similar to bitwize, I think the desktop is, for better or worse, for the largest population of users, dead. The cohort of 'casual' or 'everyday' users interaction model/experience is mobile and/or Tablet. And in those eco-systems favor closed source Apps. There are a number of factors that make that true at the moment, from the UX of owning the whole screen, to App store policies that forbid 'simply visits a webpage' type app submissions, and everywhere in between.
camus2 13y ago
> Has it not dominated? Yes in term of lob/100 page "fairly large" form apps, No in term of native apps that actually do something. When people show me a Photoshop,Indesign,Final Cut or a 3ds Max (fully featured,not just 3 edit tools hanging around) built in HTML,that work OFFLINE,that can open gigabytes of datas, with great performances on low end hardware, i will agree ( Which my old macbook does with no problem with these native apps). Let's just take the many text editors built in HTML/JS , try to open a 10/15 mb text file(an apache log file for instance),execute a search/replace with it and see how it performs. HTML everything is a promise, an idea that can be only fulfilled if the browser engines(not just the javascript engines,the DOM is not javascript) are as fast as native os(and hardware becomes faster too). That's not the case today. So people can say javascript 'is fast' all they want,that's not the bottleneck anymore.

spindritf 13y ago

Mobile: dominated by Apple and the faux-open Android. I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.

tluyben2 13y ago
For all the reasons everyone keeps mentioning here: the top apps people want for Android are not open source.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  It's not so much that, it's that a rather large percentage of the apps people want for Android won't run on AOSP. They require Android + Google Services, which are all closed.
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    I think that's what I meant or maybe you mean something else; what kind of thing are you talking about? People want the Google services apps but which apps people want which are not Google apps require Google services?
    - JohnTHaller 13y ago
      A large number of apps require Google Services be installed and won't work with bare AOSP anymore. Location services is part of Google Services now, so apps that require it need GS. Every app with in-app purchasing won't work without Google services, so you can forget about most games working on AOSP. There isn't one Android anymore. There's the base pure open source Android, aka AOSP. There's Android with Google services, which supports things like the Play Store, in-app purchases, location services, etc. There's Amazon's Android fork which has some of their own APIs inserted for in-app purchases and location, but Play Store, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc are unavailable for it. Now there's Nokia's new Android fork which will have its own set of APIs for location, in-app purchases, etc.

romanovcode 13y ago

Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal? No thanks.

woah 13y ago
No comment on Joomla or Drupal, but I am currently building out a large marketing and documentation site for a client, and Wordpress is extremely well-suited for the job. I do laugh at its hacked together nature, inconsistent naming conventions and multiple functions that do almost the same thing. Still, at the end of the day, I'm able to crank out pages very fast, and the writers are able to easily customize and populate them with content. I went through a WP-hating phase for a while too, but at this point, I've realized that it is THE tool for your standard, somewhat-dynamic, large to medium sized website.

sdegutis 13y ago

Who made that chart? It doesn't even mention Rails so I'm assuming it's pretty much made up.

andrewflnr 13y ago
It only mentions the very biggest players. While Rails is popular on HN, it doesn't surprise me that compared to PHP, ASP, and Java, it doesn't have much market share.
Pacabel 13y ago
Keep in mind that the level of hype often doesn't correspond to the actual amount of usage a technology experiences. Yes, Ruby on Rails has been widely and frequently publicized. Yes, there are some people who have a semi-religious devotion to Ruby on Rails, and are quite vocal about it. Yes, a number of books have been written about it. Yes, training is available for it. But in reality, we really don't see it used all that much, at least compared to PHP, Java, and ASP.NET. The numbers given in that graphic may not be exact, but I wouldn't be so quick to rule them out, either.
- sdegutis 13y ago
  Out of every professional programmer I know, probably 1% use PHP and 90% use Rails. (The other 9% use either Python or Clojure or something more exotic.)
filipedeschamps 13y ago
Who made that chart? Where's Node.js? Just kidding, Node fan here ;)

saosebastiao 13y ago

Android is such a miserable experience that it has made me turn in my phone for the first closed-source computing device I have owned in 9 years. The latency on everything is at least 200-300ms, which makes typing consistently difficult (as if the moronic autocorrect didn't make it impossible anyways). The battery consumption is terrible (I have never been able to go more than 12 hours without a charge, and after a year, it is more like 3-4 hours). The apps are buggy as hell, and crash all the time. And they are always riddled with bloatware and carrier apps that are not removable. If you don't like giving away ever-expanding permissions to random apps, you either get pinged about it daily as everything tries to auto-upgrade, or you have to delete the app (which, like I said before, isn't always possible). I hate apple, and I hate that I'm giving them my money, but just the latency issue alone is enough for me to give up on Android. Help me Mozilla, you are my only hope.

dmxt 13y ago
Seriously? Are you implying that there's one and only one type of Android device? My Galaxy S4 is rooted and flashed to semi-vanilla Android with no extra application bundled. I charge my phone every 3 days. Using my preference of keyboard software makes typing much faster and easier and my keyboard is more efficient than keyboard on iOS 7. Regarding your latency issue, this is probably the hardware fault. It's not a "known" issue with Android. However what you were saying might make sense if the last time you tried Android device was 4+ years ago, in this case, Android has really improved greatly lately.
hhsnopek 13y ago
Not sure what android phone you were using, but my Nexus 4 has definitely provided an amazing android experience. Your phone must of been $50 because my latency close to none. Be smart and download apps that are trusted, not one of the thousand "flappy bird" clones that just give you ads. Also bloatware only gets on your phone if you put it there. I've removed all the carrier apps on my family's T-Mobile phones(all android). Giving permissions up? I believe I can tell apps what to use from me, just edit their permissions in the settings. Pick a phone that's reliable and then complain.
- 13y ago

ochekurishvili 13y ago

Just remembered, read it somewhere: "Open source, as rock'n'roll, will never die." Truism. I believe in it.

mwfunk 13y ago

There was no battle and there is no war. Different methodologies and philosophies surrounding software development have different pros and cons, which themselves change over time as the tech industry changes. If people want to choose to view the tech world through a filter that projects everything into some open source vs. proprietary software conflict, fine. There are many such filters though. Someone could have a similar filter that only cares about vertical vs. horizontal integration. It might even be instructive! Microsoft was on top of their game in the '80s and '90s because they had the right business model (horizontal integration- sell the OS and have everyone else make the hardware it runs on and the apps that run on top of it). Other companies have more recently had more success with a more vertically integrated approach, where the hardware and the software are explicitly designed with each other in mind to maximize things like performance, power management, size, shape, and UX of the resultant products. As things like the mobile industry continue to evolve, we may be moving back into an era where horizontal integration becomes dominant again. And maybe that will lead to another era where it goes back to being dominated by vertical. Who knows. But at no point did vertical or horizontal ever "win" (although plenty of pundits said it did in the '90s), and there is no endgame where one does. It's just a pendulum that swings back and forth. If it ever stops, that means that the entire industry has ground to a halt. The exact same things can be said about open source vs. proprietary, including the fact that the two are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of things have open source as well as proprietary components, and plenty of companies have some mix of vertical and horizontal integration. I'm not saying these perceived dualities in our industry are comparable, as they describe very different things, only that describing it as a war with an ultimate winner or loser is futile for the exact same reasons. People should absolutely love open source and be inspired to be proponents of it wherever possible, but I always take great exception to philosophies like RMS', which seem less about emphasizing a particular set of virtues (freedom, openness, sharing, etc.) and much more about demonizing something else. RMS' life goal is not to promote free software, it's to destroy proprietary software. Do what you do because you love something, not because you hate the opposite of that thing. That always leads down very unfruitful paths, including casting everything in binary terms and thinking about things like imaginary battles and wars instead of simply doing great things in the manner that most inspires you and encourages others.

13y ago

knappador 13y ago

Linux is younger than I am. GNU is two years older than I am. Anyone making smart statements about the long-term prospects of a spontaneously organizing tidal wave erupting from a vacuum needs to take a step back, stop talking, and find something worth working on to them personally. Web is mostly a distraction for proponents of FOSS. Web developers consume the foundation of FOSS and, without moving past web development, cannot contribute to that foundation. I don't honestly look to domination of web software components as a source of open source growth or an indicator of open source health. Web developers are users and FOSS is powered by developers. Put more stock in Valve and Crytek's long-term influence on developers using Linux to game on. They subsequently can learn to program Linux, and that's way more influential than 99% of the garbage out there about web being some egalitarian magic kingdom where open source and individuals can thrive, so there. Gaming is one of the last great bastions of totally proprietary software platforms where users with the natural propensity to do so do not eventually become developers.

woah 13y ago
Most web developers are not writing servers or browsers in C, but within the web ecosystem open source is really the only choice (to build with). There could be more people open sourcing their whole startups, but in terms of building blocks, open source reigns supreme in the world of web. I mean, look at the HN frontpage on any given day. A good half of the posts will be about some new open source module or framework that someone has put hundreds of hours into. Closed frameworks are regularly scoffed at and treated with great suspicion. In the Node community, it is a common practice to open-source modules without giving it a second thought, just part of a day's work. I'm not sure I really understand your point, could you explain?
- knappador 13y ago
  The behavior in the node community as you have described can be taken as an example of just how community-minded FOSS developers naturally become, and not necessarily even slightly out of some sense of geek-altruism. The choice to support the FOSS community or more closed-source development is as clear-cut to developers as choosing between a lush rain forest or bio-domes scattered throughout the desert. Imagine a world where every developer learns to program using open source tools and has participated in one open source community prior to college or on-the-job training. Does any individual developer choose to use closed source and become embedded in a bio-dome where their capability to survive is permanently bound to the decisions of the bubble around them? Does any manager of developers expect to be able to direct developers to do this? Does any executive expect to retain even part of their personnel by telling them to willfully extract themselves from the rich ecosystem in which such demands cannot be made of them? Let's take OpenGL vs Direct X for example. MS says, "Learn Direct X or else your games are doomed to only use 50% of the display's luminosity range!" This is obviously crap, and MS will make tons of moves specifically to implement their software as a yoke upon developers captured by their tool-chain treadmill. You like Active X. You really do, and because you've learned to use it, now you will have a little sign on your website that tells people that IE is required to use your government service. You will specify it in job ads. You will recommend it as a developer, a manager, an executive, a South Korean politician. Your investment will chain you, your users, perhaps your entire country to tribute payments. Oh, the company can make money. So can the developers, and there is no union necessary because there are no scabs, no hard manufacturing assets, or any other reason other than entrenched, slowly eroding fiefdoms that can convince developers to choose the bio-dome over the rain forest. Corporate, closed-source software development is in a quite precarious arrangement compared to manufacturing and amorphous labor. This is true, even withstanding the still-entrenched gorillas like Apple, MS, Oracle, Google, etc etc etc. The point of this is that if everyone develops with FOSS first, get ready to see major hemorrhaging of anachronistic bio-domes until their glass is shattered and the ecosystem thrives straight through them. This is bigger than web. Imagine how many wasted resources will be recovered and how productive new companies can be. This is a quite attractive future depending on who you are. Web can't take us there. Web is not the thing that breaks down all walls. Mozilla can try and try and try. Web is always going to be waiting on standards while other programmers just do, no call for comments required. The other thing I'm getting at is that web is not a primary indicator of the growth of FOSS because not everyone who uses web has access to the tools that can be used to create web. Web is more Gutenberg Bible than printing press. You need access to the press to become more than just a consumer of the fruit. In the sense that drawing nascent developers, before they even think of programming, into the FOSS community, forever freeing them from the illusion that rowing the monopolist corporate bireme is a necessary part of life, what Valve and Crytek are doing by improving their strategic relationship with FOSS might as well be the invention of artillery in a land of castles. Linux as a gaming platform fuels a new wave of Linux users with a strong propensity to find joy in programming, the users most likely to become developers. What's going on in gaming on Linux is what leads humanity to a FOSSier world. Valve is one of the rare companies that is in position to push this change and benefit if this change becomes reality.

deleted 13y ago

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krick 13y ago

That's a screaming headline, but not a lot of meaning within. Actually, I understand what author is trying to say, but it's pretty pointless. Yeah, I also see a problem out there, but it's a little deeper than "only Mozilla understands". Open Source Software is there because somebody is writing it, software isn't going to write itself. And mostly it's alive not (at least "not only") because somebody is financing it, but because there are people that both can and want to write it. And, oh, I should've said "make", not "write", because making it is so much more than just writing it. Especially when we talk about general purpose client-side apps author cares about so much. And here we have problems with both "can" and "want". Generally, people that are actually able to write software prefer slightly different stuff from your "typical end user". Actually I don't know a single browser that I would still like and it's pretty obvious that your "typical user" won't be so much delighted by my beloved CLI apps. But what really makes me sad is that "can" problem. There might be enough of those who can do some simple coding in community, but it still takes large company to hire somebody who will cooperate with programmers to make beautiful design for their app or some folks that can do some serious math/programming. FOSS apps still generally suck in terms of UX and visual design (at least for that typical end-user). There's no FOSS that could compete against Photoshop or Cubase or be even close to quality of Google's text-to-speech services. Of course there's no one to blame except ourselves, but if you want to see the problem — here it is. It's about us improving our skills to be able to build something outstanding, to build it for free and make it open source.

spiralpolitik 13y ago

What's interesting is that the 4 markets that the article listed have reached commodity status so we can infer that open source dominates once the market reaches the point that there is insufficient profit in the mass market for proprietary solutions to dominate. See the Java IDE market as another example. (If you are playing in the high end of the market and can bring something other than technology to the fight, quality, user experience, ease of use for example then proprietary can keep a foothold). So the question then becomes can the other layers become commoditized to the point that Open source wins out in those ?

cwp 13y ago

Why does it have be a war? Why is open source only considered a success if it drives proprietary software out of business? Don't get me wrong. I love open-source. I've been using and contributing to it for 15 years. But to me, success is having a high-quality product, a vibrant ecosystem surrounding it and an active, engaged community using and contributing to it. As long as all those things are true, who cares what everybody else does?

treenyc 13y ago

We will NEVER win the FREE software war, no matter how many battles we have won or will win. It will all be irrelevant, as long as the current economic, Geo-political paradigms (central banking model) are in place, then Free/Open Software will never grew to its' maximum effectiveness. In smaller countries like Scandinavia centralization works VERY well. That is due to their homogeneous nature. In US, we may require something decentralized and more resilient model to have the Free/Open Source software movement. Something where people have incentive to work on good software without wanting to get bought out by the next google or facebook.

dllthomas 13y ago
Why does FLOSS need to be centralized?
- treenyc 13y ago
  Sorry, maybe I miscommunicated something. They don't need to be centralized. Although I do think TRANSPARENT centralization can play a benefit part of the ecosystem. I just meant in other aspects of government, everything is very centralized in Scandinavia, and it seems to be work very well there. However, that should not be translated to US, where we have much larger and diverse population. I hope that make sense?