Open Source Is Winning, and Now It's Time for People to Win Too
linuxjournal.com
linuxjournal.com
If you'll permit me a (perhaps inappropriately severe) analogy to relationships, victims in abusive relationships often stay in the relationship because they think their partner's behavior is excusable. Sometimes, this is because they haven't seen good, healthy relationships modeled for them before. "This is just how relationships are," they might think.
While I think the term "abuse" is likely too strong for corporate software's relationship with their users, I do think we can leverage this same approach. By developing and maintaining "shining stars" of the open-source world, we can provide concrete examples to people that it's possible for their software to have a purposefully healthy relationship with them.
The article calls out examples like Emacs, Perl, and Python, but the proportion of people who use software and have used (and liked) these tools is vanishingly small. What's a more appropriate shining star, our new beacon to show everyone how Software Ought To Be?
The first example that comes to my mind is Firefox - but that was perhaps more applicable in a pre-Chrome world.
(I do think there is a value in something like a MOOP - massive open online psychology - an agent that monitors us as deeply as is done currently but listens to our conversations but with intention of learning and guiding - not CBT but reviewing the past day, almost automated therapy)
This is most likely to start in corporate environments but it has value (if done at medical levels of no harm and patients best interest - of course a Black Mirror version for the Chinese government would explain why your conversation with a neighbour was not in line with party policy)
That we don't seem to have made much progress in 50 years is pretty disappointing.
As we digitize increasingly "serious" systems, this is increasing a logistical crisis in addition to a social issue. Variations that would have been trivially handled by even the least helpful of bureaucrats becomes outright impossible to submit to computer systems, often with no channel for appeal or remedy.
The story of Ellis Island screeners changing the spelling of names is infamous, but in that story at least the immigrants ended up with coherent paperwork and a usable name. Today, people with PII that doesn't match software formats are increasingly out of luck. If your name includes 'é', ASCII systems will flatly refuse to accept that. You can enter 'e', but when down the line the ASCII field gets compared to some UTF-8 record of your name, they might well be ruled different people. If you live in Apartment C, you'll suddenly and unhappily learn how many computer systems treat apartment number as a strictly numeric field. And god forbid your apartment has a name, or your street number has a decimal - there isn't even a graceful conversion for those values.
Robust design is the first step here: many systems could easily be adjusted to fail in 1% of the cases as they currently do. But human-focused design on a much larger scale can't be avoided either; when these standardizations _do_ inevitably fail, there needs to be some way of conceding that the system, and not the data, is wrong. As @patio11 put it years ago, "anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them".
This bit really stands out to me, and it bothers me to no end when I encounter it in the wild.
It even afflicts FLOSS software! Without meaning to single out any one project in particular, a concrete example that's fresh on my mind is KDE's Dolphin. Lately "sudo dolphin" results in the flat-out lie that "Executing Dolphin as root is not possible.", rather than a much more informative statement such as "Doing this would make an entire class of otherwise impossible exploits possible, so the maintainer has made a personal judgment call to disallow this behavior."
I think all software everywhere ought to conform to KDE's Human Interface Guidelines of "simple by default, powerful when needed" but would also like to see something added along the lines of:
* Don't lie to users - be as transparent as reasonably possible.
* Don't make value judgments or be (needlessly) authoritarian - software should restrict itself to doing its job and doing it well.
Another (historical) example that comes to mind: https://github.com/tpope/heroku-fucking-console
This is not the full equation though. Usually, "it can't be done for the price that users want to pay and the reality is it's entirely possible but I will not do it for free for you".
Well, there's Wikipedia. Everyone uses it and it models great respect for its users and itself.
But I don't think there are a lot of better options for Wikipedia to ask for money.
Realized the same thing about a year ago about SPLC (splc.org). Once I realized how much cash they have I saw that my contributions would have more effect elsewhere. I like what splc does: help discriminate which groups are hate groups and which aren't, among others. But they simply don't need any more money IMO.
"The Internet Archive is a US 501c3 non-profit organization."
So, similar to Wikipedia.
I don't see how that fits all that well with a do-it-yourself, volunteer ethic. It fits better with a service-based approach where people just hire others to help if they need help. But then you're competing with Apple stores.
Or, alternately, you can buy a Chromebook for a less tech-savy relative. It's a rather practical solution.
The place where open source really works is with young people who want to get involved. There is a big enough community to sustain it, but not enough to really take over.
There are free software distributions that stick quite close to that model, such as Debian and CentOS. The problem with the Chromebook is that it is only "on support" for 5 years after release, past that it's just a brick. Plus it expects you to depend on outside "cloud" services when there's no real reason to do so - a mainstream Linux distribution won't do that.
In my case, it's a nice improvement over maintaining a relative's increasingly unreliable Windows XP computer running obsolete software for long past its expiration date.
With apt, there's no straightforward way to download packages on one machine and take them to an offline machine. Apt assumes that you you will be installing on the machine doing the downloading and only downloads the packages the downloading machine needs, which may be different from the one the offline machine needs, and last I checked you had to do quite a lot of piping and text parsing to work around it.
If those options don't cover your needs can you tell me what they are?
[1] http://rickysarraf.github.io/apt-offline/ [2] https://www.ostechnix.com/fully-update-upgrade-offline-debia...
We're pretty much at the point where you could mirror the entire archive including every arch onto a portable hard drive, the total size is 2453GB: https://www.debian.org/mirror/size
For much of it, I don't think it is too strong a term. I think most Dark Patterns can be accurately described as abusive. There are Games that are specifically designed to irritate people into spending more money than they intended.
There are layers, Some of it is ignorance, some of it is willful ignorance, the worst of it is deliberate and focused.
Over time software will have a bigger and bigger impact on our lives. Already there are organisations which make assumptions about me based on data that their software gathers that is completely untrue. While it is currently laughable that Google is convinced that I want to go to Hawaii, the potential for it to beyond even what the most famous dystopian novels warned us about is truly frightening.
I don't think we need to teach people so much as we need to teach programmer. Emacs, Perl and Python were made to do something in a better way for the user. Any esoteric technology was the result of that. Not as you often see today were it is the other way around and the use case is shoehorned in at the end. If you want to do something nice you don't start with your super advanced back-end, you start with how someone is going to use it.
> What's a more appropriate shining star, our new beacon to show everyone how Software Ought To Be?
VS Code, but that is probably a bit obvious. Maybe something like Jupyter Notebook? WordPress used to be a big one. The thing is that so many things these days are proprietary web applications, mobile applications and/or networks.
It's extremely abusive. The parent company, also.
Without plugins, you are left with a text editor of only nominal use and mediocre novelty. That, or enabling telemetry. That's a pretty coercive pattern.
All tools have benefitted from standing on the shoulders of these and other giants. Software doesn't exist in a vacuum and it doesn't appear fully formed from nothing. Ideas and inspiration are drawn from a multitude of projects. Take a look at the third party software required to build Firefox sometime.
We have the examples. Then again, we have a lot of corporate bs in between the user and the opensource projects that actually drive our world.
What I care about is being able to get to my stuff - forever. Open source might help with that if it runs on my computer, and someone out there with the skill to maintain it decides to keep doing so (even most programmers have little hope of actually maintaining most of the software they use). The focus, I believe, should always have been on data formats, interchange, and local storage, not on the source code of programs.
I'd rather live in a world with no open source software and open data formats than the world we seem to be heading into: one running on open technology stacks with all the data sitting on servers somewhere in formats we can only guess at.
Tell some open source advocate from 2001 or so that most people do most of their computing on Linux in 2019, and I think they’ll picture something quite different to what we have in Android and the cloud.
To be less obtuse: this is exactly what people who say GNU/Linux and Free Software rather than Open Source have been concerned about since the beginning.
For point of reference, Linus Torvalds only half cares about ethics. He likes all the value of collaboration from a developer perspective and doesn't care so much about whether software treats people well and gives end users any freedom.
Perhaps I'm missing a use case here.
fb and the like have options to pull down your data, generally. It's not thaaaaaaaaaaaaaat much work to parse it. Certainly much less work than, say, writing a RDBMS....
But I can give you a concrete example - let's say you're a blogger - it's a large part of your professional output, and a great resource for the people in your field. Now you're not really techie, but you do keep the some original writing locally because you write in Word or whatever. But all the images have to be put in the CMS directly - you can't paste that in - and they are very important. Then there's a bunch of comments, which might greatly add to the post.
Then the place that was hosting your blog goes broke/changes business model. Okay maybe you have a techie friend who thinks about this stuff, but they maybe forgot to wget your blog for a few months/year [ahem!].
Those posts are gone. The entire stack of the blogging platform could be, and probably is, open source. It doesn't help one bit.
Those open source CMSs could have agreed and maintained a file format for local editing and tools around that. But they didn't because that wasn't seen as the main problem for some reason.
If your backups fail then you still get fired, but now it's for choosing an unreliable cloud vendor.
If you don't want to pay for your hardware up front, most hardware vendors are happy to sell it on an installment plan.
I think that "cloud" started taking off right after x64 servers got hardware virtualization support, and then you had cloud vendors showing IT departments how much more cost effective their virtual machines were than the single-application physical machines that were the status quo ante. Not bothering to mention that they're frequently not more cost effective than hosting the virtual machines yourself.
It wasn't me that came up with the backup example - which I do think is the best example of the point they were making because you wouldn't expect that particular service to fail nor someone to get fired. And if it does, it's more likely yourselves to blame for setting it up wrong than it is the cloud vendor at fault.
Their general point was more that if you self-host and the infra goes down due to hardware failure (eg switch goes pop) then it's up to you to fix. With cloud services that responsibility now becomes someone else's problem.
Personally I find this the least convincing reason to move to the cloud because I'd rather be proactive fixing something than waiting for someone else. However it's undeniable that it is an incentive to some - I suspect more for manager types than engineers though.
> If you don't want to pay for your hardware up front, most hardware vendors are happy to sell it on an installment plan.
You pay a premium for that (interest and insurance) and are still stuck with the repayments even if your project crash and burns before the instalment plan finishes. If you're a business and looking to buy hardware you are much better off buying it outright - you have a stronger position to negotiate a discount (so you're not paying advertised price) and you have capital you can resell if the worst happens. However if your a small or medium sized company and you don't have any self-hosted equipment currently or are looking to re-outfit several racks of gear, then the cloud is a very attractive offering.
> I think that "cloud" started taking off right after x64 servers got hardware virtualization support, and then you had cloud vendors showing IT departments how much more cost effective their virtual machines were than the single-application physical machines that were the status quo ante. Not bothering to mention that they're frequently not more cost effective than hosting the virtual machines yourself.
It sounds like your impression of the cloud is massively outdated. If you're just looking for a VMWare equivalent then AWS et al isn't going to be that impressive. Where public clouds have overtaken self-hosted solutions is with their SaaS solutions. This is why in my other post I make the distinction between "lift and shift" type deployments on the cloud, and using their SaaS offerings.
I do totally get the appeal of self hosting though. I've spent the majority of my career in server rooms and love the feeling of owning my own equipment. However pragmatically I can also see why the cloud is such an attractive solution to businesses these days.
Backups are notorious for going untested because too often nobody cares if they work until you discover the hard way that they don't. That's the "setting it up wrong" problem and cloud doesn't really change that.
Cloud vendors then add a different problem, which is that they operate at a scale that brings multiple redundancy failures into the realm of plausibility. Then, because the same infrastructure is shared by many customers, you end up with greater exposure to those kinds of previously negligible probability multiple systems failures when something happens that affects thousands of customers at once.
Which is still not very common, but it can be very bad when it does.
> Their general point was more that if you self-host and the infra goes down due to hardware failure (eg switch goes pop) then it's up to you to fix. With cloud services that responsibility now becomes someone else's problem.
There are two components to this. One is whether it's "your problem" in a CYA sense, which I understood to be the original argument, i.e. if the system fails and your company loses ten million dollars then you lose your job. But that hasn't really changed. If the backups don't work, pointing at the vendor is not very effective cover when you're the one who chose them.
The point you're making is that when something fails you don't have to spend time fixing it because that's somebody else's job now. Which is fine, but then you're paying a premium for that and the question becomes whether such hardware failures are common enough that you come out ahead that way or not.
> You pay a premium for that (interest and insurance) and are still stuck with the repayments even if your project crash and burns before the instalment plan finishes.
You pay even more of a premium for third party hosting, and server hardware is a general purpose commodity. If your project ends then it can be used for the next one. And even something bought on credit can be resold and the money used to pay off most/all of the debt, especially now that Moore's Law is in decline and hardware doesn't depreciate as fast as it used to.
Moreover, if you know ahead of time that your project has a high short-term failure probability then it can make sense to not want a longer-term commitment, but not everything is so uncertain. Many projects are known to have a >95% probability of still existing in five years.
> If you're a business and looking to buy hardware you are much better off buying it outright - you have a stronger position to negotiate a discount (so you're not paying advertised price) and you have capital you can resell if the worst happens.
That's true. But what if for some reason you prefer "effectively paying for your hardware on a subscription basis rather than paying tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds / dollars up front"? :)
> If you're just looking for a VMWare equivalent then AWS et al isn't going to be that impressive. Where public clouds have overtaken self-hosted solutions is with their SaaS solutions. This is why in my other post I make the distinction between "lift and shift" type deployments on the cloud, and using their SaaS offerings.
I don't think we're really disagreeing all that much. There are circumstances where cloud hosting makes sense, particularly when your needs vary unpredictably over time.
My point is that people overuse it. You see companies with entirely static and predictable future needs moving their entire operations into the cloud anyway.
And I suspect people are going to regret the long-term experience of SaaS. Once you have a decade of your business data on someone else's proprietary service with no export function, what does your negotiating position look like?
At risk of repeating myself:
1/ I didn't make the backup comparison
2/ I've already said I didn't agree with GP using that specific example
3/ I didn't make the backup comparison
So can we drop the discussion about backups please.
> The point you're making is that when something fails you don't have to spend time fixing it because that's somebody else's job now. Which is fine, but then you're paying a premium for that and the question becomes whether such hardware failures are common enough that you come out ahead that way or not.
You can argue this all you like however that doesn't change the fact that I'm only reporting what I've observed some decision makers base their decisions on. You may not agree with their opinion but arguing with me isn't going to change that.
> You pay even more of a premium for third party hosting, and server hardware is a general purpose commodity. If your project ends then it can be used for the next one. And even something bought on credit can be resold and the money used to pay off most/all of the debt, especially now that Moore's Law is in decline and hardware doesn't depreciate as fast as it used to.
As I've already said several times, it depends on how you utilise the cloud. Lift and shift projects where you replicate an on-prem solution in the cloud often works out more expensive. However using SaaS solutions can work out cheaper - if you know what you're doing. It's really not a clear cut as you think.
> Moreover, if you know ahead of time that your project has a high short-term failure probability then it can make sense to not want a longer-term commitment, but not everything is so uncertain. Many projects are known to have a >95% probability of still existing in five years.
If it were as easy as that then significantly fewer startups would fail. I get you don't like cloud services but your exaggerations are now bordering on the ridiculous.
> That's true. But what if for some reason you prefer "effectively paying for your hardware on a subscription basis rather than paying tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds / dollars up front"? :)
If that's what you want to do then do it. If you want to store all of your hardware inside a rocket and shoot it into space then you're free to do that too. It doesn't mean any of them are sensible suggestions though. But if that's what you prefer to do then go for it ;)
> My point is that people overuse it. You see companies with entirely static and predictable future needs moving their entire operations into the cloud anyway.
> And I suspect people are going to regret the long-term experience of SaaS. Once you have a decade of your business data on someone else's proprietary service with no export function, what does your negotiating position look like?
Of course people overuse it. That's how IT industry works. Someone comes up with a good idea and then everyone rushes to clone it regardless of whether it makes sense or not. As much as we'd like to consider ourselves intelligent engineers our industry is still full of hypes and fads. Often it's cyclic too - with new generations of engineers re-discovering old technology and rebranding it. I've seen it happen time and time again in my many years in IT.
If you're doing a "lift and shift" then running stuff in the cloud is almost certainly going to be more expensive.
However if you migrate to using managed services then there can be a lot of cost savings.
To be honest it's a lot like the old days of PHP hosts - comparing VPS to shared hosting - except it's now the shared hosting is scaled up and "enterprisey".
What I do find most people overlook when saying "the cloud is cheap" is just how much time is required to deploy to the cloud. I don't mean POCing a few things in the AWS console but rather deploying stuff properly using Terraform, Puppet, etc and architecting it correctly so you have resilience without paying through the nose for it.
The early internet was "opensource like" as in not monetized.
it was a very different time in the 80s and early 90s.i think no FOSS would have allowed the current state of the internet to occur much more rapidly. many more people would have experienced the net/web as a service, extended to you on the terms of the service provider.
Back then there were gatekeepers who made sure you paid to play. The internet broke that because it allowed anybody to connect for free as long as you found a way to do it. The gatekeepers used proprietary protocols and software to lock you into their paywall. The internet used FOSS to make it easy for you to connect. That was literally the difference.
Costs can quickly spiral when you’re self-hosting internet services for paying customers who expect their internet services available 24/7. Which is why the cloud is so attractive - it allows you to build your product without paying the upfront cost of self hosting.
That all said, I do honestly get the appeal of self hosting. It’s fun owning your own hardware. That is until it fails....
The only benefit with your solution is that the second home is at least an capital asset; but even still, it’s more than any small or medium sized company would be willing to stump up (I say this from experience since I’ve worked on disaster recovery solutions for SMBs in the pre-cloud computing era)
In fact the very advantage of cloud computing is you can scale your infrastructure to meet your demand (and I don’t just mean auto-scaling; but also the instance sizes you run and infrastructure you deploy). Which is the point I was making in my previous post: you can build the infrastructure which suits your problem and let the cloud provider deal with many of the “enterprisey” problems for you. Then when you reach the point where you need to start worrying about the big problems, well you can decide how you want to design your solutions there after.
The richer and more powerful the Cloud Hosting Oligopolies get, the worse off it will be for Indie OSS developers who will be unable to compete with their network lock-in, paid resources, marketeers + advocates, advertising, etc.
What's worse is if you release OSS software the Cloud Vendor network monopolies naturally stand to make more revenue then any attempts in trying to host it yourself, making it impossible to compete against given the more effort you put into development, the more revenue you will create for them which they in-turn can use to fund their competing efforts.
Personally I'm all for companies like Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and MongoDB who realize the threat and start distributing their future investments under "OSS free that's free for everyone else except major cloud vendors" to force the cloud oligopolies to revenue share back some of the money they've made from hosting their software. Hopefully we'll see more of OSS follow which will force them to implement a system for revenue sharing back to OSS software they're getting paid to host.
Even when they're unable to license it they still have the luxury to sit back and wait to see what software becomes popular and proves itself in the market before instructing their army of paid devs to clone it as they've done with their MongoDB clones that implement the MongoDB protocol (also requires a lot more effort to create something with constant customer feedback + iteration, then it is to clone it). Thanks to the integration with their ecosystem ensures their investments will have better ROI and popularity then the original authors could ever have.
The problem is, OSS has changed the biz model for software development, but we're still stuck with bugs, poor design, shite UX, frustrations, etc.
Yes, OSS solved a problem. But it wasn't The Problem. So now what?
And while I do embrace the OSS ideal, I wish I could total up the hours lost to vague documentation, delays in support (if support even exists), etc. For example, you can probably build a damn good modern CMS with all the time lost to the WordPress codex.
Or, to make it more personal: it's sometimes okay for you to make less money. Sure, Facebook might pay more than anyone else, but you need to balance that with the fact that you might be paying with your ethics…
It's easy to say that you won't sell heroine to addicts, you won't murder people, you won't poison entire cities because we sell software. But we don't have to sell software. There is no law saying that although we are a software organisation that we can't do something else if it made us more money. So why are we selling software? We've already arbitrarily built this wall of ethics around ourselves. You're lying to yourself if you say that "We need to do whatever is necessary to make more money". The reality is that we need to do what ever is necessary to make money within the boundaries that we have set for our company -- and those boundaries are whatever we want them to be. We choose.
It was interesting, because after I explained this to the manager, he was a lot happier. I honestly think he originally felt that he had no choice but to do horrible things. It was his job to optimise for profit at the expense of everything else. I don't think he wanted that job.
Because Google makes much more money than the cartels and employs far fewer people, so it's more efficient and more profitable.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Some companies, having relaxed their exclusive rights decide that they will provide autonomous services on top of their software. This is basically SaaS. But again, if you relax your exclusive rights to the software, then anyone can offer the same services. If, because they are able to scale better than you can, they can offer it cheaper (and/or better) then you will not be able to compete.
These things are so obvious to me that I find it absolutely incredible that it is a surprise to anyone. And yet, I see companies building business plans on top of nothing.
If you want to make a business doing FOSS, then you need to understand where your value lies. It is not in the exclusivity of the software. It almost certainly is not in the SaaS because unless you have a really compelling story for executing your service, more established companies will eat your lunch. So what is your value?
Your value is that you wrote the software. You are the expert. You drive the direction of the project. You own a trademark that you don't share with your competitors (unless you are insane).
But what that means is that you can't just write some software and sit on your laurels as the money rolls in. You can't write some software and stick it up on some server somewhere and watch the money roll in. You actually have to do something to make more money. Everything in your organisation has to be oriented towards, "What's next?" What are you going to do that someone will pay for? Training? Services? Custom development? A promise for the next version? A tie in with hardware? It doesn't matter, but the key is that it has to be of the category: you do something to get paid. It can't be: I already did the thing and now I'm going to sell it.
And yes. I think it's a good thing.
Unfortunately the plague that is rent seeking and patents have muddied the waters for that type of work for a long time.
The vast majority of github projects prove that statement false.
"A few years ago, MIT changed its intro computer science course away from the traditional (and brilliant) class that used Scheme to one that used Python..(snip).. the professors who wrote the course indicated that for today's software engineers, learning to code isn't enough. You also need to learn topics such as ethics."
However, I think we can only declare victory if we agree on a shared victory: proprietary software like iOS, macOS, Windows, Word, etc., etc. is also central to most people’s lives.
I am happy with a shared victory but my respect to people who are free of non-libre software.
Just teach them about Free Software. That way they won't think that ethics is just an additional cost that you can discard while still being """open""".
Free Software ideology (yes, it is one) also won't tell you how to make the lives of those people better who - for whatever good or bad reason - can't tinker themselves out of their problems. Which is mostly everyone. In that sense, teaching them about Free Software instead of about ethics is a similarly bad idea as wanting to teach people Christianity instead of ethics. Christian and Free Software culture give you some start when it comes to ethics, but can't replace ethical considerations themselves.
"You deserve to be able to hire your favorite programmer to fix it when it breaks."
from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html
I don't need to know any plumbing myself to appreciate the fact that I can hire professionals to fix or enhance my home system other than the ones who originally built it.
Free Software cares about the freedom of all software users, who are humans that just so happen to be using software. The belief that this just benefits software developers is false, although it was the way that Open Source was promoted over Free Software.
And that is part of the reason we are having this conversation.
Or 'Alabama football'.
Either one could easily be monetized to great effect.
My guess is that this isn't the case. People know that what they're doing isn't ethical, but they are doing it nevertheless because it gives them money, power, status, their desired partner etc. You can't prevent that by teaching them about ethics.
There are of course some bright lines, like looking up people you personally know, which norms and security auditing heavily deter. But the general concept? Not at all. The HN consensus is not the industry consensus.
I mean look at the Hadoop community. What do you think is in those warehouses? The weather? No. Records of user interactions.