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Comment by bostik | Hacker News Reader

Your choice of counterexamples highlights an important aspect. Three of the four are in fact outliers: Kubernetes and Android are both financially backed by Google. Android as a strategic advantage across a global market, Kubernetes as a plumbing layer enabling more businesses operate logically like Google. Sure, it's a CNCF product since 2016 or so, but it still enjoys Google's backing.

Postgres? They have a very specific governance model - a single company can not employ over 50% of the core contributors, to guarantee that the direction of the product is not taken over even by accident.

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Three of the four are in fact outliers: Kubernetes and Android are both financially backed by Google.

Is that really "outlier" behavior? More and more important open source projects are prominently backed by a single large tech company. React, TensorFlow, TypeScript, Go, etc.

If you just look at the last decade, there has been more important work done as "single-sponsor open source" than under the GPL.

A few monopolistic corporations having dictatorial power over key technologies is a dystopian nightmare.

Those projects have ultimately the interests of the corporations in mind not of the users.

Ever wonder why overcomplicated technical solutions are hyped so much? Why does everyone and their dog need to run Kubernetes? Why is it all Maschine Learning instead of good old fashioned methods that would do much better? Well those corporation have just the fitting cloud computing offering!

Sure many of them happen to be useful and are simply for increasing the prestige of the company but let's not act like it is a good thing.

If we want to bark up this tree, a larger problem is FAANG inventing technologies that assume you have equivalent baseline competency and maturity.

Which leads to companies that do not (eg no CICD or data architecture standard) adopting tools that assume they do (k8s & tensorflow).

(And yes, I realize this is because most folks who work at the former aspire to jump ship to the latter)

Say what you want about Microsoft, but they do a much better job of meeting the customer where they are (dumpster fire) instead of where Microsoft is.

> "Ever wonder why overcomplicated technical solutions are hyped so much? Why does everyone and their dog need to run Kubernetes? Why is it all Maschine Learning instead of good old fashioned methods that would do much better? Well those corporation have just the fitting cloud computing offering! "

Simpler explanation than some nefarious plan. Software engineers love to play with the coolest new thing over working with some proven solution that might have worked well enough. I think these corporation just exploit that with cloud offering. They don't really get to pick what people like (they try but suck at it) but have the money and resources to exploit whatever ends up being the popular new thing anyway.

Debugging Kubernetes does often feel like a dystopian nightmare, but you aren't forced to use it. I think it's a really good thing that this open software is available. As frustrating as Kubernetes is, for companies with medium-size or large-size deployments, it's really nice to have this level of orchestration software, and it's far better to have the option to use open source software than to be forced to roll your own because you have no alternative.

TensorFlow and Pytorch are similar. Yeah, people end up using machine learning a lot when they don't really have to. But researchers and developers can achieve a lot more when they don't have to reinvent the wheel, and machine learning has provided some really great things.

> A few monopolistic corporations having dictatorial power over key technologies is a dystopian nightmare.

These corporations are eating the world. They need not keep their source code closed, we're all employees, generating revenue for them.

One of the only reasons to keep source code closed is to retain your competitive advantage. They need not that when there's no competition, or a very slim chance of some appearing one day.

I'm joking, but it sounds a bit more true than I expected. Also, mind you, I'd rather have them publish code than not.

> A few monopolistic corporations having dictatorial power over key technologies is a dystopian nightmare.

I think "dystopian nightmare" overstates it. Monopoly control over particular technology is also a working definition of the the patent system. Hey, wait a minute ...

So TypeScript is Microsoft, and React is Facebook, but all the rest of those are Google. Shouldn't we be a bit concerned about that?

Like, it seems like it should be fine, given that TensorFlow is part of their core AI mission, and they're heavily invested in Go, and Android probably isn't going anywhere. But people once thought that Java and MySQL were safe in the hands of Sun, too.

I could add in Pytorch, VSCode, and Swift too. But yeah it's reasonable to worry a bit. It's great that competitors to Java and MySQL arose, and pretty much everything listed except Android (kind of a weird case) has a strong open source competitor.

You get it. Making lots of money cannot be a result of open source. But open source can be a result of making lots of money.

The ultimate fate of the wave of companies switching to AGPL and similar licenses now will be the proof (or disproof!) of this.

Sometimes open source helps. SQLite3 is a good example. Being open source (and very good) helped it become one of the -if not the- single most-used pieces of software in the world, but having a closed-source 100% branch coverage test suite helped establish a monopoly on development of SQLite3 and prevented hard forks. End result: big tech had to sign up for the SQLite Consortium. It's... not a unicorn, and I've not idea how much D. R. Hipp and friends get paid -- certainly they get paid enough to continue doing their awesome work, and maybe they get paid like the rock stars that they are, but probably nothing like what they'd be worth if they could really monetize SQLite3 and IPO. The SQLite devs are probably very happy, is my guess.

But yes, on the whole it's true: most open source projects aren't SQLite, and most aren't going to many any money just because they are open source. Open source is a business tool.

Nitpick: SQLite is public domain[0], which is not open source[1].

[0] https://sqlite.org/purchase/license

[1] https://opensource.org/node/878

I don't care one bit about your nitpick.

While I want to disagree with you on the general principle (and gen220's sibling comment points out several really nice longer-term examples), I will certainly admit that you have a point. Cloud providers eating the margins, investing in streamlined operations and in general making the earlier on-prem consulting work less attractive has had an effect.

But I do note that your examples are from quite a narrow sector. TypeScript, Go and React are all languages. TypeScript is a nice facade over JavaScript, and React is ... well, a very powerful DSL.[ß] Go is very much a Google project, developed perhaps more out in the open than in a traditional open-source sense.

As I understand, TensorFlow was originally an internal Google project, which they at some point decided to open up. It may have had something to do with their TPU cloud offering or not. If we wanted to compare low-level language or domain material, we should probably take a look at something like Boost. People who do C++ tell me that Boost is a pretty good approximation of C++ standards' evolutionary playground. And if we're going for new languages, shouldn't we also include Rust? It was backed and promoted by Mozilla, but how much of its development was driven solely by Mozilla, and how much was done by the interested community at large?

ß: Our frontend team will probably want to roast me for that one, but there isn't much visible JS left in modern React code. Not for my eyes, at least.

> But I do note that your examples are from quite a narrow sector. TypeScript, Go and React are all languages. TypeScript is a nice facade over JavaScript, and React is ... well, a very powerful DSL.[ß]

> ß: Our frontend team will probably want to roast me for that one, but there isn't much visible JS left in modern React code. Not for my eyes, at least.

Can you clarify what you're talking about here with regards to React? I can see calling JSX a DSL, but React is a language now? And there's no JS / TypeScript in your React code base?

> but React is a language now?

In a way, it is. Whenever you write some module in your project, you're effectively designing a language. Every function you add is a new verb, every type you define is a new noun[0] - and the relationships between them form the grammar. It may sound trivial, but I think it's an important and underappreciated point. Modularizing and abstracting is done by building languages on top of other languages.

We usually make a distinction between what is a "library" or "module" and what is a "language", by... it's hard to capture the distinction exactly, but my guess is that we reserve the term "programming language" for languages that a) define a large, highly composable set of building blocks, and b) have complex translation into a lower-level language, ultimately yielding executable code. Whatever the distinction could be, in reality, it's a spectrum.

[0] - Well, a piece of a noun phrase. Maybe. I'm not a linguist.

That's not what was asked. The query was, 'Is React a language now', i.e. specifically React, not just a general query like 'In general, is programming a process of designing little custom languages to solve problems'.

So to answer explicitly: in many ways, yes it is.

There is JS/TS in the codebase, but a surprisingly large fraction of the UI manipulation logic doesn't bear resemblance to either.

I base my opinion on my own interpretation: for me modern React looks a lot like the offspring of QML and a flavour of Lisp.

Replace React with angular, replace Go with .NET which is a platform, and it's not just the language entire stacks in .NET are available as OSS (fronted, backend, distributed computing).

Governance won't help if you have no contributors at all because there's no revenue coming in.

Also, the CNCF is essentially Google by another name.

Far from it. looks what happen with istio.

that for sure is false... Google helped start CNCF but now plays a small part in its governance, they are just one board member like the 30+ others... they have no special voting rights...

https://www.cncf.io/people/governing-board/

they still do quite a lot of heavy lifting though in contributing to a variety of CNCF projects if you look at the numbers: https://all.devstats.cncf.io/d/5/companies-table?orgId=1

What happens to CNCF if Google backs out of it tomorrow? Including all funding?

you can see our finances here in the annual report: https://www.cncf.io/cncf-annual-report-2020/

fiscally the impact would be a membership fee which is a small percentage of revenue

The organization is fairly well diversified in terms of members and revenue sources but we appreciate Google's continued support in helping the organization grow, we think it's benefited them in projects like Kubernetes where the work is done by a larger community all working together: https://www.cncf.io/cncf-kubernetes-project-journey/

That's good, but Google is still the single biggest Kubernetes contributor. If they decided to take their ball and go home, it would leave the project in the lurch. It's a risk factor. Is it likely? No. But it's not outlandish.

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