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Comment by keelhaule | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is not learned in the technology economics.

IBM to save it's business had to merge with Red hat almost 50% 50% in 2018.

Microsoft it's security and cloud offering had to, open source it's .net framework, aquire GitHub, ditch Visual Studio fot Visual Studio Code,

ARM is eating the world, it over hauled the x86_x64 architecture, and became the Defacto architecture.

We can go on and on and on and on,that the Open Source business model, became necessary to survive in tech, not just to exist.

If you don't open it, they will eat you up.

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Nice explanation, except IBM has been one of the largest Linux contributors since forever, they saw it as a means to reduce Aix development costs.

Linux only took off during the dotcom days as IBM, Oracle and Compaq started adopting it into commercial workloads, back in 2000.

Visual Studio Code isn't in the same ballpark as Visual Studio. It was already an Azure project, as the Monaco editor, and it was a way to kill Atom.

ARM is only successful on mobile devices and Apple hardware.

If you mean ARM on server, the most successful company, Ampere, is largely owned by Oracle, and there are some ongoing discussions about a full acquisition.

> ARM is only successful on mobile devices and Apple hardware.

Your "only" is funny. That is by far the biggest computing market worldwide.

Until phones get to replace laptops and desktops, it doesn't matter much.

We're literally watching this happen.

For some niche segments, yes.

If by “niche segments” you mean everyday computing tasks, sure.

Linux took off when PCs were finally able to run operating systems with virtual memory. All of a sudden devs did not need to pay for licences for C/C++ compilers and other dev tools, but most importantly they no longer had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Unix workstations or servers. It coincided with the commercialisation of the Internet (it started as a non-commercial project funded by DARPA).

Linux took off AFTER PCs were finally able to run operating systems with virtual memory.

I was using VM systems running on PCS from 1989 (OS/2) Linux only started in 1991 and did not take off for say 10 years, by then Windows NT existed.

So VM was necessary for Linux but was not the reason for it taking off.

In my experience Linux came in for servers replacing other Unix servers. Windows NT servers continued for some time.

As for desktop you still need Excel and to a lesser extent Word and these are still best on Windows.

Linux definitely replaced Unix servers. I remember calling Digital Equipment Corporation rep in the UK in 1994 for a quote for a server and was told I'd need to pay a minimum of 100,000 GBP for a minimum running config. That's 200,000+ GBP in today's money for something that had less power and storage than a RaspberryPi with an 32GB SD card. Yes, the price included the license for the operating system and the http server.

Linux was nowhere around when PCs were already running OS/2 and Windows NT, it was something to toy around at home, for doing university homework, and only because Windows NT POSIX wasn't good enough.

Had Microsoft known better, and Linux would never taken off on PC.

Paying for software was never an issue back then, piracy was quite common, you could get whatever you wanted on the countries where street bazaars are a common thing.

Check the list, make your order, come around the following week.

AWS Graviton servers are ARM. These tend to be cheaper and more reliable than Intel/AMD counterparts.

Don't confuse "giving software away for free because people have been conditioned to expect software that costs nothing" with "open source". And I have no idea why ARM is on that list: sure, they broke the Intel monoculture, but they certainly aren't free or open in any sense of the word.

> ditch Visual Studio for Visual Studio Code

How has Microsoft ditched VS for VSCode? VS is lightyears ahead in features and performance.

The two are not even remotely comparable. VSCode is a text editor that wants to be an IDE, but if you work with C++ or .NET you're shooting yourself in the foot if you use VSCode.

VSCode is not a serious alternative to VS or other IDE's like JetBrains Rider.

Exactly. Even if you do C++ development using VSCode on Windows, likely you are still relying on MSVC compiler for the Intellisense (and of course compiling). And people who mainly write JavaScript/Java/Python/Go etc have never used Visual Studio for development and never will be. VSCode didn't replace VS, they replaced Notepad++/Sublime Text/Atom/Eclipse etc, plus Intellij based IDEs for some people.

ARM is not open source.

ARM broke WIntel.

Smartphones broke Wintel, their ISA didn't need to be ARM as long as it was power-efficient.

Yeah, but how exaxtly is that relevant here?

And who cares? Functionally there is Apple ARM with its extensions and Qualcomm ARM with its extensions.

If anything, the x86 world was more open and more compatible. We have enterprise distros running on both Intel and AMD, supported by their hardware makers. Who in their right mind runs 3rd party Linux distributions on smartphones in production environments (i.e. the CEO's smartphone)?

Visual Studio Code is not open source.

GitHub is not open source.

I mean, technically true, but from context we can infer they were referring to vscode, which is open source. Visual Studio Code is vscode + ms stuff, but at it's core the project is MIT, and has been recently forked by a lot of teams (cursor, void, that fruit scandal, etc).

Yet what "sells" about VSCode is the closed-source features, not the open source core. Everybody uses VScode today because of collaboration features and Copilot integration. VSCodium is very niche.

Citation needed? I use vscodium explicitly for its license, but my friends and coworkers who use vscode don't use collaboration features and copilot anyway and could use vscodium as well if they cared. What sells vscode is that it's a nice extensible cross platform IDE filling a niche between "just use vim" and "full blown jetbrains IDE for every language that you use".

Do you by any chance work with Python? If i recall correctly, the default Python library for VSCode doesnt work out of the box in VSCodium, as its pulled from MS servers, which VSCodium does not allow. I think you need to enable this connectivity on your own. So my understanding is that by “crippling” the maket, its more convenient for people to just use VSCode.

I mean, I used pyright (the free one) in emacs for years, and it was fine. Pip installable et al, maybe this all happens automagically in VSCode?

https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ - "Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture"

> Whilst Visual Studio Code is "open-source" (as per the OSD) the value-add which transforms the editor into anything of value ("what people actually refer to when they talk about using VSCode") is far from open and full of intentionally designed minefields that often makes using Visual Studio Code in any other way than what Microsoft desires legally risky...

ARM isn't open source. Companies like MS and Google use OSS that complement themselves but the core money makers are closed source and closely guarded.

Open source won those battles but the war doesn't end. The next fight is AI and thanks to a leak we have open source (weights and inference) models now.

Without that leak we would not have the ecosystem evolving around Llama.

Meta was always planning to release LLaMA to the public. They were literally sending LLaMA 1 to anyone with a ".edu" email.

Bell Labs did the same with Unix, but Unix was still not open source. This is why we run GNU/Linux today, not Unix™.

There is still enough Unix™ around, including from a well know fruit company.

No, macOS is FreeBSD, not the Unix from Bell Labs.

macOS is many things, a bit of NeXTSTEP, a pinch of Mach, q.b. BSD, and a UNIX™ certification from OpenGroup.

A UNIX™ certification is not the same as being actual code from Unix™.

NeXTSTEP was 4.3BSD plus Mach, using Display Postscript as its windowing system and TIFF as its image format, supporting transparency for icons. macOS is FreeBSD plus Mach, using Display PDF as its windowing format and PNG as its image format, supporting transparency for icons. Basically NeXTSTEP but every component upgraded to its then-modern equivalent. (Except Objective C, they kept that.)

Where do you mention Unix™ is the original source code, and not UNIX™ as defined by OpenGroup, the owners of UNIX™?

> Bell Labs did the same with Unix, but Unix was still not open source. This is why we run GNU/Linux today, not Unix™.

I know pretty well how NeXTSTEP used to be, my graduation project was to port a visualization framework from NeXTSTEP/Objective-C to Windows/C++.

The issue at hand was me making an analogy about how Meta releasing LLaMA to many .edu addresses still would not mean that LLaMA would be actually used widely, since the Unix™ source code was similarly released by Bell Labs, but the actual Unix™ source code did not end up being the code which we now use.

The fact that UNIX™ later went on to become a compatibility specification, not a specific implementation, is irrelevant to the analogy.

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