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Comment by moreentropy | Hacker News Reader

True dat.

I think close to 100% of the internet is built on/with open source software.

But it's a major headache to get your in house libraries/software released as open source. There's reservations because by default everything developed is considered proprietary and a trade secret. It's difficult to convince management to give stuff back and/or see a benefit, the larger the org the harder it gets. Then comes legal with the legal derp.

And finally you can't just put stuff on Github and expect it to thrive, you need resources to maintain your open source projects and again convince management beforehand that it's not just a liability.

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I don't think it's anywhere near "close to 100%", like you're claiming.

IIS is still quite widely used for many web sites. Netcraft's latest survey results suggest just slightly under 30% of all web sites are served by it. So that's some closed-source software powering a significant portion of the web, at least.

And it's quite safe to say that those IIS installations are running on some variant of Windows, which is yet another generally closed-source software system. Then there are other non-web services (DNS, FTP, and so on) handled by such Windows systems.

There are still a surprising number of proprietary UNIX systems out there in production, on the public Internet. We're talking HP-UX, AIX, UnixWare, and even BSD/OS in some cases. There are many behind the scenes, indirectly supporting web sites and other publically-accessible services.

There is a lot of other networking gear that runs proprietary software, too.

Is open source software important to the Internet? Absolutely. Is it the "100%" you're claiming? Absolutely not.

Yes, you're right if you take it that way. I didn't mean the internet is built exclusively with open source software, but the majority of developed applications contain at least a bit of open source software, like a library, curl, Apache, PHP etc. That's much closer to 100% I think. Something where you can say "we took something for free, we give something back". Not that that's required in any way.

There's some high profile exceptions like the infrastructure parts you mentioned, but noone expects you to open source your router and unix config, there's nothing worth contributing and collaborating on here.

The one exception I've seen though is Microsoft stack applications. For whatever reason open source libraries aren't as widespread there. Sure, there are some and with things like NuGet it's getting easier to use them, but a lot of developers don't seem to bother going outside of what Microsoft offers out of the box.

Can you list a few benefits of releasing custom coded solutions to the public?

The only one I can see is building culture/name for yourself (which I don't consider a trivial thing), but I can't think of anything else.

I built a number of those open source libraries (Summingbird, Storehaus, Algebird, etc) - often more than 50% of our contributions would come from outside Twitter. Scalding has far more outside activity than inside, where a few talented folks are holding down the fort.

Sam, you don't hold down a fort. You just hold it. Forts don't fly away. <3.

A scala type hierarchy DOES feel a bit like a pillow fort on a blustery day.

> <3

You probably mean this [1], but all I see is this [2]. What's wrong with me?

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%3C3&defid=11...

[2] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%3C3&defid=13...

Sure. Your grateful users might add a feature you didn't have time for. Or they might find a security issue and send you a patch as a part of responsible disclosure. Or they might start hacking on your codebase and actually do something cool. Then you can hire them/buy them out, turning your codebase into a nice recruiting tool.

Think about this: if Twitter open sources 100% of their code, what would change? Would Twitter clones pop up all over the place? No, because Twitter is the software + infrastructure + name. Most companies think that their code contains some type of secret sauce that makes it special. In reality that's not true. Sure, Google may hide their exact PageRank algorithm, but they don't need to hide their web server code. Or their indexing algorithm. Companies like Twitter are even better for this: they do absolutely nothing that's really proprietary.

For an example of this on a much smaller scale look at TheTVDB (http://thetvdb.com/), their entire site source is OSS, yet there are no clones.

For some companies where the barrier to entry is very high or requires a lot of market share to compete, this may be true. But for others where the investment in actually building the thing was the only barrier, giving the code out to the world can be a terrifying prospect.

You are right, it's not always appropriate. However, in most cases, it's just fine. Here's a list of companies that I think could open up at least 95% of their code: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Tesla/Ford/GMC/Toyota/BMW/any car manufacturer, Apple, Home Depot/Walmart/Safeway/any retailer, Mint, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and many more.

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...

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