Linux Foundation Chief: Businesses 'Will Fail' If They Don't Use Open Source Code (techrepublic.com) 109
The luminaries speaking at the Google Cloud Next conference had some strong words about the importance of openness, innovation, and a rich developer community. An anonymous reader writes:
First Vint Cert said there's a "thread of openness" that runs throughout the internet, adding that "the internet, itself, has open characteristics" and thrives on "permissionless innovation." And Eric Brewer, vice president of infrastructure at Google, touched on the same themes, according to Tech Republic. "Linux, Brewer said, won some of the early internet wars because it was open, but also because it was the most innovative of its time. He also said that companies should work with open source for the value of the ecosystem and community, not just the value of the code." Then Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told the audience that business models were already changing to include open source, and ultimately made the argument that organizations that "don't harvest the shared innovation" of open source "will fail."
Value of the open source ecosystem and community?! (Score:4, Interesting)
After seeing how GNOME 3, systemd and PulseAudio have destroyed Linux's usability for me, and after seeing how Firefox has gone way down hill, I have to question the involvement of large organizations, profit-driven or not, when it comes to the development of open source software.
The best open source software I use on a daily basis is developed by a single individual, or perhaps a small team at most. This software is usable and pleasant to use, perhaps because the creators are often among its heaviest users.
The worst open source software I have had to use has been developed by corporations or large organizations. In some cases this software has been supremely disruptive, especially when it has been forced on unwilling victims, like in the case of systemd. It's really strange to talk about the "ecosystem and the community", when software like systemd has, in my opinion and experience, inflicted great pain upon both of those things.
Re:Value of the open source ecosystem and communit (Score:5, Insightful)
Gnome3 and its ilk, are the result of developers (and especially designers) not listening to their userbase.
"But the menu based metaphor systems are so... OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for not respecting user feedback about your choices as the dev team/designer.
The same same is true for things like Pottering's systemd.
"Script based inits, like found in sysv init, are just so OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for its removal.
If you are a developer/designer, and you disagree with my attestation that just because something is old does not mean you should remove it (or replace it with something else), take this to heart:
The air you breathe now is several MILLION years old. Why not replace that old, ancient air with something new, and edgy-- like ionized plasma freshly born from inside a star!? No, you don't like that idea, because your lungs aren't able to handle highly energetic plasma? Fancy that-- your end users have systems that are not able to handle having the init system changed willy-nilly either.
Blame it on the distros (Score:3, Interesting)
Gnome3 and its ilk, are the result of developers (and especially designers) not listening to their userbase.
The Gnome 3 designers aren't entirely to blame for the mess. Experimentation is a good part of innovation, or we'd be stuck using the teletype terminal. The problem is the speed with which the experiment was mainlined or adopted by the major distributions as the one and only true path to desktop nirvana. If they had allowed, say, a five-year phase-in period where features are added gradually then maybe users will get used to the new supposedly touch-friendly interface. Also a "classic" interface should have
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A good example of how this could be done is the evolution of the Google home page. Without Googling for screenshots, who can actually tell the difference between the Google home page now and then?
I don't need to view screenshots.. I just have to look at page rendering times and view the page source. Google's homepage used to be lightweight and simple, and now it's a bloated mess of javascript.
X11 familiar common environment (Score:2)
The problem is the speed with which the experiment was mainlined or adopted by the major distributions as the one and only true path to desktop nirvana.
I don't know to which "major distributions" you refer, but Debian descendants still provide the more traditional look and feel of Xfce. To put Xfce on your Ubuntu box, for instance, run sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop
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are just so OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for its removal
Fortunately for you, that was never the justification to replace them.
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What you list is one side of the coin - trying to get too much under one hat. You'd better turn to FVWM2 or something to get a lightweight non-bloated platform.
But the other side of the coin is that with openness you get interoperability - people can build their own applications interacting with your platform. The sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. The alternative is a lot of manual labor moving information between systems with the result that either the job isn't done or it's prone to e
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But the other side of the coin is that with openness you get interoperability - people can build their own applications interacting with your platform. The sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. The alternative is a lot of manual labor moving information between systems with the result that either the job isn't done or it's prone to error as well as being a lot slower.
However it didn't really take off until Linux came around where people discovered an OS that could be adapted to their solution with no heavy strings attached in the form of licensing, just navigation around the GPL constraints which aren't that cumbersome compared to Oracle or SAP licenses.
Here's where I like to bring up a metaphor -- I see two roles to software development: the first is to raise the ceiling -- innovate and create something better than anyone else before you, setting a new "maximum" that all software can aspire to; the other is to raise the floor -- set a new "minimum" that all software should be better than.
For instance, the existence of free implementations of quicksort, bubble sort etc raise the floor, because now everyone can write software that sorts data with the same
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ESR is not fashionable these days, but he has some good points about programmer motivation in the open source world.
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It's not so much about the paycheque, it's about the layers of indirection between the developer and the user. For a very small open source project, the developer and the user are the same person. The project grows and gets more users, then the developer is one of the users, but still directly in contact with people who have other use cases. Then the project grows a bit more and there are multiple developers, but they're all still users.
Then it grows a bit more, and now other people are paid to work on
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There's a lot of truth to that. Productivity tends to scale with N but communications overhead tends to N^2. So at some point as N increases the communications overhead will swamp actual productivity.
When employers aren't involved, eventually some subset of the developers will just do the right thing by themselves and the project moves forward. Otherwise, management enforces paying the communications overhead and nothing useful happens.
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The thing is, you just just belong to a smaller user segment, that was deemed secondary to serve in order to improve the service for the primary focus groups. There isn't any conspiracy, or incompetence there. The mentioned applications were just marketed for mass needs instead of your elitistic little world.
PulseAudio has worked well for me. I have not had one single issue with it in the last 10 years or so. Systemd based systems have been more manageable, and the absolute basics like automatic service res
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Init always had automatic service restarting, the "respawn" option of /etc/inittab...
Of course having a service automatically restart just masks the true problem - namely that your service doesn't stay running on its own for whatever reason.
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Obviously after a panic you have to boot, but that does not mean the problem is not going to be addressed.
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However handing respawning via inittab is like wielding a sledgehammer in a glass shop. With systemd you can enable/disable this with a easy setting on a per daemon basis and also define "only respawn X number of times during Y number of seconds" among other things.
Regarding your second opinion I tend to agree, however there exists plenty of daemons/services where a pure restart does no real harm (say a webserver, dns server and so on) and one does not exclude the other, i.e just because your daemons respaw
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Of course, in those limited cases, a small simple C program can take care of respawning without disrupting everything else in the system. Just drop it into the init script.
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I once wrote one in 10 lines of C that woule compile on every distro as well as Irix and Solaris. So very hard!
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And if it never got the SIGCHLD since signals does not have a delivery guarantee under any OS how well does your 10-line fork+execve+waitpid program work then?
And what if the daemon in question does a fork of it's own then your 10-liner gets the SIGCHLD while the daemon is running just fine and you will never get the SIGCHLD from the grandchild so you now have to add several lines more to read in a pid file and also hope that the daemon in question stores the running pid in such a file and further you have
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It never missed. Of course it was written for the daemon it was respawning.
However, now that cgroups is a thing, I could write one that never misses for any program. It would still be a lot less disruption to just drop that in than it is to use systemd.
Or, I could just use PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER to make the respawner instance become the parent of any children of the daemon so that I just have to see if I still have child processes. Not available when I wrote the 10 liner, but available now.
Of course, system
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Well if you only care about deamons that you write your self then yes this is a no problem as you write but as a distribution one have to think about all those strange and different daemons out there.
Of course, systemd isn't a perfect solution either. For example, if a daemon forks and exits and then the child process gets stuck but doesn't terminate, systemd won't know about it. A custom restarter could check for that condition as needed.
For the random daemon out there yes but it the daemon supports systemd it can send heartbeats to systemd with "sd_notify (0, "WATCHDOG=1");" in order to catch a stalled deamon. systemd itself can also send heartbeats upwards to a harware watchdog so your whole server gets a reboot if the whole system stalls.
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You missed it! I could use the very code that systemd uses only isolated as a small restarter utility and get the same results with far less disruption to the system as a whole. It's what they should have done in the first place. The only reason systemd is better at restarting than the old restarters is that it can rely on cgroups to do the heavy lifting and that didn't exist years ago.
It's the same reason systemd hasn't tried to consume *BSD or Mac.
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With systemd you can enable/disable this with a easy setting on a per daemon basis and also define "only respawn X number of times during Y number of seconds"
Indeed. Like you can do with init. But let not get facts in your way of spreading systemd propaganda.
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if (ch->count >= MAXSPAWN) {
initlog(L_VB,
"Id \"%s\" respawning too fast: disabled for %d minutes",
ch->id, SLEEPTIME / 60);
That said, I'm not sure why
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pid-matching is needed in the situation where the underlying deamon forks and thus the daemon is running as a grandchild to your monitoring process. Then the only way that your process can see if the grandchild is running is to check if the pid that it stored in a pid-file is running, however due to the limited space of pids (they are only 16 bits) there can spawn a different process that gets the same pid as your grandchild between the moment the grandchild crashes and your process detects that it's down w
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You don't have to use gnome3, pulse audio, or systemd if you don't want too. There are still distributions out there that shun those. Pick you poison or roll your own.
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What stopped you uninstalling PulseAudio or using one of the other Linux Desktop Environments [howtogeek.com]. Video demo of XFCE vs MATE vs KDE [youtube.com].
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--Yah, I didn't like Pulseaudio for a while but it actually comes in handy for HDMI video output and volume control (pavucontrol). Systemd I don't like (and use the Antix distro to get around it) and haven't used GNOME regularly since about 2.4.
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It's trivially easy to dump pulseaudio and GNOME3, but systemd is somewhat harder to get rid of since it likes to dig it's tentacles into everything.
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> The best open source software I use on a daily basis is developed by a single individual
From a business perspective that would be risky unless it is not in any way business critical.
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But it's a lot cheaper than starting over from scratch if a proprietary vendor decides to cancel the project.
Re:Value of the open source ecosystem and communit (Score:4, Insightful)
Or you are prepared to take over should that individual decide to retire from the project (not usually an option with proprietary software) or the software is sufficiently mature that further development is not needed (actually fairly common in business software). Again, advantage to Free software since licensing extra copies isn't an issue.
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After seeing how GNOME 3, systemd and PulseAudio have destroyed Linux's usability for me
Yeah damn my ability to switch audio dynamically in a modern way. Damn being able to manage system services without wading through 100 line scripts. Damn .... No actually you're right GNOME 3 can fuck right off.
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Gnome3 I can understand, but just use Kde instead.
But how exactly did systemd and PulseAudio destroy usability for you? Personally I found they make my desktop system much better.
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Please elaborate on what you mean.
One problem for large banks is that they are tied down in systems written in Cobol a long time ago where only few persons have a good grasp of what the system do and with parts that nobody dares to touch because it works but nobody knows why since the person who wrote that stuff once has passed on to the afterlife.
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Banks are usually so far behind that the code that runs things is hidden behind several black boxes.
Investment banks (note, not the same thing as regular deposit banks) on the other hand are constantly pushing for faster hardware, assembly-level code at all levels to ensure their orders go out faster than their competition. That 20ms round trip time between the NASDAQ and the Banks computers means the difference of millions of dollars per second.
But banks do not, ever, benefit from open source, because they
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Gatekeepers worried (Score:3)
Those things Google mentions-- like "Permissionless innovation" and the like-- those frighten the shit out of businesses who revolve around gatekeeping.
You see, to stay relevant in such an atmosphere, one has to actually be innovative, stay innovative, and be among the most innovative. That costs money and effort. Innovating early, then stagnating the market with gatekeeping and patent abuse allows them to reap big financial rewards for years while doing nothing but placating shareholders. (See, EG, the likes of Oracle.)
Google is *really* telling them that their market abuse strategy is doomed to failure, because innovators will not be discouraged by their heavy handed attempts to stop them, and the internet amplifies that innovation.
Expect lots of denial, gnashing of teeth, and doubled-down litigation in the near future.
Oh yeah (Score:2)
Point me to the open source equivalent of SolidWorks or Adobe Premiere and then we can talk.
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Nobody seems to have been willing to make an actual project (and it would take a whole team and actual project leadership!) to create free industrial CAD/CAM on the level of Solidworks/CATIA.
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How about FreeCAD [freecadweb.org].
I'm not claiming it's there yet, but it is quite useful in it's current form and improving. Certainly it shows that sombody IS willing to make an actual project.
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Point me to the open source equivalent of SolidWorks or Adobe Premiere and then we can talk.
There are opensource video editors, if that's what you mean by the trade name Adobe Premiere. Simply saying open source equivalent of [proprietary software] makes it difficult, if not impossible, to answer your question since if you're looking for the precise feature set or look-and-feel then obviously anything that's not Adobe Premiere is going to be not equivalent. Same thing for SolidWorks. What is SolidWorks, some sort of design software or a particular piece of software named SolidWorks that works exac
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Point me to the open source equivalent of SolidWorks or Adobe Premiere and then we can talk.
OpenSCAD .. if you have a brain is better than any "3d-cad" guifui stuff where you spend countless hours making things look pretty. .. like no one really uses Excel any more.
Whole of 3D-printing was built on it and it's pretty darn good. In about 5-10 years NO ONE will use Solidworks
This too will pass.
warm fuzzies for 'openness' (Score:2)
Now let's get this thinking into medical and other research, solar and other physical product development, and finally ... government. Oh yes, and that girl next door.
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Not everything works out, but the pieces that do came at the right time with the right functionality. Just because someone failed doesn't mean that you shouldn't try since you may have the correct flavor at the correct time.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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as long as FOSS is so politicized and rigid that an individual or company cannot sell more than a single copy of their software before someone else gives it away for free?
There are many licenses out there, and nobody is forcing you to use a particular license. I'm trying to understand your point, which in a sense seems to be something like "FOSS would be more successful as a brand if it wasn't FOSS." Well, in which case, 1. it wouldn't be FOSS any more, and 2. again, nobody is forcing you to use that licensing model.
Looking around, there's still plenty of jobs around for skilled programmers. Finally, and this may shock you; some people are motivated to create by values other
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For those that do not know what the blessed trinity is, its 1.- Selling services, 2.- Selling hardware, and 3.- e-begging.
What exactly is this "blessed trinity"?
Services, hardware, or donation.
None of these three models have proven viable for, say, single-player video games with production values competitive with current-generation AAA games.