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Open Source

Are We In 'The Golden Age of Open Source'? (infoworld.com) 72

Posted by EditorDavid from the land-of-the-free-code dept.
InfoWorld's Matt Asay argues we're in (or near) "the golden age of open source." Here and there an open source company might struggle to make a buck, but as a community of communities, open source has never been healthier. There are a few good indicators for this.

The first is that the clouds -- yes, all of them -- are open sourcing essential building blocks that expose their operations. Google rightly gets credit for moving first on this with projects like Kubernetes and TensorFlow, but the others have followed suit. For example, Microsoft Azure released Azure Functions, which "extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or third-party service as well as on-premises systems...." More recently, AWS released Firecracker, a lightweight, open source virtualization technology for running multi-tenant container workloads that emerged from AWS' serverless products (Lambda and Fargate). In a textbook example of how open source is supposed to work, Firecracker was derived from the Google-spawned crosvm but then spawned its own upgrade in the form of Weave Ignite, which made Firecracker much easier to manage.

These are just a few examples of the interesting open source projects emerging from the public clouds. (Across the ocean, Alibaba has been open sourcing its chip architecture, among other things.) More remains to be done, but these offer hope that the public clouds come not to bury open source, but rather to raise it...

it's not hard to believe that the more companies get serious about becoming software companies, the more they're going to encourage their developers to get involved in the open source communities upon which they depend... [I]t's not just the upstarts. Old-school enterprises like Home Depot host code on GitHub, while financial services companies like Capital One go even further, sponsoring open source events to help foster community around their proliferating projects.... So, again, not everybody is doing it. Not yet. But far more organizations are involved in open source today than were back in 2008... Such involvement is happening both at the elite level (public clouds) and in more mainstream ways, ushering in a golden era of open source.
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Are We In 'The Golden Age of Open Source'? More

Are We In 'The Golden Age of Open Source'?

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  • And could not be healthier? When you can't even earn a living, minimal wage with that? https://youtu.be/1984NYOPRsI [youtu.be]

    • Sorry to hear someone on YouTube is having trouble figuring out how to make good money. I watched the first 60 seconds of the video - silence, a shot of somebody's hands on a keyboard, doing nothing. Eventually I got bored of looking at his desk while he says nothing and does nothing.

      Hopefully he's better at *something* than he is at public speaking or at making YouTube videos, because he's probably not going to make a ton of money from videos of him not doing or saying anything. I start my presentations

      • I forgot to elaborate on the intro format I've learned:

        1. Get their attention by either starting a story or a provocative statement.

        2. One too four sentence summary of what I'm going to talk about.

        3. Introduce myself - my name etc.

        Most people introduce themselves first, and poorly. Right after someone else introduced them, or for a YouTube video their name is right there in the screen. So the presentation begins with information that is both uninteresting and redundant. Shockingly, that doesn't grab the

        • Good points. One I try and stick to is always be clear in your mind: what message/lesson/etc. do you want the audience to go away with? Make sure you drive that home because everything else is peripheral.

          • That's a good point, and a good reminder for me.

            I've recently realized the same applies to resumes.
            I added a headline with 2-3 words to my resume and read it over to see if my main points are well-supported. My 20-year career can be summed up in there bullet point words:

            Security
            Software Development
            Trainer

            I teach programmers how to make secure software.
            Everything on my resume should support those three items.
            I recently added the third item. If my career was ten years, I'd pick two items rather than three.

  • It has greatly improved (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:10AM (#59078216)

    from the days of downloading source code from Usenet and compiling everything.

    I also seem to remember having to drive to a local university and putting emacs for a Vax system onto a mag tape.

    My boss and I ensured we made a very generous donation to the FSF from our company, back in the day.

    Making it so much easier doesn't mean it should be considered better. People need to be understand the ecosystem and how to help and support it. It's not a one-way street.

  • Wrong way to look at (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sivaraj ( 34067 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:11AM (#59078218)

    Calling this a golden age implies it will gradually decline. But that can't be the case. Open source model will become ubiquitous for all the infrastructure software.

    • I already IS (Score:5, Interesting)

      by EuropeanConsultant ( 6158770 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @05:02AM (#59078374)
      All those Gigacorporations of the Monetized Internet(google, facebook, Twitter, AWS,...) are all building their Walled Gardens on the basis of Free Software. But of course they keep all the important bits for themselves and even invent New Shackles for their victim-users. So we are probably in the Age Of Golden Cages built from Free Software ;-)

      • Jesus Christ

        Your attitude is exactly why Linux and the fucking cult behind it will never be mainstream

        • You love the Golden Cages ? Because someone makes $$$ from them ?
        • Exactly, and they all whine about how "Linux runs the world!"
          Fair enough, but it's not Ubuntu, or Red Hat, or Mint, or Debian, or... shit I ran out of flavours, that run the world, it's the Linux kernel, everything else is built on top of it, and lets face it, even hard core Linux people would not know what the fuck to do with just the kernel. The only reason that it is solid is because of a core group of people working (mostly) together. There is also a lack of free options, so... does winning by being
          • In any case, the Linux kernel is more efficient than the Windows kernel. Starting processes, traversing the files system - things like that. That is a major reason Linux is so successful.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by LordWabbit2 ( 2440804 )
        Yeah, because they are spending lots of money making it user friendly. user=idiot. And as long as you and every other nix zealot out there can't understand why people "just don't figure it out" and continue with that attitude, the longer windows will dominate. Mark's attempt to make a user friendly version with Ubuntu made some strides, but it's not enough, because he didn't have enough money. Maybe he shouldn't have gone to space, but I doubt that would have helped. It takes a LOT of money to make sof
        • Linux and FOSS is "all so confusing", because it is not a single target your billions can corrupt, corrode and eventually destroy. Rather, the FOSS world is very resilient and can suffer the destruction of any single project. You corrupt the Linux kernel ? No problem, we have OpenBSD waiting in the wings. You corrupt LibreOffice ? No problem, we have LaTeX, GNUmeric and many others.

          Regarding your F.U.D. about different flavours of Linux: this is 99% of hyperbole mixed with 1% of truth. Linux GUIs are more

  • No (Score:5, Insightful)

    by weilawei ( 897823 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:11AM (#59078220)

    I'm pretty sure we're in the middle of an Open Source version of Eternal September, where everything turns into Windows.

  • ... and that works best in software and all-digital goods. Marxism with the brakes removed.
    See Shenzen for the hardware version of that.

    So, basically, yes, we are in the golden age of FOSS.

    • Re:it's called 'post scarcity economy' ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by demon driver ( 1046738 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:56AM (#59078272) Journal

      ... and that works best in software and all-digital goods. Marxism with the brakes removed.
      See Shenzen for the hardware version of that.

      So, basically, yes, we are in the golden age of FOSS.

      You seem to have no idea what Marxism is. Without any 'brakes', fully implemented, it would ensure everyone getting what they need and everyone contributing what they like and what they are good at, without enforcing the latter for someone to be eligible for the former, indeed without any such obligation above an absolute minimum of perhaps a few hours per week in order to keep society and its infrastructure going.

      What's happening in China is further away from Marxism than it ever was, it's state-controlled turbo-capitalism, with the distribution of income and wealth becoming more unequal year by year, same as in all other capitalist economies.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 )

        What in the _devil_?

        Please, let me know that this comment was meant as pure irony using the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by roman_mir ( 125474 )

        the horror, the horror of inequality, after decades of total equality brought to the Chinese by turbo communism, everyone lived equally, living in dirt, eating goo and wearing burlap, it was marvelous in its equality. It produced equally hungry and small people, small because of equal hunger.

        • Anti-communist propaganda always lacks even the most basic logic. The fact that the one major historical attempt at equality of wealth failed doesn't mean that there cannot be a functioning society based on an at least halfway equal distribution of wealth, and it doesn't make the existing and outrageous inequality which is intrinsic to capitalist economies any better.

      • since I don't think we can get past the "Dictatorship" part in "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (I'm a Social Democrat) but I did recently come across the best description of China's political system in history:

        When China does well it's a capitalist miracle, when it does poorly it's communist failure.

      • https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueO... [reddit.com]

        Seriously, read it. True marxism / communism / socialism / whatever you want to call it so far has always, always resulted in horrifying dictatorships that had to build walls to keep people in, and mass-murdered large parts of their own populations.

        If capitalism is really so bad, why do you suppose everyone and their dog are trying to immigrate into capitalist nations?

  • bitrot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by astrofurter ( 5464356 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:54AM (#59078264)

    Nah. Silicon Valley already cooked the goose that laid the golden eggs.

    Look around you, look at the applications you work on. The termites have set in. Every dependency chain is littered with abandoned packages. People still release new half-baked FOSS packages out of good will. But no one finishes them, no one maintains them. There's no living to be made as a FOSS author. Companies take but give nothing back.

    It's just a matter of time before the bitrot brings down the house.

    Maybe it's different outside America. Far from the stifling monoculture of Big Tech. Far from the Sandhill Road money cartel and their captive "startups". Far from the Stalinist paranoia of DC. Far from the stuffed suits and avarice of New York. Maybe...

    • Sigh. I am trying to setup a JSX build chain even as we speak

      I will pay any Corp top dollar to fix that godawful mess

      • Re: bitrot (Score:1, Troll)

        by weilawei ( 897823 )

        Dear Friend.

        As you read this, I don't want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday.

        My name is Peter Lawson,a merchant in Dubai, in the U.A.E.I have been diagnosed with Esophageal Cancer which was discovered very late,due to my laxity in carrying for my health. It has defiled all forms of medicine, and right now I have only about a few months to live, according to medical experts.

        I have not particularly lived my life so well, as I never really cared for anyone not even myself b

      • "I will pay any Corp top dollar to fix that godawful mess" Plenty of FOSS consulting companies around. Unlike Google, most of them don't dodge taxes and contribute to the local community. e.g "Savoir-faire Linux" out of Montreal, Canada. Here is their FOSS Skype Alternative: https://jami.net/ [jami.net] Bring them your problem, your money and they will use FOSS tools to fix your problem. You can even pay them to fix a FOSS project you want fixed. For the greater good of everyone. Just like the Linux kernel.

      • ... and you won't need JSX or many other build tools.

        Of course, you probably won't be able to do that because if you work somewhere like most companies, where so much other over-complicated crap is now "industry standard" (often because Facebook or Google pushed it).

        But in case you have some say over what tools you use, as I explain here:
        https://github.com/pdfernhout/... [github.com]
        "tl;dr: Choose Mithril whenever you can for JavaScript UI development because Mithril is overall easier to use, understand, debug, refactor

    • The problem is that the large companies use OSS, like OpenSSL, but don't support it... and then when glaring holes are found, they gripe and demand closed source solutions. If one gives something like the Gnu Privacy Guard a fraction of what it would cost to license a commercial solution, they could get enough coders to greatly improve it.

  • Unfortunately... No (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Robin Edgar ( 6038610 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:54AM (#59078266)
    Many open source projects are struggling to stay viable, loads are underfunded, understaffed and overstressed (eg Roundcube and sabredav). Most of what the big companies put online is incomplete, old and unmaintained. They hope that this kind of stuff will act as a gateway drug to their propreitary offerings. The big companies are forking projects and taking them over (yay! free software!) and then turning the updates into payed modules. I'd say the open source world is in disarray, especially if you consider that the complexity of projects is growing like crazy and the FOSS community people act like beggars by selling t-shirts to get some sort of funding because the FOSS fundamentalists refuse to think of making money using open source - usually a very easy stance for them to take, considering they are on a payroll. I discuss this in a bit more detail in my talk Open Source XOR Money https://youtu.be/inGz92AHjwo [youtu.be]

    • Re:Unfortunately... No (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @05:57AM (#59078430)

      > Many open source projects are struggling to stay viable, loads are underfunded, understaffed and overstressed (eg Roundcube and sabredav).

      In an open market, many businesses fail in the long run. We've seen that the same is true for ideas and software technologies.

      It's interesting that you mention "free software". It's important to remember that "free software" also means "free as in speech", and that many critical components of "free softwre" are evolving well. This especially include the Linux kernel, whose developers have successfully resisted the temptation to use "open source" that is not, in fact, "open" but is instead proprietary on top of a shared foundation. Those "open source" projects have often had real problem because they've lost community involvement in the project. The Xen software taken over by the CentOS community, who've abandoned and diverged from Citrix's attempted commercialization of Xen, seems to be a very good example.

  • I hope not (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gravewax ( 4772409 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:57AM (#59078274)
    If this is what the golden age looks like I hope I am not around to see the recessions. many projects struggling to survive with constant infighting and poor direction. many developers unable to earn a living with outsourcing of any paid work to cheap foreign bodies. Personally I hope we still have a long way to go to hit the golden age.
    • Build your Alternative Solution. Be creative. Use something else to achieve your initial objectives. E.g. you need a Content Mgmt System. Why not abuse Git and some indexing engine to store your content ? Generate your web pages using m4 macros.
  • The crown jewels are the desktop (Windows) where if it was open source they could strip out any telemetry, where they make their real money.

    • Apps and services are the crown jewels now, the desktop is legacy cruft. Google/Apple/Microsoft would like nothing better than to have developers working on a thin client (Chromebook, iPad pro, Surface) with the compiler and storage and such in their cloud where they have full control over everything. Same for video and photo editing - your Adobe subscription would get more expensive, but they'll include access to a datacenter full of GPUs to make it fast. Eventually AutoCAD and all the rest of the heavy

      • It seems we are heading back to the mainframe, where most endpoints were terminals pointing to a central server. Don't pay the timeshare bill, expect everything to be pulled.

        I wonder when the pendulum will start swinging back, or if we are going to wind up with basically X stations or Chromebooks.

        • I wonder when the pendulum will start swinging back, or if we are going to wind up with basically X stations or Chromebooks.

          Lots of Windows use is already basically X stations, like your average POS terminal. Most of those seem to be like that now. For most people with more than a handful of seats, they will probably want their own little cloud. For people with just a couple of seats, they will wind up having two affordable choices. Either they can go down when the internet is down, or they can go OSS.

  • past golden age (Score:3)

    by sad_ ( 7868 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @04:38AM (#59078342) Homepage

    sure, those cloud companies give us bread crumbs of whatever their online apps/infrastructure is made of, but good look replicating it all by yourself at home (or for your company). and not only cloud companies use these tactics, a lot of open source programs, backed by companies, these days are just a small part of the complete proprietary stack/tool.

    that is not really open source in my book.

    • If they let you replicate their Corp at home they also let some billionaire in China do the same and put them out of business. Is this really so hard to understand to the FOSS cultists?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sad_ ( 7868 )

        you are making the classical mistake that OSS is about making money.
        the topic is the golden age of OSS, which it is currently not.

  • In theory git and services like github opened the door to a new golden age of opensource. Previously bothering to get anything upstream was a case of don't waste your time, work around instead.

    Github makes it a lot easier to contribute upstream though things are far from perfect. It's not just that it still takes a long time for PRs to be accepted or cleaned up then pushed down.

    There's a too much contribution problem. You can have a basic core service and before you know it there are a thousand module
  • + Raspberry PI as Personal Server(PS), connected to DSL Modem + ssh/scp to securely transfer file to/from the PS + personal blog on the PS on your OWN web server + Jabber/Xabber as a means of Team Communication. Server on your PS. + BitTorrent to distribute your own videos. No need for Goo-controlled youtube and their random censorship. + Git Server on your PS instead of MS-owned github. Freedom does not come free - it requires YOU to get off your backside and set up your Personal Server. Don't be shackled

  • No it was in 2007 (Score:5, Funny)

    by ruddk ( 5153113 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @06:01AM (#59078440)

    No it was in 2007.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @07:32AM (#59078584)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Yes, it fuels the Second Dotcom Bubble (Score:3)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @08:58AM (#59078788)

    I would say so. Even Microsoft got the open source religion and realized they're just a big cloud provider that happens to sell software on the side.

    One thing open source everything, combined with cheap money and cloud services, is fueling is the Second Dotcom Bubble. Startups that would have had to raise millions and buy data centers and software back in 1998 just to get going can now use the founder's credit cards until they get their VC money. As a result, you get a lot of companies that can stick around way longer than they would otherwise. You start up as a "nothing in-house" company and stay that way, and the startups fuel the SaaS businesses. All you have is a shared working space full of hipsters on MacBook Pros.

    We'll see what happens when the next recession hits, but I'm seeing parallels to the last bubble. Because it's so easy to do, you have tons of copycat companies each trying to serve a similar market. How many meal kit services are there? How many specialized Tinder-esque services do you have? How many subscription-box-of-junk services? One negative is that you're not going to have much firesale equipment on eBay after the next recession...maybe some Aeron chairs and bright white cafeteria tables but that's it.

    The nice things we'll get to keep from this bubble are cloud computing related in my opinion. However, all the cloud providers are working to get developers addicted to proprietary It Just Works(TM) services. Even if they're open-source based, the providers know it will take work to move these workloads from one cloud to another. If you just use the cloud as fancy hosting and keep the propretary services to a minimum, then yes I guess it's the golden age of open source.

    • FOSS helps me to protect my files, my Intellectual Property, my speech. The corporations of the Monetized Internet will wipe your entire files in a minute, if some rich&powerful folks have declared you an "undesirable" person. And I am not talking about real terrorism or crime. Just having an excentric opinion on some things which are important to the elite. So, irrespective of $$$, FOSS gives me sovereignty over my files, my source code, my ideas, my communications. I can now run my own, secure file

      • This already has happened. Look at Microsoft's eBooks, or perhaps things like MS Edge or Zune, if one paid for DRM encumbered tracks. Those are gone. Plus, software companies are starting to go into politics, such as how Salesforce has forced Dick's Sporting goods to give up selling guns. You never know if you may wind up on the wrong end of the political game, and some company pulls access to their software and your data, just to do some virtue signaling to the press.

  • Are There Too Many Golden Age Articles on Slasdot? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @09:07AM (#59078816) Homepage
    Not one, but two "Golden Age" articles in one day?

  • Has Netcraft Confirmed it?

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