
Open source innovation is now about vendor on-ramps - mgiannopoulos
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3238491/open-source-tools/open-source-innovation-is-now-all-about-vendor-on-ramps.html
======
sheetjs
> Google hopes to “standardize machine learning on a single framework and
> API,” namely TensorFlow, then supplement it “with a service that can
> [manage] it all for you more efficiently and with less operational
> overhead,” namely Google Cloud.

"vendor on-ramps" is the corporate equivalent of the open-source/pro split
commonly seen in non-corporate projects like sidekiq: A bunch of features are
available in the open source domain with liberal licensing, and beyond that
there are additional paid enhancements. Nothing new or surprising here

~~~
mooreds
What's different is that the corporate offerings used to be extra features or
monitoring or support--things that were sometimes nice, sometimes must haves.

Now the corporate offering is the ability to run the code in a way that makes
it useful. Setting up tensorflow is easy (at least, when I looked at the docs
it seemed to be), but running tensorflow so you get useful answers out of it
in a performant manner--that requires knowledge and data that can't be encoded
in code.

So the corporate offering that is tied to open source goes from being a nice
to have (or perhaps a requirement) to a hard requirement.

------
lukeqsee
I’m not sure how I see this as a problem.

Software is complex, costly, and time-consuming. Perhaps some individuals are
altruistic enough to take it on themselves without some sort of monitization,
but in a capitalistic society, most open-source will tend towards
profitability (in some avenue). And that’s just fine with me. We all have
benefited greatly from the model.

~~~
volaski
This is a problem because it results in vendors with huge budget to dominate
the open source space. This in itself is fine, but the side effect is that it
discourages all the grass roots innovations that could have happened, and
effectively kills off all the small time competition with no budget.

normally these large vendors have every interest to stay away from
implementing anything that undermines their power in the ecosystem.

When that happens, people can “fork” out of the project since it’s open, you
may say.

But imagine even thinking about forming something like react.js or tensorflow.
Unless you have very strong motivation it would be very discouraging to even
start.

So I think the problem with these large vendors dominating open source is that
when things come to this state, we don’t have an alternative and everyone is
locked into the “open source” projects given to us by those small number of
companies. Not so much different from their own services dominating consumer
market share.

~~~
nordsieck
> the side effect is that it discourages all the grass roots innovations that
> could have happened

> people can “fork” out of the project since it’s open [but] Unless you have
> very strong motivation it would be very discouraging to even start.

You don't get to have it both ways. Either:

1\. There are (potential) projects being stifled by big money, but forking
those projects is easier than starting from scratch.

or

2\. The scale of software is simply too big for hobbyists so there's no real
stifling going on and forks are too hard.

------
youdontknowtho
I don't know. All of the stuff that they are talking about in the article are
things that are of interest to business... message queueing and iot and
databases. I can see having the source code as an insurance policy against the
vendor going bust, i don't see how these projects are of interest to people.

The number of open source projects that I think actually matter in the
cyberpunk dystopian future we all live in is really small. I stopped believing
the hype about open source a long time ago. All that change the world BS makes
everyone feel great...you are a revolutionary because you use VI or
Debian...without having to do anything that might cost them something. Witness
all the helplessness and rage expressed when distros went to systemd.
Literally source available, more choice than ever, and Linux running on
billions of devices...but it's never quite good enough. How dare you oppress
me!

I don't know which freedom we are talking about anymore. It seems to be
available either in abundance or not at all depending on who you ask.

------
sitkack
This article is of low quality. False dilemmas, appeal to authority and
reasoning by analogy.

Even the on-ramp Kubernetes is now preferred container orchestration tool
across cloud providers and on-premise. A more apt article would be how the big
three cloud providers co-opt Open Source into managed services.

~~~
mikeokner
Isn't that a good thing, too, though? I personally love that I can spin up
Redis or Postgres or whatever as a managed service on AWS. I care about using
the software, not staying on top of patching the server running the software.

------
jlgaddis
The author worka for Adobe, but I'm having trouble remembering the last thing
that Adobe open-sourced.

~~~
ehllo
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM/CQ) is at its core open source. But you're right
in that manner, that they don't promote these projects or help them to grow.

[https://sling.apache.org/](https://sling.apache.org/) \- the core

[http://jackrabbit.apache.org/jcr/index.html](http://jackrabbit.apache.org/jcr/index.html)
\- content repository

[https://github.com/Adobe-Marketing-Cloud/htl-
spec/blob/maste...](https://github.com/Adobe-Marketing-Cloud/htl-
spec/blob/master/SPECIFICATION.md) \- htl/sightly (template language)

------
th0ma5
Some orgs go a little bit too far with this. Plotly for instance puts a
publish button by default which is a direct tie in to their cloud data
hosting. You can turn it off, but being opt-out instead of opt-in is a little
disingenuous for an open source project in my opinion.

~~~
nine_k
It its being open-source matters to you, you can go and alter the source to
your taste and remove the button. (I'm not even talking about contributing
something generally useful upstream.)

If someone just wants some piece of software for free, but does not care to
have a clue, then maybe they're better served by a paid subscription.

~~~
Retra
People who don't have a clue are better served by being exploited, rather than
informed?

~~~
nine_k
Exploited = taken advantage of, _to their detriment_. How is this the case
with a link placed somewhere?

People without both a clue and a desire to spend _time_ on acquiring it are
best served by some hand-holding and solving their specific problems for them.
Unlike the code, this can be a paid service, on which they can spend _money_
instead.

~~~
th0ma5
The link by itself doesn't come with a clear description of the security,
privacy, legal, or licensing implications of its use, even accidental use, and
could lead to unintended public data disclosure.

------
jzelinskie
>Spanner depends on TrueTime, a powerful way of coordinating resources in
disparate places. No one but Google has this technology, although AWS and
Microsoft could conceivably build it. Pretty much no one else on Earth could.

This is what I thought when the Spanner paper first came out. As I've worked
in industry, I've discovered that far more companies than you think have
access to the hardware necessary to support such behavior. If the interest
continues, I'd expect this hardware to become fairly standard on enterprise
gear.

Kubernetes is also developed with the goal of preventing vendor lock-in... It
is an on-ramp for "the cloud" in general, but there are many details that will
decide where you run your cluster.

~~~
sitkack
> Pretty much no one else on Earth could.

Hyperbole.

1) time is a crutch 2) GPS receivers are cheap enough for every machine to
have one.

------
open-source-ux
Another perspective on this topic by the CTO of influxDB:

 _My talk, titled "The Open Source Business Model is Under Siege," is about
the existential threat that Open Source Database companies, or any open source
software infrastructure, are facing from cloud vendors like Amazon Web
Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The talk is based on my own
experience building a business around open source over the last three and a
half years with InfluxDB and our other projects._

[https://www.influxdata.com/blog/the-open-source-database-
bus...](https://www.influxdata.com/blog/the-open-source-database-business-
model-is-under-siege/)

------
robert_foss
Some areas of open source like kubernetes for example definitely function at
least partially as on ramps.

But on the whole that's a small minority of projects.

------
thomastjeffery
> Google could open-source everything tomorrow without any damage to its
> revenue, but the code itself would provide other providers and enterprises
> only limited ability to increase their revenue unless Google did all the
> necessary prep work to make it useful to mere mortals not running superhuman
> Google infrastructure.

That's a poor excuse. Free software has more benefits than availability.

------
nixpulvis
Maybe shifty Open Source, but there are still plenty of "good" projects out
there.

------
jcoffland
> AWS, Microsoft, and Google are all racing to figure out how to turn their
> innovations into open source on-ramps to their proprietary services

I'm sorry but these companies neither started the Open-Source movement nor do
they define it today. Microsoft, in particular, was openly hostel towards the
Open-Source community for at least a decade. Today's Microsoft has embraced
Open-Source in some fantastic ways but still it is hard to forget comments
like these:

> "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to
> everything it touches," former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

> "A common trait of many of the companies that failed is that they gave away
> for free or at a loss the very thing they produced that was of greatest
> value--in the hope that somehow they'd make money selling something else,"
> Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie.

------
chriscappuccio
infoworld has such a short memory

