
Ask HN: Has FOSS Software Won? - foobar_
Considering the following markets<p>- Embedded &#x2F; IoT<p>- Server &#x2F; Web &#x2F; Cloud<p>- Gaming Console<p>- Mobile<p>- Enterprise Software<p>- Desktop<p>In all the markets except desktop open source software has &gt; 50% market share.<p>If you consider Mac and Chrome OS, Virtual Machine Installs, Desktop reinstalls, people using both Windows and Linux at $work ... I would wager that FOSS Desktop Market share is well over 15%.<p>Based on that would you say FOSS has won ?<p>On a side note would you consider carpentry &#x2F; IKEA as a model of OSS, where openness is obvious ?<p>Where FOSS has failed IMO is closed computing and closed data.<p>Reducing a general purpose computer to a vendor purpose computer by means of special firmware (the Apple CPU being the new culprit on the block). This also happens on the cloud. This is why Mac or Playstation are still considered closed source as compared to Android which allows you to install ROMs for the most part.<p>For some strange reason it is acceptable for data to be closed source. It is clearly where the money is. The user owns the data and the more I look at it ... the idea of transferable copyright for perpetuity is absurd.
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pabs3
Ironically, I'd argue that FLOSS has simply served to enable proprietary
software vendors.

In embedded/IoT, devices might use FLOSS but they are usually violating the
licenses and the parts that make the device special are usually proprietary
(think robot vacuums running Linux with a proprietary daemon doing house
mapping etc). Often there are proprietary drivers or firmware too.

In servers FLOSS operating systems have indeed won, but lower level hardware-
facing software like UEFI has not and indeed most proprietary UEFI
implementations are based on FLOSS implementations, but with proprietary
features or hardware support added that means users can't use the FLOSS
version.

On the web FLOSS has indeed won, it is fairly rare to use proprietary
JS/backend frameworks, but the things that are built using FLOSS web tools are
mostly proprietary.

On the cloud FLOSS may have won the VM side, but the hypervisor side is trade
secret land and management interfaces are mostly proprietary, very few cloud
vendors use OpenStack.

Gaming consoles may use some bits of FLOSS internally, but they are locked
down and proprietarised.

Mobile OSes may use some bits of FLOSS internally, but they are locked down
and proprietarised to the extent that it takes a lot of work to get Linux
running on a newly released device, sometimes even requiring exploiting
security vulnerabilities.

Enterprise Software might be based on FLOSS but it is all proprietary at the
end of the day.

On the desktop, the trend continues, macOS is FLOSS+proprietary, Chrome OS is
FLOSS+proprietary.

~~~
foobar_
Precisely, this is why I think open data should be the next battle. All code
takes input and gives output. I don't mind closed source as long as the
interfaces are open ... but data being bought and sold is really troubling.
Apart from public data sets, most data sets are closed. I am not sure if there
are companies that publish _all_ the data they collected openly.

~~~
pabs3
The data issue is that it most of it shouldn't be collected in the first
place, not that it should be public.

~~~
foobar_
Well thats a chicken and egg problem in a way. Without data you can't build
some types of software. I think you have three types of data.

1\. Private data / Linked Data

This is the data contributed by the user. Shopping data for example. I think
the EU data laws are meant to guard this. I think it is both unethical and
illegal to sell / publish primary data without the user's consent.

2\. Public data

In social networks you also get interaction data, which the user had made
public. I don't see any reason for companies not to publish this. Right now
people use crawling to get this data.

3\. Insights

This is the data generated by ML and statistical analytics.

By open data I mean user should be able to get a dump of all three and the
organisation should? publish 2 openly and 3 if it wants to openly as well.

Also see:
[http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000810.html](http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000810.html)

~~~
pabs3
I don't think any of those things should be collected nor published.

~~~
foobar_
How would you solve a basic e-commerce use case then ?

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gitgud
OSS has won the cloud. This makes sense as companies gain a lot by
collaborating on Server Technology, and don't lose much.

OSS has won mobile (kind of). Android makes sense as multiple companies can
collaborate on the same OS and put their own layers on top.

Basically FOSS has excelled in every field _except_ the desktop. This is
because:

\- Hardware is tightly controlled by a lot of PC manufacturers, which aren't
all that interested in supporting a different OS.

\- Apple and Microsoft which have developed their OS's for decades, gaining
private experience in GUI design and user experience, which doesn't seem to be
as popular in Open-Source desktop OS's.

\- Majority of people don't even know you can change the OS.

I think until manufacturers start releasing desktop computers with FOSS
preinstalled, like Android phones... FOSS has not won

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CM30
Depends on the market. The following ones have definitely seen open source
win:

Servers (as mentioned, various Linux distributions with things like Apache
also being open source on top of that)

CMS systems (WordPress, Drupal, Magento, MediaWiki et al)

Programming Languages (virtually no one pays for one anymore)

Source control (Git)

Web browsers

These are dubious though:

Mobile (Android is open source, but iOS still holds a decent percentage of the
market)

Enterprise software

And I don't think the gaming world has been won by open source software just
yet. I don't see Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/Valve open sourcing their dev kits/OS
software/firmware/whatever, and those companies dominate most of the market.

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burntoutfire
Most Enterprise software is not FOSS - it's either written in house and owned
by the corporation which wrote it, or it's SAP etc. You probably meant the
stack that enterprise software is running on and not enterprise software
itself?

