Posted by lhoff 10/27/2024
every now and then open source is suggested as superior, because being free. Zero comment on code quality, who wrote it, why it came to be in the first place.
Even the argument that a host running open source makes delivery more trustworthy is super biased - major cognitive dissonance is that services based on open tech are very often not open, neither auditable.
There’s a lot of open source being controlled by same large corporations and the part that is not, does not constitute a service on its own.
Then we must admit it takes a lot of care taking care of services nobody else cares about (by means of support).
While open source is important for academia, I think open results are more important for government. Like I don’t care what somebody used to cater to this geospatial data, or that image. I care about the data that went in and went out. Open data is much more important in the era of open weights and closed sources training sets.
The general public is often misled to equate open source to free beer. Well that is also not entirely correct given plethora of not so free licenses. Asp not correct as costs are greater when you put the personnel running that service in the equation. I can see how this argument does not fly well with socialist ideologies, but that’s problem of ideology, not of costs or technology.
Even if we consider only those open projects which are also free - these come with less guaranties than a pair of second hand shoes bought from random store.
Don’t get me wrong - open source is great and we use it daily, but comparing means of distribution with quality of service is really like comparing ябълки и круши (apples and pears in Bulgarian). So it’s indeed time to stop blindly waving the open source flag, but actually try to understand the benefits and challenges it comes with.
almost the entire world and industry is literally running on open source.
Open source software is the building blocks used by large rent (service fee) seeking corporations. They will extract large profits from any of these contracts and that is a demonstrable fact, they are also nearly all from the USA and so those profits will flow in one particular direction. It is also a historical fact that governments have run successful large scale infrastructure. Make your choice.
This logic doesn’t really hold when it comes to large governments. Their needs are large enough that they can justify employing specialists. At that point, the profit margin the service business is capturing is just inefficiency. Internal services should be more common in large governments.
In practice, Microsoft isn't going anywhere. You're just paying for an external inhouse.
imho the question should be if the country continues to function if the project goes bankrupt. If it is so essential that it needs to be saved by the government (even in theory) then it lives outside the domain of capitalism.
Most of my Compose files contain 2 services (1 for app + 1 for database), but some contain 3 and some contain 1. It's incredibly easy to install new software and incredibly easy to shut it down temporarily if you don't need to use it all day.
I'd even argue that some companies would benefit more from using Swarm than Kubernetes. There is a lot of things to take into account when using Kubernetes (let alone setting it up for GitOps), but Docker Swarm can be managed by 1 person.
[1]: A joke, obviously, but it really isn't popular at all
I found setting up gitops via flux quite easy, apart from order of operations, like installing controllers and custom resource definitions before resources that need those CRDs etc.
What were you thinking of things to take into account for k8s over swarm?
The main difference for me is k8s needs a hell of a lot more boilerplate yaml for doing basically anything.
I'll admit I've never used K8s outside of work very much, so I can't really argue on that!
> What were you thinking of things to take into account for k8s over swarm? The main difference for me is k8s needs a hell of a lot more boilerplate yaml for doing basically anything.
I think that's a big one, yes. Stateful services (i.e. volumes) are also much easier to setup and understand with Docker Swarm - which is the same as Compose. The routing mesh[1] is also lovely. I didn't use the Kubernetes routing mesh at work because the infrastructure department didn't allow us to, why is one a reason I was arguing against it; we used a very powerful and complex system without profiting from one of its most powerful feature.
I would be very curious to know if the data are stored on their own data center or Microsoft's.
- [0] https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre...
Try to mimicking them is a waste of time and can't work, pushing the society toward ownership and freedom might work, because in a way or another we will end up there being technically the sole solution.
The big tech model where trust is in the company, not the person. Business love the big tech model because it's easier to let a few credit card companies deal with the trust issue than establish a trust relationship with everyone directly (or deal with cash), because surveillance capitalism is more profitable, and because it's more profitable to rent than to sell.
The big tech model can profit first on that cost difference, and later on switching costs which would otherwise inhibit abuse.
It has essentially nothing to do with the internet, as mainframes were networked long before personal computers. Even back in the 1980s, POS terminals used dial-up to verify credit card transactions.
The trust problem is easy to solve, with an open society: as long as payments got processed with open APIs and the government takes care of the frauds there is no trust problem. I do not need to trust a third party with eCash, I only need to trust my State protections.
The idea is already tempted, see not only the historic eCash, witch are the modern GNU Taler chosen (it seems) by the EU for the digital Euro https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/ and https://social.network.europa.eu/@EC_NGI/111499172838284606 but also https://openfisca.org and https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala or few others alike.
That's still embrional but in FLOSS terms we have already more than enough, we just miss the law enforcing it and the schools teaching it to the masses.
The centralized trust model does not require mainframes connected-to by dumb terminals. We need only look at how Visa in its first few decades used carbon copy devices and signatures, along with eventual consistency across a network of mainframes, to gain market power.
"The trust problem is easy to solve" is laughable, as you well understand by the need for "the law enforcing it and the schools teaching it to the masses."
There are aspects of a State to function that MUST be ONLY fully public. Again it's simple, in conceptual terms, hard to get applied in reality.
As I was on the phone and going through their documents, Windows 10 decided to install updates. I'd experienced this before and had done everything I could to try and configure Windows 10 to require my permission to run updates, but it doesn't work that way at least when you are a small business without an I.T. team.
After a few minutes I told the customer I would call them back when my computer completed its updates. The update ended up taking over 40 minutes to complete. What really bothered me the most is that Microsoft is setting the priorities of our organization - software update instead of resolving a critical customer issue.
I've never had a Linux update require so much time and definitely I've never been spontaneously and without requesting my permission locked out of my computer so Linux could run an update.
"Big Tech", as discussed in the article, appears to me to be no longer concerned with small customers and operating in such a way as to assume we are all just their guaranteed customers so they are free to do with us as they please.