Posted by lhoff 10/27/2024
Open source is about licensing, big tech is about scale.
When I sit down at my mac, I have a working and very polished calendar, mail client, todo list, contacts, note taking app, music player, browser, photo editing and library management tools, video call and conferencing software etc. And all of it syncs with my phone and my tablet out of the box.
When I sit down at a Linux machine, I have a calendar that breaks every 5 minutes and I can't share anything with anyone without futzing with iCal feeds and hiring another provider, a mail client that is ugly as sin and doesn't integrate with the calendaring or contact management stuff at all, a job and a half to find a note taking app that actually works properly, a todo list app that syncs with nothing, a spreadsheet package that crashes whenever I try and print something and oh hell I give up by then. And the answer to this? Roll out nextcloud on a VPS. Kill me, with a spoon. This is not freedom, it's just slavery of another kind.
I just want to get shit done. Big tech covers that. Please take this as a recommendation to tidy up all this hell and just help people to get shit done and then it will be an alternative to big tech.
Now that I'm working on a proprietary version[2] (with a block editor I rewrote from scratch), I'm talking to these end users and understand their frustration in using my product. For example, many users had issues discovering the different features of the app, so I created a toolbar, which much helped. This is just one example.
On paper this sounds really good but there's a lot of overhead when it comes to maintenance. "Yeah, it's just one more docker-compose.yml, big whoop"(yes kubernetes is pointless overkill if you are the sole user). I've said that too many times and it's not true cause it only takes one small thing that you overlooked and you have to spend a day or two to put everything back up together.
Another thing worth mentioning is that open source can be a good alternative but open source does not mean free or cheap. For instance, I've gotten really into drones and radio communications lately. Take hackrf and the baby brother that is flipper zero - they are both completely open source but neither of them is cheap. In fact, they are really expensive - they are effectively open source ASIC's. I'm willing to bet that north of 80% of the cost is down to the software and not the hardware - because polishing a piece of software to the point where you can pick up a product and use it without effort or a steep learning curve, involves a ton of work on behalf of developers and UX/I people.
And you can't really cut off all big tech - open source phones are BAD, you don't really have a good alternative to google maps and waze, you still heavily rely on search engines and a few dozen services if you start digging deeper. There are also a number of services which do not have an even half-decent open source alternative. Also not everyone has the skills to set up and run these things.
I think the big case in favor of self-hosting whatever you can is that while open source is far from immune to leaks, if it resides in your private network(which it should) without access to the rest of the world, those holes will eventually be patched and you can take action in the meantime - stop the service, block a few ports, etc. The odds of you personally getting affected are pretty low. Now if a leak happens in big tech, there's nothing you can do about it and by the time you learn about it, it's often too late. Honestly, this is the number one reason I'm doing this to myself.
Because it is risky. The more esoteric the knowledge gets, the further it moves away from your core business, the more in-demand the skills are. As an example, maintaining your own metrics and timeseries storage. It takes quite a few skilled hands to do this in house and probably only feasible for larger companies anyway. Or you can simply hand this problem over to DataDog. While they are pricey, it is potentially pricier to build your own internal DataDog-like system, especially if you consider the opportunity cost of pulling your most skilled engineers to build it instead of building your product that your customers are paying for. Companies are perfectly willing to pay a premium to not worry about something, and that includes not worrying about your very skilled engineers leaving and then needing to scramble because no one else understands what has been built.
1. You aren't average. Market forces might not align with your use case. The pricing model might change, or it might happen that you find out later it doesn't scale well for your business.
2. They might leave you suddenly. For example, all the google "products" (quotes because there is actually only one--ads) that have disappeared over the years. Even when an open source dependency suffers a cataclysmic licensing event, you can still fork it and carry on, provided you've both chosen your dependencies wisely and hired the people capable of maintaining them.
3. By choosing a vendor you're making a commitment to ossifying a part of your stack. The observability example is a good one here. At the companies I've worked for who do all their logging, metrics, alerting, etc in-house, developers aren't afraid to use the tools. The tools adapt to the requirements, whether it's cost efficiency, features, whatever. At the companies where we've used vendors everyone's perpetually afraid of increasing the monthly bill, and nobody has a say in deciding what goes on the product roadmap. To be clear, this might be the right trade.
If you need more anxiety, just think about the hottest technology right now that is capable of relating massive amounts of data instantly :-)
SQL isn't ready for AI.
Imagine if you had to compete producing widgets in a market landscape where some hyper-conglomerate would source and distribute all power, define and install all plug standards and, in addition, produce and rent any widgets that saw consumer traction. For decades this is what has come to pass as normal in this domain.
Openness (of varying degrees), standards-adherence, interoperability and competitive markets are connected attributes. In this context open source is an extreme productivity multiplier. Maybe the most potent such development in modern human history. Entities that adopt open source would collectively out-compete in innovation and usefulness any proprietary offering. But for this mechanism of sharing knowledge to thrive and reach its full potential there has to be a real market for digital technology.
Big tech can totally sell "FOSS services" and provide ground works for it, like some of it do - you don't have to lock people with proprietary stuff.
Even more, big IT tech couldn't exist without FOSS in this form and shape, while the opposite is not true.
I prefer privately hosted web and mail servers. Before "the cloud", the economy worked just fine and companies had enough money for in-house IT.
By using the nextcloud example, the author of the article is asking the wrong question.
Yet they dont.
The problem is not big tech. Not open source. It's that the European tech economy crippled itself and cries wolf about it all day.
It's the same kind of political denial as with being "concerned" about climate change, but still trading with China (even worse when this allows for fake self-congratulations about decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, when it mostly comes from most of the industry having been exported).
The USA is enjoying the wealth they gained in both world wars and they also kept their defacto colonies in the South America and Pacific.
Europeans destroyed their wealth in the world wars and they lost their colonies. Of course the end of the colonialism has ended some of the human suffering but it has a cold-hearted economic impact.
The American venture capitalists are all coming from the industries that got stronger at and after the world wars. They invested silicon and then the tech industries that built the wealth exponentially. The Europeans had to rebuild their countries until 70s and the investments they made are smaller. Similarly the US spent its government money to nuclear and space programs that further strengthened the economy. EU spent its surplus to improve post-Soviet countries which may or may not pay dividends in the future.
It may require significant reallocation of resources from certain places to tech. It may require diverting the resources spent on old pensioners who are the biggest voting block. It is not a simple lack of political will. It requires reshaping a century of decisions.