[drdg]

Can you name some examples where open source won?

In the past I wanted to believe this can be the future, where open source will somehow win (at least in some parts). What I see is that even the biggest projects are mere tools in the hands of the big corporations. Linux, Postgres, etc. All great! But have been assimilated. I cannot really consider them a win.

It seems to me that it goes back and forth - it also seems to me that the advancements in LLMs will go a similar route.

[mfuzzey]

Why do you not consider that Linux has won?

It dominates everywhere from fairly small embedded, to super computers, with the one notable exception of the desktop, a shrinking market and mostly a historical anomaly (Microsoft cornered it before Linux was a viable player in that space).

I wouldn't say it is a "mere tool in the hands of big corporations". Sure these days most Linux developers are paid by corporations (a good thingg since that allows them to work full time on Linux) but the important point is that those corporations don't control Linux. Sure they can pay people to work on specific areas but they don't get to decide what gets merged or what the acceptance criteria are.

More generally, beyond Linux, huge swathes of new technology are expected to be open source or no one looks at them (think language and frameworks).

In the late 90s / early 2000s it became obvious that software development would no longer be about writing things from scratch but building on existing components. But there were two competing models for this. There was Microsoft's vision which envisionned a market of binary components that people would buy and use to compose application (that gave rise to the likes of Active X, DCOM, OLE) and the Open Source community vision that saw us building on components supplied in source form. It's clear that today the second vision has won. Even proprietary software now uses huge quantites of open source internally (take a look at the "about" screen on your Smartphone, TV or router).

LLMs may be the exception here for the moment (mainly due to the compute power needed for training).

[api]

Open source has won hands down for developers. It’s basically a giant tool bin and parts yard for people who build things with software. It’s also useful to extremely tech savvy people who like to DIY homelab type stuff.

In the consumer realm it has lost equally decisively.

The reason, I think, is that the distance between software nerds can use and software the general public can (or wants) to use is significantly larger than anyone understood. Getting something to work gets it like 5% of the way to making it usable.

Even worse, making it usable requires a huge amount of the kind of nit picky UI/UX work that programmers hate to do. This means they have to be paid to do it, which means usable software is many many times more expensive than technical software.

The situation is hopeless unless people start paying for open software, which is hard because the FOSS movement taught everyone that software should be free.

[jrm4]

"In the consumer realm it has lost" is kind of weird to me, though. I'd say, don't think about "developers" v. everyone else but "anyone doing anything creative, as opposed to merely consuming, with computers and related devices" and it's not at all clear that the creators are the losers?

[Karrot_Kream]

This seems almost like you're framing an observation "in the consumer realm it has lost" as some moral failing and feels in dangerously bad faith. What's the point? Do you really want to willfully ignore the artists using Procreate a closed source iOS app, the chip designers using proprietary EDA tools, the DJs using proprietary DJ software like Serrato, the musicians using proprietary DAWs like Ableton?

If anything, it's the creatives who use more proprietary software than the folks doing generic office work that can get away using LibreOffice and read PDFs using evince.

[ghaff]

The generous reading, which I think is mostly correct, is that consumers mostly don't directly run open source software, e.g. LibreOffice on Linux. A ton of the software they run has significant open source components but it's packaged up as a proprietary SaaS or an app store app.

[api]

SaaS is how most people use open source, which is very ironically the least open way of using software. Closed source commercial (local) software is considerably more open and offers far more privacy and freedom.

[sebastiennight]

I wouldn't say that open-source SaaS is the "least open" way of using software.

If you're using a hosted service based on open source software, you know that you can leave. You can grab your data and self-host. You can move it to another host that has reused or forked the code. You can run it locally. You have options.

If you're using local closed-source software, your files might not even be usable without an Internet connection. Think Spotify (closed source, local) where even your "offline" playlists won't load if you don't allow the software to phone home once in a while.

[api]

Self hostable SaaS does restore a lot of freedom but it’s not the most common paradigm. Most SaaS is closed.

Spotify is SaaS. It’s an app that runs locally but the data and most of what it really does lives in the cloud.

[drdg]

Yes, this was exactly my point. Not sure why I got down voted so much for it. And note what companies such as hashicorp and elastic are doing.

[ghaff]

>Linux, Postgres, etc. All great! But have been assimilated.

If you're a company, you almost certainly want support, certifications, and related benefits of having a commercial product. And it's nice to have that avenue to fund developers. But the side effect is that the software is still free as in beer open source that anyone can download. In general, I'd say open source infrastructure software has won pretty thoroughly (even if not universally).

[toenail]

> Linux, Postgres, etc. All great! But have been assimilated. I cannot really consider them a win.

Are you trying to argue that free software becomes less free because specific groups of people contribute to it?

[jrm4]

Linux absolutely won the OS wars.

We just didn't fully realize what that would look like before it happened.

[drdg]

It won the OS wars on the server side, no question there! It works greats, serving all the SaaS platforms out there...

But as a desktop? Most of my colleagues are using apple hardware/MacOSX. Personally, I'm writing this on Ubuntu - I've been on Linux since forever.

Another one: Android. Built on top of Linux, its core is open source, but is it REALLY in the spirit of open source? One most new phones you cannot put LineageOS (I've always checking the list before I buy).

How does it help that I have the source of Linux and Android, but I'm still not able to build the OS for most mobiles?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not disillusioned with open source. Not at all. I love and appreciate the open source I have (this includes e.g. Rust) I'm just cautious about what the author of the article is foreseeing. You might have a vibrant community, doesn't mean its output won't get wrapped inside some SaaS/big corp.

[flohofwoe]

Complaining about companies releasing their work under a liberal open source license is a first-world-problem if I've ever seen one ;)