Comment by api

Comment by api a day ago

The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data.

Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros.

I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.

skissane a day ago

> I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.

The XNU kernel is only partially open-sourced. And it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release.

It is better than nothing, but is more “technically open source” than “open source in spirit”. A lot of Darwin code can’t even be compiled outside of Apple because the open source code includes closed source headers.

It wasn’t always like this… in the early days of OS X, you could download an ISO of open source Darwin, install it on your PPC Mac, and it was actually a useable Unix-like OS (missing Apple’s GUI, but it offered X11 as an alternative). Then Apple lost interest-and got scared their (relative) openness was making life easier for jailbreakers and Hackintoshes-and nowadays you aren’t getting a usable open source Darwin without a huge amount of work to reconstruct and substitute the missing bits (which I know some people are working on, but no idea how much success they’ve had)

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mustache_kimono a day ago

> it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release.
Mostly agree re: your entire post, but, re: OSS above, does not matter, you don't owe an open development model to anyone.

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- skissane a day ago
  
  I think there can be a difference between the literal and official meaning of a term, and what it most commonly means in practice - and that’s a descriptive claim about how words get used, not a prescriptive claim that anyone has some moral or legal obligation to do anything in particular
  
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xwowsersx a day ago

> The infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software. Cloud SaaS is far more closed than closed source software on a personal device. Often it’s not even possible to export your own data.

That's fair, but I think it misses the distinction between who owns the infra and what the infra is built on. Yes, SaaS is often closed to end users, but the reason those companies could even exist at scale is because the underlying layers (OS, databases, frameworks, orchestration, etc.) are open.

You're right that control shifted from users to cloud vendors, but that's a business model problem, not a failure of open software. If anything, FOSS won so decisively on the supply side that it enabled an entire generation of companies to build closed services faster and cheaper than ever before.

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ThrowawayR2 a day ago

"FOSS won so decisively on the supply side" because it's basically giving away something that would ordinarily cost money. Anyone can "win" by giving away something of value away for free; it's not a victory that's worth anything.
What those adopters are not doing is opening their own source code as FOSS or contributing back to FOSS. That means that there isn't a path to future success.

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api 14 hours ago

You are so close. Or maybe you’re there and I misread that.
FOSS killed the profit margin in just making software. That shifted profits to hosting it, and in so doing shifted the industry to a more closed model than it had before.
In other words the net effect over time on the system from FOSS was to close things more. It had the opposite of the intended effect. We incentivized closed.
The result had been horribly dystopian. Before we had PCs that ran closed source but still local software and had our own data. Now we have cloud they runs opaque software we can’t even run ourselves and our data is not ours and is subject to mass surveillance. (By “our” I mean most people. Tech savvy people can opt out with some effort.)
This is super common. It’s hard to predict the actual incentive structure that something will create, and it is incentives not intentions that determine outcomes. Large scale socioeconomic systems are mindless gradient descent machines that chase profits of various kinds the way a plant grows toward sunlight.

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fluoridation a day ago

>he infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software.

Free software was conceptualized at the dawn of the personal computing era. As it is defined, it could never prevent isolating users from the software by isolating them from the hardware, because it was assumed that the software would run on the hardware that the user interacted with directly. You could build an SaaS product on entirely copyleft software without breaching any licenses. It's only specific kinds of free software that require giving users the source code. And even then, they don't require the service provider to implement any changes. If Google Docs was free software, Google isn't going to integrate your patch if it doesn't want to.

>Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros.

>I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.

I mean, what does it even mean to "interact directly" with something, at that point? If I'm using Firefox on Android to watch a YouTube video, is that direct enough or not? Firefox, like the kernel, is just a facilitator for a task I'm interested in. Hell, arguably, so is YouTube. Then it follows that almost no one actually "interacts directly" with software; people interact directly with their task, and software is ultimate just a tool that's more or less practical to accomplish it.

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