Open Source: Big Company Point of View
January 2, 2020
DarkCyber noted a quite good and meaty Slashdot write up called “CNBC Reports Open Source Software Has Essentially ‘Taken Over the World’”. What makes the information interesting is that a big media company reports that other big companies are definitely into open source software. The sources for the information include:
- The Google
- Microsoft GitHub
- IBM Red Hat
There are a couple of slightly less power entities referenced as well; namely, the executive director of the Linux Foundation and a real live open source maintainer.
The main idea is encapsulated in this quote:
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, even tells CNBC that 10,000 lines of code are added to Linux every day. “It is by far the highest-velocity, the most effective software development process in the history of computing… As the idea of sharing technology and collaborating collectively expands, we’re moving into open hardware initiatives, data-sharing initiatives. And that’s really going to be the future…
The write up does not mention the business actions underway to make open source into a 21st century type of proprietary software.
Perhaps this is not important? DarkCyber’s research team thinks this is important. Oh, there’s one open sourcey outfit not mentioned in the write up. Amazon is beavering away on open source forests as well.
Also, probably not important. Well, maybe Amazon is just a source for T shirts and electronic version of books?
Stephen E Arnold, January 2, 2020
Open Source: A Good to Be Exploited?
December 25, 2019
Is Amazon Web Services taking undue advantage of open source software, or is it simply giving its users what they want (or perhaps both)? It seems to be a matter of perspective. ZDNet reports, “AWS Hits Back at Open-Source Software Critics: Claims that AWS is Strip-Mining Open-Source Software is ‘Silly and Off-Base,’ Says Exec.” The defense is in response to a piece (paywalled) in the New York Times in which open-source creators complained the company takes the liberty of freely integrating their work into its profitable platform. Writer Liam Tung specifies:
“According to the New York Times report, several rivals have discussed bringing antitrust complaints against AWS. Bloomberg reported this month that the Federal Trade Commission has asked software companies about AWS. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told the NYT that ‘people are afraid that Amazon’s ambitions are endless’. Cloudflare operates a large content distribution network, which competes with a subsection of AWS.”
We also learn that open-source firms are shifting their licensing terms in response to such cloudy business practices from IBM and others, as well as Amazon. MongoDB’s Server Side Public License is one example. Elastic, maker of Elasticsearch, has also placed limits on how cloud companies may use its software.
AWS VP Andi Gutmans, however, insists this is much ado about nothing. Tung quotes the executive:
“‘The [Times] story is largely talking about open source software projects and companies who’ve tried to build businesses around commercializing that open-source software. These open-source projects enable any company to utilize this software on-premises or in the cloud, and build services around it. AWS customers have repeatedly asked AWS to build managed services around open source,’ Gutmans said. He noted that AWS contributes to open-source projects such as Linux, Java, Kubernetes, Xen, KVM, Chromium, Robot Operating System, Apache Lucene, Redis, s2n, FreeRTOS and Elasticsearch.
“‘A number of maintainers of open-source projects build commercial companies around the open-source project. A small set of outliers see it as a zero-sum game and want to be the only ones able to freely monetize managed services around these open-source projects,’ he added.”
And the remediation process? Lawyers are standing by.
Cynthia Murrell, December 25, 2019
Is This the Future of Open Source?
December 11, 2019
Open source software essentially breaks the chains which vendors of proprietary software clamp on their customers. A good idea? Sure, as long as their are multiple people supporting the code and following the rules (such as they are). “OSXfuse Is No Longer Open Source” makes clear that open source software can go away. Bad move? Unfair? Inconsiderate? The write up explains:
So to summarize again
* Apple does Apple things and heavily restricts third-party developers.
* Fleischer, having dealt with malarkey like this for close to a decade, realizes he doesn’t get paid enough for this [expletive deleted].
* He makes the repo closed source in 2017, but doesn’t mention this to anyone.
* In 2019, after making a bunch of critical changes to the code, he quietly announces that the licensing terms of the project are now different.
* At this stage in the proceedings, companies’ choices are to pay up or tell their users that they can’t use the hot new version of macOS.
As far as monetization strategies go, love it or hate it, you’ve got to give the guy props.
However, there are other corrosive forces at work. Examples include the appropriation of open source code by large, well funded entities. The open source software is wrapped in proprietary functions. Open source morphs into — wait for it — proprietary software.
What’s the impact? The old Hegelian thesis, antithesis, synthesis process is alive and well. Good to know.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2019
Open Source Goodness? Not So Fast
November 18, 2019
DarkCyber does not have a dog in the fight. Open source software has been an interesting sector. However, there may be some tension in open source land. If you have a stake in open source software, you will want to read “Venture Capital Shillscapegoating Free Software’s Failures.” I noted this statement in the article:
Venture capitalists and hireling lawyers make convenient scapegoats. The old, creaky pillars of the free software movement need convenient scapegoats, because the facts on the ground raise serious doubt about the effectiveness of their leadership and the byzantine, insular ideology of copyleft they impose. When the facts don’t help, substitute narrative. You can rule on narrative alone, at least for a while.
Free software has found its way into some interesting products and services. Some of these are backed by big money; for example, LucidWorks, Palantir, and even IBM Watson.
So what?
No answers shall be forthcoming from DarkCyber. You, gentle reader, are on your own to ponder the Amazon open source plays, the future of proprietary software stripped of open source goodness, and venture firms betting that the “community” will keep on being communal.
Stephen E Arnold, November 18, 2019
Wikipedia: Good for Students, Good for the Google
November 14, 2019
There may be some help for over stressed PhD student.
The Internet Archive is making it even easier to check out online citations, beginning in the most logical place. The organization’s blog describes how it is “Weaving Books into the Web—Starting with Wikipedia.” Writer Brewster Kahle tells us:
“The Internet Archive has transformed 130,000 references to books in Wikipedia into live links to 50,000 digitized Internet Archive books in several Wikipedia language editions including English, Greek, and Arabic. And we are just getting started. By working with Wikipedia communities and scanning more books, both users and robots will link many more book references directly into Internet Archive books. In these cases, diving deeper into a subject will be a single click. … For example, the Wikipedia article on Martin Luther King, Jr. cites the book To Redeem the Soul of America, by Adam Fairclough. That citation now links directly to page 299 inside the digital version of the book provided by the Internet Archive. There are 66 cited and linked books on that article alone. Readers can see a couple of pages to preview the book and, if they want to read further, they can borrow the digital copy using Controlled Digital Lending in a way that’s analogous to how they borrow physical books from their local library.”
The Internet Archive hopes to bring four million more books online over the next few years. It costs about $20 per book, and anyone can help by sponsoring the digitization of specific books or simply donating to the organization. As the director of their Wayback Machine declares, “Together we can achieve universal access to all knowledge, one linked book, paper, web page, news article, music file, video and image at a time.”
Who benefits? Students and, of course, Google. There’s a reason many queries’ results pages point to the Wikipedia service.
Cynthia Murrell, November 14, 2019
Search System Bayard
November 1, 2019
Looking for an open source search and retrieval tool written in Rust and built on top of Tantivy (Lucene?). Point your browser to Github and grab the files. The read me file highlights these features:
- Full-text search/indexing
- Index replication
- Bringing up a cluster
- Command line interface.
DarkCyber has not tested it, but a journalist contacted us on October 31, 2019, and was interested in the future of search. I pointed out that there are free and open source options.
What people want to buy, however, is something that does not alienate two thirds of the search system’s users the first day the software is deployed.
Surprised? You may not know what you don’t know, but, gentle reader, you are an exception.
Stephen E Arnold, November 1, 2019
Open Source Fact Checking Service
October 18, 2019
Misinformation is not new, neither is the wide, mass distribution of it. The problem nowadays is the plethora, amount, and platforms available to spread the misinformation. Another problem is that people who believe and spread misinformation can now find each other and congregate. It is important to verify facts, but with so many sources claiming to post the truth (online and off line) how can you check?
Reddit is one platform where misinformation spreads, however, it is gathering place for people to find truth and check facts. One of their popular threads is the “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” and recently they had one with Yaz Sinan. In his AMA titled, “I Built A Platform For Journalism With ‘Open Source’ Fact Checking. In The Age Of Information (And Misinformation (Overload), The Goal Is To Help The Best Journalists Stand Out By Making Their Fact Checking Process Fully Transparent And Reviewable.”
Yaz Sinan is a programmer living in Toronto, Canada. For the past three years, he has built fact checking tools. To test his tools, he has participated in over 500 fact checks. Sinan dubbed his platform Sourced Fact and the best thing about it is that it is open source! Sinan built this platform, because there are many projects in production intending to battle misinformation. Sinan does not think the projects will be able to keep up. His belief is that t takes more energy to refute BS than the energy to produce it.
Sourced Fact takes a different approach than other projects, because journalists upload their articles and annotate their articles with verified checks for readers. Sinan wants to make it easy for journalists to “show their work,” readers can review them, and it will make the journalists stand out from their peers. Sinan approaches Sourced Fact with an open mind and a lot of common sense:
“– This approach only works for journalism covering information based on publicly reviewable evidence. This includes legislation, public government initiatives, whistle blower documents, and scientific data. This isn’t a good fit for journalism based on undocumented sources.
– This approach doesn’t eliminate bias. One can provide completely accurate facts and still introduce bias by omitting facts that don’t agree with their views. I do think however that helping the accurate provable facts stand out from everything else would still be a meaningful improvement to what we have today.
– – I don’t expect the average reader to click into and explore the evidence for every claim. Just like the average consumer of open source code rarely reads the code. The point though is that it’s out there for anyone who wants to check it, so whoever wants to double check can do so anytime.”
I want Sinan’s platform to become an industry standard for news outlets around the world, particularly the United States. Sinan, please apply for grants to make your genius Sourced Fact work!
Whitney Grace, October 18, 2019
Open Source: Everything New Is Old Again
October 7, 2019
The Andreessen Horowitz open source info blitz contains some good stuff. You will want to read the essay “Open Source: From Community to Commercialization” and, if you qualify, download the pdf of lecture notes. We noted this statement from the essay about the SaaS open source business model:
In a SaaS model, you provide a complete hosted offering of the software. If your value and competitive edge is in the operational excellence of the software, then SaaS is a good choice. However, since SaaS is usually based around cloud hosting, there is the potential risk that public clouds will choose to take your open source code and compete.
Accurate.
We noted this statement at the end of the article:
I [Peter Levine / Jennifer Li?] believe Open Source 3.0 will expand how we think of and define open source businesses. Open source will no longer be RedHat, Elastic, Databricks, and Cloudera; it will be – at least in part – Facebook, Airbnb, Google, and any other business that has open source as a key part of its stack. When we look at open source this way, then the renaissance underway may only be in its infancy. The market and possibilities for open source software are far greater than we have yet realized.
Correct.
Years ago, the DarkCyber team undertook a study of a dozen open source software vendors specializing in search and retrieval. Today, most of those vendors have embraced “artificial intelligence”, “predictive analytics”, and “natural language processing”. That’s because search is a utility and the developers and vendors of general purpose open source software have to differentiate themselves. In the course of that research, DarkCyber noted several things.
- Big companies in 2008 were among the most enthusiastic testers and eventually users of open source software. Why? Our data suggested that open source allowed users of commercial proprietary software more freedom to make changes. Bug fixes would often arrive in a more timely way. Plus, the IBM- and Oracle-style license fees did not come along for the ride. That is probably true in some cases today.
- Open source was a free lunch. The developers often contributed for the common good; others created and made available open source software as a way to demonstrate and prove their capabilities. Translation, as one person told one of my researchers, “A job, man. Big bucks.”
- Monetization was mostly “little plays”; that is use our free stuff and then pay for support or proprietary extensions.
Flash forward to today. Some of these three decade old findings may still be in play, but the context is now very different.
What’s changed?
For the first time, meta plays are possible. Forget the investment, merger, and acquisition angles that motivate venture capital firms. Think in terms of just using Amazon and paying for what you need.
Start ups no longer just use Microsoft because it is available and works. Start ups use Amazon because it appears to be open source, cheap or subsidized, and available globally.
The challenge this presents to open source is significant. DarkCyber is not convinced that open source developers, users of open source software, analysts, and other professionals recognize what Amazon’s meta play and strategy is doing; that is, creating a new context of open source.
Want to learn more about Amazon’s meta play for open source? Write seaky2000 at yahoo dot com and inquire about our Amazon strategy webinar. Note: It’s not a freebie.
Everthing new is old again, including vendor lock in.
Stephen E Arnold, October 7, 2019
Roy Cohn Documents Released by FBI
September 30, 2019
If you are interested in Roy Cohn, a New York attorney, new information is available. Released by the FBI, the documents contain about 700 pages of information. You can access the data at this link. The documents are redacted. Mr. Cohn interacted with a number of individuals with a high profile. Mr. Cohn died in 1986, that’s 33 years ago. The New York Post ran a photo of Mr. Cohn with a youthful President Trump and mentioned some of Mr. Cohn’s high profile activities.
Stephen E Arnold, September 30, 2019
Open Source Software: Just So Darned Good
August 9, 2019
The Trump administration’s proscription against doing business with Chinese tech company Huawei has cast a wide net, and one blogger suspects such a net may soon ensnare one of our favorite things. Bunnie’s Blog warns, “Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War.” The writer checked out Executive Order 13873, and considers how the incredibly broad text could be used to target just about any tech company around the world. They also extensively criticize the technique of weaponizing supply chains and its unintended consequences, so navigate to the blog post to delve into that reasoning.
One of those consequences, they fear, may be the very existence of open-source projects. Huawei, as our immediate example, has contributed significantly to the Linux Foundation. Linux has, so far, escaped the Huawei blacklist net because of a license exemption; however, Bunnie writes:
“Should Huawei be designated as a ‘foreign adversary’ under EO13873, it greatly expands the scope of the ban because it prohibits transactions with entities under the direction or influence of foreign adversaries. The executive order also broadly includes any information technology including hardware and software with no exemption for open source. In fact, it explicitly states that ‘…openness must be balanced by the need to protect our country against critical national security threats’. While the context of ‘open’ in this case refers to an ‘investment climate’, I worry the text is broad enough to easily extend its reach into open source technologies.
We noted this statement too:
“There’s nothing in Github (or any other source-sharing platform) that prevents your code from being accessed by a foreign adversary and incorporated into their technological base, so there is an argument that open source developers are aiding and abetting an enemy by effectively sharing technology with them. Furthermore, in addition to considering requests to merge code from a technical standpoint, one has to also consider the possibility that the requester could be subject to the influence of Huawei, in which case accepting the merge may put you at risk of stiff penalties under the IEEPA (up to $250K for accidental violations; $1M and 20 years imprisonment for willful violations).”
The beauty of open source is, well, its openness. Bunnie argues that if the government gets to decide what entities can contribute and which cannot, the freedom that underpins open source software will vanish.
Cynthia Murrell, August 9, 2019
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