In the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term.
I agree with most of the above, just wanted to relay an explanation given to me years ago by my then eng director in an argument about this. He said the reasons we tend to use proprietary / closed platforms and deps in business settings is not necessarily because the software was better or easier to work with. Clearly it often isn’t.
It’s because of (1) built-in factoring and infrastructure, (2) built-in domain expertise that would otherwise require hiring or training, and (3) contractual guarantees that can be invoked when things go wrong. All of which attenuate risk and make development timelines and outcomes more predictable.
His line was “OSS is free like a puppy is free.” That is, most businesses aren’t old enough to handle the responsibility, and that’s why we still sometimes use shitty proprietary software.
Also, once they are old enough, change is harder. It’s why all the software these days is freemium. Small companies use it as its free. Medium companies pay for it as it’s easier than using something else.
How do we break out of this path of trying to get big enough to break custom, and once you’re big enough not having the guts to test wide sweeping changes?
Speaking about VSCode it is also open-source until you realize that 1) the language plugins that you require can only compiled and run in official builds of VSCode and 2) Microsoft took over a lot of the popular 3rd party language plugins, repackage them with a different license… making it so if you try to create a fork of VSCode you can’t have any support for any programming language because it won’t be an official VSCode build. MS be like :).
I’m opposed to having repositories for plugins. I don’t want my code editor to connect to the internet at all. If I need some popular plugin, it should already be available in the repository of the distro that I’m using. Some distributions of VIM and Emacs download a bunch of plugins on launch from who knows where. I don’t get why people are fine with that.
It’s similar with Flatpak and Snap. Oh and each programming language has its own package manager too, of course (NPM belongs to Microsoft too, btw). Everyone and everything wants its own package manager or a separate distribution system.
For now I use VSCodium in firejail to prevent it from accessing the network and I don’t install new plugins. I haven’t heard of any better editor, unfortunately.
I’ve read it, but I don’t really understand the legal issue. I’m also not sure what could be illegal about VSCodium. It uses the Open VSX store for downloading extensions (but not every extension is on there).
It would certainly be better if VSCode was under a Copyleft license, so that it couldn’t be turned into proprietary software and maybe that way addons would also have to be Free Software, like in Blender. But Microsoft clearly doesn’t want that.
I’m not much against having repositories with plugins, extensions or whatever BUT they should be like Debian, you can just pack everything into images / a folder and use offline for ever when required.
Yeah, that’s a good idea. They could also just be added to Debian, which would solve this problem, but there also would be another benefit for me. Most people don’t care about that, but I want to only use Free Software. When I install something from Debian’s free repository, I don’t have to worry that it might be proprietary, because they only allow Free Software there. I don’t have this certainty when installing software from most other places.
Same goes for modern Docker powered solutions and JavaScript frameworks.
Some JavaScript frameworks and libraries seem to be packaged in Debian. But most people use NPM, of course.
Bravo for the great summary and expanding on the article. I’d like to subscribe to everything you write.
Agree on the VScode comments. Some of the scummiest business maneuvering from Microsoft. The terrifying part is its slowly becoming so ingrained that its going to take a long time and a lot of directed effort to undo the damage.
Agree on the consultancy angle - this is woefully becoming more and more commonplace as true from-scratch engineering dies on the wayside. Do you think this can be mitigated by, say, college courses that concentrate on the base form of the programming domain? Maybe web development with backend hosted on a machine in the classroom, with a registered domain on an external registrar instead of the usual localhost bullshit, and students responsible for routing etc? Like an emulation of the old days when you started learning web dev on your home computer and stayed with it until you were pretty much a journeyman engineer?
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I agree with most of the above, just wanted to relay an explanation given to me years ago by my then eng director in an argument about this. He said the reasons we tend to use proprietary / closed platforms and deps in business settings is not necessarily because the software was better or easier to work with. Clearly it often isn’t.
It’s because of (1) built-in factoring and infrastructure, (2) built-in domain expertise that would otherwise require hiring or training, and (3) contractual guarantees that can be invoked when things go wrong. All of which attenuate risk and make development timelines and outcomes more predictable.
His line was “OSS is free like a puppy is free.” That is, most businesses aren’t old enough to handle the responsibility, and that’s why we still sometimes use shitty proprietary software.
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Also, once they are old enough, change is harder. It’s why all the software these days is freemium. Small companies use it as its free. Medium companies pay for it as it’s easier than using something else.
How do we break out of this path of trying to get big enough to break custom, and once you’re big enough not having the guts to test wide sweeping changes?
I’m opposed to having repositories for plugins. I don’t want my code editor to connect to the internet at all. If I need some popular plugin, it should already be available in the repository of the distro that I’m using. Some distributions of VIM and Emacs download a bunch of plugins on launch from who knows where. I don’t get why people are fine with that.
It’s similar with Flatpak and Snap. Oh and each programming language has its own package manager too, of course (NPM belongs to Microsoft too, btw). Everyone and everything wants its own package manager or a separate distribution system.
For now I use VSCodium in firejail to prevent it from accessing the network and I don’t install new plugins. I haven’t heard of any better editor, unfortunately.
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I’ve read it, but I don’t really understand the legal issue. I’m also not sure what could be illegal about VSCodium. It uses the Open VSX store for downloading extensions (but not every extension is on there).
It would certainly be better if VSCode was under a Copyleft license, so that it couldn’t be turned into proprietary software and maybe that way addons would also have to be Free Software, like in Blender. But Microsoft clearly doesn’t want that.
Yeah, that’s a good idea. They could also just be added to Debian, which would solve this problem, but there also would be another benefit for me. Most people don’t care about that, but I want to only use Free Software. When I install something from Debian’s free repository, I don’t have to worry that it might be proprietary, because they only allow Free Software there. I don’t have this certainty when installing software from most other places.
Some JavaScript frameworks and libraries seem to be packaged in Debian. But most people use NPM, of course.
Bravo for the great summary and expanding on the article. I’d like to subscribe to everything you write.
Agree on the VScode comments. Some of the scummiest business maneuvering from Microsoft. The terrifying part is its slowly becoming so ingrained that its going to take a long time and a lot of directed effort to undo the damage.
Agree on the consultancy angle - this is woefully becoming more and more commonplace as true from-scratch engineering dies on the wayside. Do you think this can be mitigated by, say, college courses that concentrate on the base form of the programming domain? Maybe web development with backend hosted on a machine in the classroom, with a registered domain on an external registrar instead of the usual localhost bullshit, and students responsible for routing etc? Like an emulation of the old days when you started learning web dev on your home computer and stayed with it until you were pretty much a journeyman engineer?
Removed by mod