That's not at all true. This has nothing to do with the government. It's a court ruling on a law passed by parliament. In no way was the opinion/side of government at play here.
"Turns out FOSS devs are humas just like everybody else and suffer from the same flaws."
Hell no. FOSS communities, as other spaces created by permanently online individuals, definitely have higher-than-average number of mentally unhinged snowflakes.
> Turns out FOSS devs are humas just like everybody else and suffer from the same flaws.
It is rather anticlimactic. I had always imagined FOSS to be this free exchange of ideas, thoughtful consideration, and intentional action. Seeing what it has become though… Maybe closed source is better.
I've had similar pissing matches in closed source development, instigated by me and not...
Often, these things get resolved or left simmering without any public visibility, so that's nice as a user. And there's usually a somewhat clear heirarchy of authority, where the boss can say I don't care who's right, do X; which resolves issues in ways that sometimes a technically minded open source project can't; that can often help with bikeshedding between usable options.
But sometimes you just keep working somewhere because deep in your heart of hearts you want to do it your way, and once that other person quits or maybe even goes on vacation, you can. And sometimes people endeavor to actively push that person out, which I guess I've seen on FOSS drama too, but office politics have a way of lurking under the surface more, IMHO.
> Seeing what it has become though… Maybe closed source is better.
You thought it was better in the past? Read up on the great ncurses maintainer drama. Or the NetBSD/OpenBSD split. Or FreeBSD/DragonflyBSD split. Or the Emacs forks, GNU libc forks, GCC fork, etc. etc. etc.
This kind of drama has always existed. Difficult people have always existed. And even good people have always been struggling with their emotions.
And in all my closed-source $dayjobs I've had to deal with all of that too. Sometimes significantly worse than I'm seeing here.
At least in some cases this is plausible. The money people get for working on closed source software irons out some issues, for example:
Some people who voluntarily work on open source code do it for self-actualization, which indicates that they have a strong desire to push their wishes through. This implies that a lot of drama gets involved if these people don't get their way.
Was it ever different? Not as far as I can remember at least. I think one of the main strengths of open source development is that it works despite the drama.
With open source projects, everybody is free to start their own fork over disagreements, and if the fork actually turns out to be objectively better it will replace the original project.
> Maybe closed source is better.
It's the same and worse over there, the drama just isn't public.
This is much less likely in a company. Any sane company decides on a clear direction which way to go. Either do X and put resources in it, or not and instead focus on something else. They may change directions, but never "maybe X" at a specific point in time. Someone at the company makes a decision on this.
Of course, with notable exceptions. See Apple Car, Android tablets etc.
> It's the same and worse over there, the drama just isn't public.
At least you’re getting paid. What’s the point of spending one’s free time arguing with strangers on the internet over some code that will be refactored anyway ten years from now..? Life is short, have fun, enjoy it. If you’re spending time or money on something that sucks, walk away.
I assure you it isn't; it really, really isn't. You don't see the drama because 1) it's behind closed doors and 2) because the people involved know their job is at risk if they cross the line.
FOSS devs put a lot of time in what they do and they are understandably attached to whether what they do is good/successful, at least in the same proportion the general population is (but arguably more due to how much dedication goes into FOSS, kind of by construction)
You must be new to billionaire business practices: break the rules first, ask for forgiveness later.
By the time the cheque comes, your illicit venture either went bust or you built a bilion dollar empire capable of buying the best lawyers and lobbying to walk away clean.
They are trying their best to lose the current generation to no one. It's pretty funny when your own engineers can't get access to the cards you've supposedly launched.
There's still time. The situation in which you can effectively replace your OCR vendor with hitting LLM APIs via a half-assed Python script ChatGPT wrote for you, has existed for maybe few months. People are only beginning to realize LLMs got good enough that this is an option. An OCR vendor that starts working on the shift today, should easily be able to develop, tune, test and productize an LLM-based OCR pipeline way before most of their customers realize what's been happening.
But it is a good opportunity for a fast-moving OCR service to steal some customers from their competition. If I were working in this space, I'd be worried about that, and also about the possibility some of the LLM companies realize they could actually break into this market themselves right now, and secure some additional income.
EDIT:
I get the feeling that the main LLM suppliers are purposefully sticking to general-purpose APIs and refraining from competing with anyone on specific services, and that this goes beyond just staying focused. Some of potential applications, like OCR, could turn into money printers if they moved on them now, and they all could use some more cash to offset what they burn on compute. Is it because they're trying to avoid starting an "us vs. them" war until after they made everyone else dependent on them?
To the point after your edit, I view it like the cloud shift from IaaS to PaaS / SaaS. Start with a neutral infrastructure platform that attracts lots of service providers. Then take your pick of which ones to replicate with a vertically integrated competitor or manager offering once you are too big for anyone to really complain.
Never underestimate the power of the second mover. Since the development is happening in the open, someone can quickly cobble up the information and cut directly to the 90% of the work.
Then your secret sauce will be your fine tunes, etc.
Like it or not AI/LLM will be a commodity, and this bubble will burst. Moats are hard to build when you have at least one open source copy of what you just did.
>Incredibly, we're still running NTFS and dealing with hacks on hacks on hacks.
It's the painful cost of maintaining backwards compatibility.
For context, I can still install and use Winamp 2.5 from 1999 on Windows 11. That's over 25 years of backwards compatibility. Not something most people need on a daily basis but still very cool.
I think it's more looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and forgetting that some of the things that have improved over the past decades wern't always that way.
I too have nostalgia for the days when my start menu didn't phone home to microsoft, and focused on making my computer useful rather than trying to sell me stuff. Would I give up things like hi-dpi support to get that back? Hell no.
It is the rise of anti-intellectualism. It's the lack of good-faith. It's the promulgation of lies instead of truths, without even caring they are lies as long as they attack the right people. It's the idea "it takes a lot of work to make it look easy" being replaced with "if it looks easy you must not be working".
Windows 10 you can go through a couple of clicks of a Wizard and reboot, and Windows will install Hyper-V type 1 hypervisor, seamlessly virtualise the host OS and not even look or feel different. It will integrate with Windows patching, with PowerShell Hyper-V cmdlets, with subsystems like WSL2, with Volume Shadow Copy. It's localised into different languages, documented, and supported. It's got virtual switch and networking support layered into the Windows network subsystem. And you can go through a couple of clicks of a Wizard and reboot, and Windows will seamlessly un-virtualise the OS, and that's all just gone. On almost any random hardware it's not limited to Dell servers with qualified drivers, you can do it on a desktop or laptop with the right CPU instructions and Windows license level.
How much human programmer effort, planning, design and time does the parent poster think that took? And that happened alongside all the other changes to internals, process isolation, memory compression, UAC, networking stack, and along with merging tablet PC Windows and Xbox Windows and Windows Server into one unified codebase.
No all that goes into "I didn't use it, I didn't see it, I hate it, so it counts as doing nothing".
Repeat for all the features. "Oh they just added new hardware support" - Bluetooth support is more than a driver, it's a whole front end for discovery, sharing, there's APIs into the Metro apps and WinRT for apps to send files and data over Bluetooth, there's Bluetooth audio stack, Windows telephony subsystem integration for answering calls.
Multiple monitors? High DPI screens? Multiple desktops? Fractional display scaling?
It's pretty, it's classic, it's coherent, it's responsive. People would go ape-shit over this? Really?
(Is it a coincidence that Windows and Mac users look at it and think it's a nice retro legacy toy from 25 years ago, and Linux users look at it and think it's a futuristic utopia?)
