Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by sudhirj on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @08:51AM (#18493745)

Think the MBA speak for this is “commoditising you competition”. It’s when you use open source or zero pricing to either offensively or defensively to nullify an advantage your competitor has. Google attacks Apple by offering an open source OS (Android). Now everyone can make a phone.

They defend against Facebook controlling the internet by offering an open source browser (Chrome/ium).

Microsoft defends against irrelevance in the Linux age by open sourcing .Net Core. So now you’re just writing code for .Net, not Linux.

FB open sources dev tools to both attack and defend the talent pool.

Google open sources Flutter to counter React, decides it can show FB how it’s done.

Google also puts out K8S because AWS ate their cloud lunch and they need to show they also get it. Now you’re just running on K8S, not AWS.

AWS just open sourced a JDK. Now we can all give Oracle the finger.

Apple sits in their spaceship, not giving a fuck. Chris Lattner tried to open source for the sake of OSS, with LLVM and Swift, but he left.

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by wenc on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @09:15AM (#18493888)

> Chris Lattner tried to open source for the sake of OSS, with LLVM and Swift, but he left.

Maybe there's some history here that I'm missing: but it looks like LLVM and Swift are open source. Did Chris have any trouble open-sourcing them? Was the reason for his departure related to that?

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by sudhirj on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @09:22AM (#18493948)

He succeeded at open sourcing those two projects. Not sure why he left, but other than WebKit, which was probably a defense against Microsoft and IE, don’t think anything else can come out of Apple.

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by bluGill on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @09:36AM (#18494048)

WebKit started as a fork from khtml (from kde). Apple didn't have a choice about open sourcing Webkit because they started with GPL2 code. They would have kept it closed source if they could, but that would have taken a few years of development, while they could start with khtml and get a great browser in just a few months.

I expect in a few years (5-10) Apple will do an audit, discover that only a small amount of code isn't written by Apple, and replace that with inhouse code and then relicense to something propitiatory. Time will tell.

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by wenc on Friday November 23, 2018 @11:20AM (#18517300)

Well I guess there's Foundationdb [1] and cups [2] but those were acquisitions.

[1] https://github.com/apple/foundationdb [2] https://github.com/apple/cups

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by wool_gather on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @11:52AM (#18495281)

> Chris Lattner tried to open source [...] LLVM

LLVM was open source from its beginning: it was Lattner's research project. Apple acqui-hired it/him, and they have a private fork.

I agree that it's pretty remarkable that Swift, which was conceived at Apple, was opened up, however.

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by pmart123 on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @02:46PM (#18497010)

I think it make sense from a cost/benefit analysis. Swift was created to make it easier for developers to write iPhone apps. Open sourcing the code provides developers with example code (given it was a brand new language), and more eyeballs to potentially look through the code to improve it whereas google open sourcing search should just allow bing to catch-up.

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by dragandj on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @05:05AM (#18501447)

Amazon "open sourced" OpenJDK, which has been open source since the day 0 of Oracle purchasing Sun? Oracle just committed to maintaining backports for OpenJDK 8, and that part of Oracle's business it might be commoditizing: paid support for legacy versions, not the code.

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by sudhirj on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @07:17AM (#18502102)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-corretto-no-c...

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by nouseforaname on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @04:00PM (#18497663)

> They defend against Facebook controlling the internet by offering an open source browser (Chrome/ium).

Imo chrome and android are about being able to ensure ads are delivered.

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by sudhirj on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @01:17AM (#18500541)

At this point, the ability to deliver ads is the definition of internet control.

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by platz on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @09:05AM (#18493830)

So open source is just a service model where the product is free but you get loyalty.

So "you are the product" seems to fit open source as well then, eh

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Re:Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code by vmh1928 on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @11:32AM (#18495110)

Excellent point.

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