Re:The importance of decentralisation
by jka on Thursday November 14, 2019 @10:43AM
(#21536264)
That trend seems real, yep, and your points ring true to me. In response to the items you mention (in reverse order), decentralization could become rapidly more attractive if & when:
2) The time required to configure, install, and use decentralized services reduces to within a small margin of the equivalent centralized systems
1) The cost of losing custody of your personal data, and the cost of being influenced and constrained within a proprietary system are more apparent and can be stacked onto the 'free' price tag
Work towards this takes a long time, especially while software engineers are in such demand in the profitable private sector (which, although there are exceptions, tends to skew towards building proprietary software).
In general I'd tend to believe that another, second trend is that decentralized and open source software does always eventually catch up (in a kind of asymptotic progress curve to infinity) - and that we'll reach this 'switch margin' eventually, it's just a question of how long it will take.
2) The time required to configure, install, and use decentralized services reduces to within a small margin of the equivalent centralized systems
1) The cost of losing custody of your personal data, and the cost of being influenced and constrained within a proprietary system are more apparent and can be stacked onto the 'free' price tag
Work towards this takes a long time, especially while software engineers are in such demand in the profitable private sector (which, although there are exceptions, tends to skew towards building proprietary software).
In general I'd tend to believe that another, second trend is that decentralized and open source software does always eventually catch up (in a kind of asymptotic progress curve to infinity) - and that we'll reach this 'switch margin' eventually, it's just a question of how long it will take.