Re:Unleashing Open-Source Silicon
by beatgammit on Monday November 25, 2019 @09:23PM
(#21635133)
You mean, kind of like Android, Google Docs, etc? Google makes its money by charging for add-ons to those products (space on Google Drive, Play store for Android, etc), not from those products directly. I see no reason why Google would be hurt by open sourcing those products, yet they don't, and that choice leads to all sorts of issues from privacy-conscious individuals.
I understand not open sourcing their secret sauce (e.g. search algorithms), but they have a ton of other products that could absolutely be open source without any negative financial impact. It's things like this that make me seriously doubt their commitment to open source.
Re:Unleashing Open-Source Silicon
by joshuamorton on Monday November 25, 2019 @09:50PM
(#21635252)
The common-across-many-applications parts of android are open source, and "Google docs" isn't common-across-many-applications. Arguably, the google drive storage backend could be open source, but that wouldn't need to be open source, it would make more sense as an api.
Open source very often works wonderfully that way. Or is your definition of “working” open source something like “receives constant commits and churn”?
Lots of open source repos rarely see any activity and the the world is still so much better because people fork it, read the code, or just use it as is.
GNU grep sees almost no activity and it’s done more for people than kubernetes has.
Your Blender example doesn't really hold up in this case because it's not like Blender has been funded historically by some large company replacing the expensive proprietary tool Maya. In fact, there are many fully open source products that do not fit into some larger corporate-backed business model: VLC, Gimp, ffmpeg, to name just a few.
But Blender specifically has been proprietary for many years, before being crowdfunded into an open-source project.
It’s an imperfect example, but the Maya to Blender transition is starting to happen now. See “Epic Games supports Blender Foundation with $1.2 million Epic MegaGrant“, https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...
I would love to see Blender become competitive with Maya etc but it's got a long long way to go. Though it might be closer than most, in part because it's competition is so expensive people are looking for alternatives. I sponsor Blender to help see that day happen and I wish big companies that are paying for Maya, Houdini, 3DSMax, ZBrush licenses would instead spend all that money paying engineers to contribute to Blender. But, as of today, while 2.8 made big strides, it's still missing huge swaths of features available in Maya and others.
Because sustainable open source rarely works that way. Sustainable open source projects focus on three things: (1) identify the bits that are common across many applications, (2) establish an open source standard for those bits, (3) sustain the bits by making it easy for other people/orgs to use them & contribute to maintaining them.
Edit: Sometimes a tool like Blender is open source and feature complete. So it seems like “the whole thing” is open source. However, in those scenarios the tool usually replaces a very expensive proprietary tool (Maya, in the Blender example) that is a single step in a larger business process (like making a 3D animation).