Netflix is known for other forward thinking R&D initiatives such as Chaos Engineering (intentionally introducing bugs to test your resilience). Their work on NUMA, EPYC, and FreeBSD is nothing short of incredible.
So, if you want to support FOSS, I recommend you use Netflix
So, first off, that’s really cool! It’s always cool to see FOSS powering large and high-performance systems. This is a good thing, so thanks for sharing!
That said, I would keep in mind what Bryan Lunduke has said. The crux of the argument is these companies have lots of money (as evidenced by Netflix being a Platinum donor), and because of that, it can become a scenario of them guiding/dictating (depending on the level of influence) actions and development paths that are in their interest, and not necessarily in line with FOSS goals. While heavy investment isn’t a bad thing, for me it’s a cautious optimism. While I am happy that they donated, and utilize the software and hardware to their limits, I don’t trust them, and will keep an eye on future moves and statements.
Regardless of whether they want to or not, I don’t think they could. With the community, and the community’s ability to fork whenever they want, they couldn’t extinguish it.
At the moment, this is still a good thing. Their (I’m assuming yearly) gift is a developer’s salary. Or a new server rack. Or any other number of things. This is good and should be praised. However, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t later become a bad thing. So, for me, while I’m happy for FreeBSD, it’s more an earmark and check-in later. Like I said, cautiously optimistic.
So I love this pragmatism from Netflix. FreeBSD is best FOSS. The license is one of the more free out there. Screw GPL3 its utter crap. They complained about the proprietary until they basically became so but called it free.
Anyways the problem I have with most FOSS community folks is their lack of pragmatism and their preach of a fake reality. Much like engineers the free software “engineers” have zero concept of economics. I can make this claim primarily due to the folks I graduated with as an engineer have the same flaw.
You cant just build software call it free and assume people will donate. You have to make it good. Build it on a supportable cycle and provide support and features people ask for even if they are hard. Thats what BSD has done from what I see. Its an exceptionally good OS especially with network tasks.
The FOSS community also seems to not like the idea of the four 9s reliability principle save Debian Novell and Red Hat. (Not to include open suse nor fedora).
Anyways without going to far off. You make a good profitable product for someone or service and they will pay for it. doesn’t matter if its open source or not and the FOSS community needs to get this through their thick heads. Ill support their products all day long if they are good, useful, save me time…especially the last since time is often money and our most precious resource.
For example im currently toying the ides of donating to both the BSD project and the Linux Mint community. Anyways reality of economics and the world. Money talks FOSS or not. Principles go out the window when you have to survive or run a business.
Here is a challenge
To all whom use free software. Create a workflow. Consistently use it. Do not distro hop. Commit one bug fix and donate at least 10 dollars. It will change your perspective and cure you of distro hop and Foss diseases. Much like Netflix has put value into what it uses, you will put value in what you use. Im telling you it works.
Hes not right. Lunduke’s posts and videos on open source and the actions of corporations panders to the easily paranoid to keep his plate full, that’s his thing, and i’m not even convinced hes drinking his own cool-aide, though at this point its possible. He comes out with the most ridiculous stuff and almost all of it is full conspiracy tin foil hat mode. Most people eat it up, but those people are already predisposed to those ideas and the whole “big corp” stuff.
The reality is far simpler. Companies want to make products and make money, to do that the good ones give money to open source projects they use or in many cases open up many of their own tools as open source (Microsoft in recent years) as they see the value in the beneficial relationship.
The successful companies partner up with open source projects as they see the value in keeping those projects funded. The ones who don’t eventually fail or fall out of favour or move in a different direction.
Lundukes bullshit posts on these things is all the more obvious when he starts deleting youtube videos and tweets that he gets called out on. Case in point i can no longer show you the tweet where he had essentially called microsoft evil and against open source software (where he was called out on his bullshit again) that he made a couple of months before the posted video in this thread where he insists that he doesn’t view microsoft as evil (he just implies it this time around)
Basically take what he says with a pinch of salt the size of the himalayan mountains, most of it isnt true.
(tried to edit it slightly to speak more specifically to his posts about these specific things, not him in general, as the guy is fine, i just dislike what hes trying to do to the community)
As I said, I don’t even know the guy, nor have I seen any of his stuff (though the name does ring a bell), at least that I’m aware of. However I’ve seen a quite few instances where money has definitely influenced the direction of projects, so the statement as such I can definitely agree with.
While funding projects is fine, it gets worrisome once a single company employs the majority of active developers on a project (or even multiple projects), as then the line between what the companies want and what the community wants basically ceases to exist.
The problem with this on big projects is that “don’t like it, fork it” generally doesn’t work since these project have become too big to effectively fork without corporate backing, though given enough lack of subtlety in pushing the corporate preferences such forks will still happen.
Whether any of these changes were for the better or worse I’ll leave up to the individual to decide, however they were very clearly driven by the needs of corporations that were, at least initially, pushed through entirely by leveraging their “stake” in the projects involved regardless of what the community at large preferred.
In some instances one could argue that they were the way forward anyway, and that the involvement of “money” only accelerated things. However, I’m not sure if corporations getting what they want faster in spite of the community is a good trade off, even if the corporations were right (which most definitely won’t always be the case)
I think you’re running away from the badassery and celebration of what this is.
Netflix isn’t hiring a majority of the active developers. They’re not even the highest donators, Intel and NetApp are, followed by Netflix, Facebook, Juniper, and others.
Money doesn’t always dictate the direction of a project. With something like FreeBSD I doubt that would even be a fleeting thought.
If you’re referring to the original post, I only have one retort: Not sure if srs. This is huge for all parties involved. I think high quality streaming is joining pornography and video games in pushing the envelop with high-end computing. The work Netflix has done with FreeBSD and Nginx, on top of everything else in the DevOps and SRE cultures and movements, should be applauded, not peppered with “cautious optimism”.
I have trust issues with opensource code owners/maintainers since 2004 that kept me from significant contributions ever again. I coded a massive well known (it it’s genre at the time) set of Battltech MUX code over the course of many years, but it was to the original closed-source codebase I had permissions to utilize with the owner. One of my subordinates on my site took the code (off my private server he had limited access to) without asking and hand ported all of it into his own GPL viral license release he created in college to get resume fodder and look cool as an opensource developer. He didn’t even know C that it was written in at the time. No permission, but my handle in the game was given obscure credit in a text file even though never asked to release it.
I trust Berkeley licenses far more than GPL licenses. I thought about doing something about the above, but life moved on, the software was past it’s heyday, and I had plenty of jobs to work and make good money.
It kept a very good programmer from every contributing to a viral license opensource project again, and injected into the job market (I saw where he works now… big into opensource. Makes me sad to think about) a low-skill low-ethics developer catapulting off hundreds of hours of my labor of love.
Oh ya… same guy was caught spending donations to his sites on pizza and frivilous stuff at college rather than maintaining the sites with the donations.
Ethics… they all talk about it, but those of us with our boots on the ground who didn’t waste time locked in a box from the world know that no man is proven until he is tested.
I would like to take a moment and talk about how hilarious your profile icon is and how well it fits this situation.
There should be ways to create a lawsuit over this the FSF is an extremely short sighted organization that puts their “ethics” before anybody’s rights and thats what bothers me about them. Someone can basically steam code and call it a port and boom an ides that was once profitable is gone.
To summarize part of bill gates “evil proprietary quote” (which I absolutely love and still agree with to this day) ;“people have to make a living, you cant create a good idea and publish it as free software”
100 percent. The BSD license is one of the best licenses ever created.
Yup and heres the big thing. If you make it free and available I see it as okay to copy IDC really. If you don’t have the rights and never asked permission and do that you should be sued or locked up for theft.
I was not referring to the original post, rather I avoided giving specific examples to avoid starting an argument about the (de)merits of some of those specific examples. Perhaps I should have worded that more carefully. Mea culpa.
, but Netflix hit the theoretical limit of 25GBps.
?
).
and how well it fits this situation.
