[CALUG] entry in open frameworks

[Walt Smith]

Hi,

I don't usually post news.  But I thought this
slashdot summary was pretty much on target about the
position of open source, and more specifically linux today,
and what might be needed.   I give some credibilty because 
I think  Canonical is one of the few companies willing to
produce a product for consumers, in different markets, - 
even if a user  doesn't like some of the outcomes.

Notice I said user, not sys admin, configurer, or expert.

What is noticeably missing from the summary is a mention of
Android.

My recent experience in several of the "normal desktops"
has not been happy, and sometimes I think I'm back using
for ONE example, Redhat 7.1...    I'm a perfect case for finding - easily-
what QC is not there.   Note that I haven't addressed the cost/benefit
for more QC, and neither does the summary...  so I don't know how
Canonical performs this function.

And also wonder why it's never discussed - anywhere - that 
I've seen.      Finding bugs or addressing issues, or getting help
on a "apache" or "Gnome" topic is not a discussion of Who, How, or 
Why, or When QC in general.

( If you can, please, thank you for your indulgence. ).


Walt.......

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 Is Open Source Innovation Now All About Vendor On-Ramps? (infoworld.com) 32

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday December 03, 2017 @03:59AM from the get-onto-my-cloud dept.
InfoWorld published an interesting essay from Matt Asay, former COO at Canonical (and an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative), about innovation from the big public cloud vendors, which "even when open-sourced, doesn't really help the community at large... All this innovation is available to buy; none of it is available to build. Not for mere mortals, anyway."
Google in particular has figured out how to both open-source code in a useful way and make it pay. As Server Density CEO David Mytton has underlined, Google hopes to "standardize machine learning on a single framework and API," namely TensorFlow, then supplement it "with a service that can [manage] it all for you more efficiently and with less operational overhead," namely Google Cloud. By open-sourcing TensorFlow and backing it with machine-learning-heavy Google Cloud, Google has open-sourced a great on-ramp to future revenue.

My question: why not do this with the rest of its code? The simple answer is "Because it's a lot of work." That is, Google could open-source everything tomorrow without any damage to its revenue, but the code itself would provide other providers and enterprises only limited ability to increase their revenue unless Google did all the necessary prep work to make it useful to mere mortals not running superhuman Google infrastructure. This is the trick that AWS, Microsoft, and Google are all racing to figure out today. Not open source, per se, because that's the easy table stakes. No, the AWS/Microsoft Azure/Google Cloud trio are figuring out how to turn their innovations into open source on-ramps to their proprietary services. Companies used to lock up their code to sell it. Today, it's the opposite: They need to open it up to make their ability to operate the code at scale more valuable. For them.





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 The government is lawless, not the press (people).
 ( [Supreme Court] Justice Douglas re: The Pentagon Papers )