We want it to be open source because open source is the only source of services you can run at home or on premises at a small business for a reasonable cost.
It's really a supply side issue pretending to be a demand one. Self hosted services of all kinds are woefully underdeveloped.
Tech giants aren't going to encourage you to own your data and hardware by spending effort on supporting it, because that undermines key reasons for building cloud services: surveillance and control.
Self-hosted services are woefully underdeveloped because people outside the open source community generally don't want them. I'm familiar with a couple of small organizations who've been around since the pre-cloud days; all of them hated "the server" and love that Google enabled them to get rid of it.
> Tech giants aren't going to encourage you to own your data and hardware by spending effort on supporting it
On the contrary, it would make a lot of sense for Amazon to work on open source self-hosted server apps, because they would seem to be the answer to the question, "Why would a non-techy want a cloud VM." Surely their PMs must day-dream about a future in which a cloud VM is as common a monthly fee for a middle-class family as a gym membership or netflix subscription, right?
Fake edit to add: there's a startup devoted to solving this problem with a novel OS intended to be a good platform for server-side apps, and since they appear unlikely to get traction I would be very happy to hear that Amazon is forking or duplicating it, just because I so badly want to be a user of such a product.
That's one of the reasons I point to Apple as the company that could theoretically do it. Apple devices talking to Apple software running on Apple hardware. As a partial (but less complex) analogy, consider how seamless AirPods are vs bluetooth headphones.
If the server software were confined to macs, that would also act as marketing just like iTunes was mac only for a while. Though I recognize Tim Cook seems far more interested in selling additional services than hardware unfortunately.
I love this idea and hope it comes to market. Apple could easily turn it into a subscription and have the user provide their own storage (aka upsell internal storage). I was curious how users without a stationary Mac (aka a MacBook that doesn’t have ~100% uptime) but I’m sure they could create a network sharing between devices when they are on the move.
Unfortunately, iCloud works well for probably 99% of their user and, like someone in this thread said, the only people interested in this service are in this thread.
> We want it to be open source because open source is the only source of services you can run at home or on premises at a small business for a reasonable cost
Many, many HN users want open source primarily for ideological reasons. A closed-source solution (or even a source-available one) is unacceptable for that reason alone, and not related to cost or practicality.
It's really a supply side issue pretending to be a demand one. Self hosted services of all kinds are woefully underdeveloped.
Tech giants aren't going to encourage you to own your data and hardware by spending effort on supporting it, because that undermines key reasons for building cloud services: surveillance and control.
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