I will try to put myself as an outsider and just reflect on what I see. We have a very innovative Linux distribution / packaging etc software, where there is no dominant commercial actor. Instead there are a number of smaller companies specializing in evolving the ecosystem, selling services around it and so on. There is opportunity in Nix future for a commercial actor to make a lot of money by becoming the most trusted authority in aspects of it. Becoming the next Red Hat or something like that. I sense there is a lot of positioning and hustling to become THE Nix company that takes pole position and becomes the dominant one.
Once in a while, there have been an announcement like this, which has not been well received. I am a little worried about it, and what it can lead to for the future. I worry it can split the community and be harmful to the future of very innovative software. I am trying to think of a similar situation within another area of the Linux or Open Source space, but can't really come up with good examples.
Interested to hear if these thoughts are well founded or just a bad take.
This is my fear too, and I'm pretty convinced we'll get there at some point, if and when the *nix-on-desktop scene gets more competetive.
This seems to be a common pattern - after you delivered all the value you could and you still have competition, eventually you and everyone else will start one-up each other on abusing your users for additional profit.
Oracle is the most (in)famous via various acquisitions. But IBM/RedHat/Canonical/Microsoft are a few other large players that have been trying with varying degrees of success recently related to Linux. Corporations appreciate ever increasing EPS and decreasing costs... nothing more.
The difference between the competition we have now and the 'UNIX wars' is all a matter of licensing.
With the latter, proprietary licensing caused a large part of this fragmentation as there was no easy way of using code from one project in another to preserve compatibility.
Today, most of these projects are FOSS, so the risk of another '*nix war' has been negated to the point of being a non-issue.
I don't see ostree promote themselves as an alternative to Nix. The GP linked to an explainer of how OStree differs from a bunch of systems, not really a promotional page. And in general OStree's use case is different to Nix so I don't think it competes.
You may be right that this is a pattern, but I don't see it in this case.
It's marketing in action, though Chris Lattner's reputation from LLVM and Swift has a lot to do with why it quickly gained a high profile in these circles.
Maybe it's true, maybe it isn't. But who do you think has a vested interest in that meme being repeated? Mojo is a commercial, closed source language implementation backed by $30M of investor cash looking to turn a profit.
I wish them luck and watch with interest. Like a lot of people I've had "write a very fast Python and ??? and profit" on my todo list for a while (it remains below "job to pay the bills" though) because there's been obvious user interest for some years, although it's not clear if that translates to much commercial demand. I think if they are successful and if they remain closed source, an open source clone will appear soon after, and within a year or two will match or outperform them on reported performance, but they will still have a business for the same sorts of reasons Red Hat remains profitable.
Agreed - I think if they were really set on this they would release a 'pure' kernel or distribution devoid of any proprietary drivers, binaries, or non-GNU licensed code as a demonstration of how a true GNU-'compliant' distribution should look, and we can all see just how little work we can get done on it. This would by necessity exclude any and all access to non-GNU licensed code bases.
Any non-standards compliant hardware, or hardware with extended or proprietary functionality above and beyond the standards would therefore not be supported (as it appears even the offer or availability of such software takes the distribution out of contention for endorsement), meaning there would be very little work done in any realm other that the hobbyist world - giving it a rather small subset of the functionality most system users have come to expect from most *nix flavours.
I love NixOS and was a nixpkgs committer. I think a lot of ideas from Nix will get adopted by the wider Linux ecosystem. But I think it is far more likely that immutable systems based on OSTree, like Silverblue and Fedora CoreOS will become the OS for the next 20 years. It is much more familiar to most people and provides many of the same benefits. Especially now OSTree is adopting Docker/OCI images as a transport [1], the line between building systems and building containers is blurring. A lot of organizations have plenty of institutional knowledge in building Docker containers and OSTree with containers makes system building pretty much the same.
If 'OSS' wins, that doesn't mean the end of competition. Rather, it means the beginning of competition between the numerous distributions, window managers, package managers, etc.
Fortunately, these are almost all based on the same kernel, which will allow for better interoperability and cross-platform software (cross-platform meaning Ubuntu/Red Hat/BSD/Mac etc, not Windows/*nix variant). OSS is a philosophy, not a monopolistic party.
Or, possibly, the beginning of an Apple-dominated monopoly.
I expect a future, where like Linux and BSD downstreamers, there will be OEMs with their own proprietary extensions using them as means of business differentiation.
tbf if a new Linux were starting in 2022, it would absolutely be VC-funded, since the dotcom era opened that Pandora's Box and it will never close again
i think the other key difference b/w nix and k8s is that a very large swath of k8s core contributors are employed by very large companies (mostly Google, Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and IBM) who are also deeply invested in k8s-derivatives sold in the marketplace. from what i've gathered, and this might not be true anymore, many contributions to Linux still come from the academy (universities, etc)
I wonder if this consortium will end up defining "enterprise" Linux in the same way that POSIX forcibly seized the standards for UNIX from the control of AT&T and Sun.
I try not to predict the future but similar things were said about Open Source in the 90s. Then IBM threw their weight behind it (they were still pretty relevant), RedHat was and is a success, etc. I remember when the scales completely tipped on the Linux kernel and the top X contributors were from Intel, etc as opposed to individual hobbyist devs. Nvidia is an obvious one here - they already do a ton of large model/research work because good models sell a lot of hardware. I would not be surprised at all if in they're already working internally on this (they're due for a new large model/arch release anyway).
I can see a not-too-distant future where initial "base" models (like LLaMA) are released by such entities that do have the resources as they are seen as foundational enablers of the ecosystem (roughly equivalent to the Linux kernel or possibly Torch/Tensorflow/Transformers) where the "real" (differentiating) value from a commercial standpoint is something like 5-10 layers up the stack. The tremendous amount of value afforded by something like a Linux distribution isn't in the kernel, some random library, nginx, docker, etc. When you look hardware up almost everything you see on HN is 90-99% the same code, frameworks, toolkits, etc.
Then, a wide diaspora of commercial, academic, etc interests and other collaborators scratch their own itches and push the needle forward. Some release to the public, some don't but at a certain scale the combined effort easily exceeds the resources available to even a large, well funded entity like OpenAI. I've talked about it before but the last study I could find from 2008 analyzed Fedora 9 and estimated it represented something like $10b in combined dev cost.
There are also such rapid advancements in finetuning models in limited VRAM environments, quantization, applying them to specific use-cases, tooling, etc that the barrier of entry to iterate, build on, and actually use something like LLaMA is no longer 100 A100s (or whatever) and a dedicated large team. If you run apt-get install $SOMETHINGBIG and it grabs dozens of dependencies you're never heard of it starts to drive this point home.
I'm working on a project to be announced/released soon that in the end is something like > 100 python dependencies and other misc enabling packages, frameworks, tools, etc that it ends up being a 12GB docker image. Our "magic", meanwhile, is something like 1k LoC.
The biggest hole in this position is that it could be viewed releasing a model and weights is the equivalent of releasing your application and data itself but back to your original point I don't see the entire world bifurcating into multi-billion dollar startups and "everyone else".
Great examples. I almost mentioned Novell in my post, given their stewardshp of SuSE, but I haven't been paying a lot of attention to them lately, and wasn't sure if they'd been up to any weird shenanigans.
Canonical and Codeweavers and id are good examples as well. I should have thought of them.
IBM is an interesting case also. They certainly aren't a "pure play" F/OSS company the way Red Hat is, but IBM do contribute a lot to the F/OSS world, and they make a lot of knowledge available for free. But they also patent a LOT of stuff and pump out a ton of proprietary software. I'm on the fence about them.
It's a bit sad to see "real" distributions have shrunk to 2. In a way, you can say that's more of a case of these growing while everyone else did not (see: Slackware), and that it's a net positive in terms of consistency, but it might also indicate a retreat from experimental approaches. "Different" distributions like Gentoo failed to capitalize on early momentum, and there is now a general expectation that all * nix systems should look like RH or Debian.
Once in a while, there have been an announcement like this, which has not been well received. I am a little worried about it, and what it can lead to for the future. I worry it can split the community and be harmful to the future of very innovative software. I am trying to think of a similar situation within another area of the Linux or Open Source space, but can't really come up with good examples.
Interested to hear if these thoughts are well founded or just a bad take.
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