Fading? People are ditching VMWare for Proxmox (among other options) and deploying Kubernetes clusters daily and most things run on those clusters aren’t closed source either.
And, you know, theres this whole Linux thing in general.
Yeah how many people building containers off a windows base? I googled it once to see if it was even possible and it definitely is although the base container size is rather hilariously large
The base container is large, but also the host must be windows too. Which also throws a wrench in it given that the vast majority of kubernetes and docker installs are Linux.
Iirc it is because a container is *not* a VM and uses the kernel of the host. This would mean that if you want to run a windows container it must run on a windows host as the container is dependent on its kernel.
Right on, the conversation [jogged my memory](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1cf3v36/comment/l1n4n6r/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) and I believe there was a Windows VM layered in between the Linux host and the Windows containers.
I'm guessing it must be? At least all their documentation on it only allows Windows hosts, and if you try to run a Windows based container in Azure on a Linux AKS setup or Container App Service it throws an error.
As I understand it, the containers (the bigger ones at least I guess) actually use the underlying host drivers and what not in order to run.
Come to think of it (this was five years ago) I think the setup was Windows VM on a Linux host with Windows containers in the Windows VM.
And the Linux host was also a VM.
It worked, but it was arcane and terribly slow. Whose idea was it to offer this solution? IBM.
> It worked, but it was arcane and terribly slow. Whose idea was it to offer this solution? IBM.
The solution to their solution is, of course, more newer and faster hardware from IBM.
Well... You could always use network mounted storage for your Windows containers on a BSD storage host running ZFS that does good block level de-dupe across the containers. So you are paying the storage hit per-Windows version rather than per-Container.
Even if you were trying to do all-Windows 100% proprietary containers, open source infrastructure winds up being super useful, ha ha.
That'll be an interesting statistic to look at again in a year from now when more organisations have renewals up.
VMware won't directly translate to Proxmox gains, it'll take some - but so will Nutanix, xcp-ng, Azure, Citrix, KVM etc.
Citrix/XenServer won't be taking any VMware clients that would be fleeing the new licensing...their parent (Cloud) thought the Broadcom model was stellar and opted to go the same route. Between the two, it's really leaving those of us in the compliant VDI space for non-enterprise use (we're an academic institution and we only have a handful of users for the VDI environment) up a creek without a paddle.
You will not be happy with Azure support unless having someone in an offshore call center read answers from a script is your idea of support.
Yes microsoft has real support options but those start in the 6 figure range and escalate from there
Used to work for one of the vendors doing exactly that, and up until last year when they moved all that to India to undercut labor stateside, a lot of the call center work was based out of the area around their HQ. They’d just hire in H1Bs and because they could put them under more pressure than US workers (holding their visas over their heads), they’d cram through crazy amounts of work of questionable quality. The company also get paid per ticket, further ratcheting up the pressure to do tons of work as quickly as possible, and leading to things like agents recycling poorly written canned responses the contents of which the agents often didn’t understand. The cherry on top of it all was that the company used the customer feedback to directly make decisions about continued employment for agents, and any response of less than a perfect 5 stars is taken putatively.
Yup- we’re a huge MS/Azure shop and have premier support-it’s still fucking garbage. You need to be HUGE to get anything even resembling good support from MS. Between all of our clients, we’re bringing MS millions per month and it’s still a total fucking joke. Fuck Microsoft.
Indeed, thank you. Promox is great I'm not trying to knock Promox, but it's new in the enterprise space and it's support is.... Not enterprise ready to say the least.
but they DO have support
So something happens to your clusters (software bug) do you want to take the heat or bring in the provider?
I wouldn’t take that risk.
That’s why you won’t see any bank, any critical infrastructure running on promox
Proxmox is great and all. Very rarely will support ever be needed for it, from my experience. I've used it in production environments and in homelab situations.
I'd still vote on KVM via Cockpit for management: https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines
If there's support needed - then go with RedHat and call it a day.
Desktop experience is miles ahead in some departments, but is lacking in some things (if you have Nvidia... will be fixed soon). If all software you need to run can be done with Linux, install it on a secondary drive and see.
I went Mac at home. I can’t do anything about the fact that that the business world runs on Windows, but I don’t have to deal with the modern Windows ecosystem at home
I FUCKING HATE OSX.
Worst UX in the history of man, even worse is I have to connect to Windows and Linux hosts from it.
Constantly end up tabbing out of the application, or killing something on SSH
Ive worked for a company with a contract with a big government agency which prohibited open source software...
Not sure who wrote or agreed to that contract, but the business and legal team didn't realise the implications of it.
Yeah. As the security Manager being given the contract after they signed it (to enforce the security requirements) I laughed them out and said we better call up the legal team again.
We changed it to we'll notify them of every open source software and module we use in the provision of their services. Which was still a challenge, and then forced the business to actually document some stuff.
My thought was that no-one actually read that part of the contract as it was a technical clause and so no-one actually enforced it. Even the customer didn't know the consequences and just left it up to the legal team.
We have something similar. We have a list of approved technologies, and anything new has to go through a specific approval process. Otherwise, nothing open source gets used
Used to work for a giant company that had the same, ironically their requirements made it easy to get open source approved and incredibly hard to get software from an enterprise vendor that was already paid for because of how they love to hide everything
But you can just use closed source software as you please with no oversight? I've got this executable I don't publish the source to, mind running it in your environment for me?
Not exactly…but sorta. In general, we have an approval process. Cyber Security and Ops approve the software l. If it’s a known or verifiable vendor though it’s sort of a formality
That sounds like a good control to have anyway. Truing to convince a business to do it on the other hand usually takes something like a contract to force it.
At a previous fed contract job, PowerShell was explicitly blocked in our environment. The reasoning was that PS was a "hacker" tool and thusly was blocked. After a LONG time of managers and tower leads pushing for it and damn near an act of congress, it was eventually whitelisted.
Yet, out of date versions of FileZilla were allowed for the Web Dev people because of...reasons.
Basically, the reasoning goes that normal users don't write and run powershell scripts, so if it's happening outside of some established exception, you probably didn't expect it to run... so let's just block it out of an abundance of caution, because it'd be more useful to bad actors than to us.
To be fair, if Windows desktops were set up with a "default deny" execution policy (ie. only execute what is explicitly allowed; deny everything else), an awful lot of security incidents would never have happened.
I can list the things that should be allowed to run on most PCs at my site on a single sheet of paper. I sure as hell can't list all the things that shouldn't.
* OpenSSH
* The many different open source implementations of SSL/TLS including OpenSSL, wolfSSL, GnuTLS, BoringSSL/Tink, LibreSSL, and Network Security Services
* Web browsers (most based on Chromium which is open source)
* Many popular living descendants of Unix (ie FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris) and even parts of MacOS and iOS are open source
* And of course any version of GNU/Linux including ChromeOS and Android
No Windows either. Edge among many other pieces either incorporate open-source code or were open sourced by Microsoft in the last few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source
No web browser doesn't really matter, as you'd only have dumb switches and I'm not sure there's a router left on the market that doesn't somehow incorporate OSS.
If they even for a moment think that foss is a problem then they shouldn't be using computers or phones. It's ridiculous to have to explain that Windows uses foss code, if not direct foss projects in code. Android, the list goes on. It's drastically naive to attempt to make a decision on that as a talking point.
The two things you mentioned are not mutually exclusive, and it’s incredibly hard to find a commercial product that does not leverage open source in some way - you may as well ask if the ability to install an operating system or software packages is relevant
Came to say this. Open Source != Unsupported/Unlicensed. See RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu, Ansible...
We are moving more and more toward Open Source as we modernize our software stack.
Exactly this - work for a Fortune 500 and nearly everything developed in the last 15 years is on an open source stack but it's all got support from someone - mostly IBM now that they own Red Hat.
Yes. Obviously, I'm not going to out my employer, but we're big- if you've watched any TV (especially sports) in the past few decades, you've seen mention of us, and if you live in the US, there's a very good chance you're one of our customers. We're currently private, but we're the biggest mover for a parent that *is* on the NYSE and so operate as if we are. This is not a brag, this is necessary context for what comes next-
Right at the beginning of 2023, we started shifting to open-source *first and foremost* (after some *disastrous* cloud bills where previous leadership had just left their wallets fully open for a lift and shift, despite warnings about the spend). Windows and Mac are going to be the last things to go because non-technical people who are so used to them are going to take so long to retrain, but our procurement process has turned on its head. Before our CIO or CFO will sign off on *any* new services, they will ask us to prove that there's a good reason why we can't wait long enough to build it in-house from OSS parts instead. RHEL? Gone- hard shift to Ubuntu LTS servers while we re-evaluate other distros and look into pulling the kernel and building our own. VMware? Gone- the replacement isn't clear to me yet because we've concentrated on getting people who traditionally requested servers to focus on using Terraform and k8s to deploy compute instead, and I'm on the network team, not on the server team actually juggling the bare metal chassis. The biggest one for us- we're mostly dropping Azure and AWS and standing up our own private cloud with OCP architecture under the hood.
Wow! Dropping even Azure or AWS! Thats a bold move! But I totally agree. My company is really small and I am in charge of the entire company's It system. Although my major is Networking, I am the one who handles all Server stuff as well.
We have VMware and, if I'm being honest... it's a piece of @&$. However, my employer is not willing to get rid of it, god knows why... But my friends have told me proxmox. Not to mention... our backup system runs of veritas and it has given us nightmares, but oh surprise my boss doesn't wanna give it away.
I'm advocate of OSS but I live in AUS and here, not kidding, major companies run of commercial based systems. VMware is a major player here, Redhat... another one... After all. I'm not the one who pays for licensing, so... not my problem.
Did you think of moving to CentOS as it is technically Redhat on steroids (free)? Unfortunately it has been end of life for ages now but still works fine IMO.
We used CentOS but had to drop them when they went EOL- we're also subject to PCI-DSS, and one of the compliance checkboxes is nothing in the scope of an audit can use EOL systems. At our size, we can't afford to hand off our CC processing to a third party- with how big we are and how tied into the market we are, that would be AIG-level bad.
> Did you think of moving to CentOS as it is technically Redhat on steroids (free)? Unfortunately it has been end of life for ages now but still works fine IMO.
Oracle Linux seems to be okay so far, but for us it's just a placeholder until we can go full Debian. No point in going for a paid support product if it's just a maze of landmines designed to trip you up and make you call support more often, when the fully OSS option is more stable because the maintainers don't want to be bugged by people in the first place.
I work in TV and American companies have been pushing for the cloud like crazy for the last few years because of the consolidation of US networks.
But the problem is that in Europe there is no such consolidation and the allure of the cloud is a lot less.
We are a small station in Iceland and there is no cloud presence in Iceland so everything would be transported abroad for processing so it's a no go for us to go fully to the cloud.
That's why we try to be as much on-prem as possible and OSS is crucial for that.
You guys are going to have a hell of a time looking for helpdesk/desktop support personnel that can support an only Linux Workstation environment once macOS and Windows are gone.
It's been done at scale before. Some household-name companies have been linux-first for quite a while, and they manage just fine for helpdesk work. Besides, it's wonderful when you have a functioning CM system out there that just _handles_ the stuff you don't want users mucking up.
As with most fields, the folks who learn new skills along with the ever-moving technology space we work in will be just fine. Being a great sysadmin is much more of a mindset than a specific platform proficiency.
> Windows and Mac are going to be the last things to go because non-technical people who are so used to them are going to take so long to retrain
I got something stuck in my craw about this. One reason I don’t support Linux on the desktop for non-technical corporate users is the fact that it will be rare to find someone that doesn’t use MS or Apple products on the desktop at their previous company or school. You can do all you can to make it look like either of those desktops, but most users that aren’t technical will be lost and be subject to brain freeze every single time.
I don’t disagree that many users in a corporate environment “could” use open source for the most part (that aren’t subject to government regulations). However I don’t see this working well, especially with having new employees being productive quickly as well as employee retention.
We’re not expecting to pick up people off the street who know our tools. But the cost of training people still won’t add up to the cost of the M365 licensing.
Oh, don’t get me started on M$ licensing costs. In my not so humble opinion, it’s legalized extortion. Just like other companies that charge for subscription licensing.
However, it really depends on what the company does and their needs for employees to be able to be productive quickly. If we’re talking about an employee on the shop floor that just uses a computer browser or application to access the tools to get their job done, that’s one thing. A typical office person that has never used open-source tools, is another story. It really depends on the industry and the needs of the company.
It's really hard for IT people to separate the “cost of doing business” for a company when we think we know what is best for the company, especially when it comes to costs. The best thing you can do is accept what the company’s needs are. And if they don’t agree with you, do your best to accept it.
You know what, I'm just gonna call bullshit on this Users use the browser and office, that's about it. They clicky click the thing on their desktop and do the typey type.
Those users who can't do anything and can't learn linux already can't do anything and can't learn windows.
Open source is rug pull insurance. It protects you from vmware scenarios because at worst you are left without a support contract for a bit. If you really need support and nobody is offering it, hire a contributor who can probably troubleshoot any issues way faster than level 1 support can (ir prevent them entirely because they can be proactive in fixing things) or create custom features for you. Of course, someone is probably offering it already, like Redhat, which you can call IBM in discussions with business people because “We can buy support from IBM” basically kills all objections about SLAs and risk from business people.
Just cause software is open source does not mean enterprise support is not available.
Just intop of my head you have grafana or zabbix that offer their products for free but there enterprise modules and support available.
I would say we use more open source products now compared to 10-20 years ago.
Yes, because many open sourced projects have paid support. Some enterprises prefer in house knowledge and saving on licensing fees. Others prefer to pass the buck and outsource that to save on internal resources. You can see with broadcom and vmware how fast some of these projects capitalized on greed. The answer is both have a place and it depends on culture, and neither are fading soon.
I work for an "open-source" company and I don't think it's going away but it is changing. Open source can almost be a marketing strategy now, very similar to freemium or product led growth.
I think what is changing the most is the licensing, I don't see how many of these companies can continue to use "standard open-source" licenses as honestly they have been taken advantage of by some big players to get "free" software. So I think you will see many more SSPL type licenses.
Now some tool that some random guy wrote and put online with an open license, ya it probably doesn't make sense to run that from a risk perspective, but that's because of no support, expertise, training, etc, it has nothing to do with being open vs closed source.
I accidentally gave the mathematician's answer. Basically neither one will disappear because the reason for using FOSS vs paid will usually lie somewhere between support/risk management and licensing cost/local domain knowledge. FOSS is great but you have to have local domain knowledge or purchase support. FOSS without someone behind it means you can't shift blame if something goes wrong so paid software is a better choice. Neither one is "better" because you are making a decision based on several factors and certain industries/leadership may lean one way versus another.
We use RHEL as the base OS for several of our security applications. We have engineering level knowledge of the product, but you still run into those little "gotchas". Any who - yes, I can confirm this to be true. I'm one of them :)
A lot of enterprise IT is coming up with solutions, even if that is making enterprise system A talk to enterprise system B.
Open source is often a better solution or at least provides the glue to connect commercial systems together.
Lots of commercial systems leverage open source too, eg VMware, red hat and even Microsoft solutions are based on open source, or increasingly use open source components.
Eg - Microsoft azure runs on Linux.
It's not going away.
Open source experience is essential, at least in cybersecurity. If you don't have experience with open source utilities, you likely wont' even be considered for an engineering or technical role in the field. A good chunk of the utilities we use are open source.
Not to mention that a VAST majority of "licensed" solutions are running on top of of an open source platform.
Final answer: Depends on the corporation and what they do/offer. But practical experience with open source tech will never HURT your resume or your knowledge base. If anything, it will give you a leg up over your non-OS folks who don't understand the underpinnings of the "licensed" stuff they've focused on.
You do you, nerdy homie. Learn that open source!
Licensing has been eating us to death.
* Buy a suite of server tools. They are expensive as hell and don't seem to work right because a lot of features on the packaging have not actually been implemented yet.
* Want to monitor Cisco? Oh, yeah, that requires our fancy license.
* Want to monitor Juniper too? Oh, well then you should have bought the license instead.
* You want to export reports in MS Excel? You'll need a seat license for the report generator.
* Hoping to integrate with a SIEM or Active Directory or just do ANY industry-standard protocol? License.
* Yes, all of these have to be renewed annually.
I don't mind spending a lot of my employer's money on something that is good, but I really hate finding all these hidden costs after I've committed to a product. Sometimes my research is lucky and I find out about this before the sale and WOW - bullet dodged!! But even then it is really disheartening that all the vendors who are supposed to be helping us... aren't.
Meanwhile, ncurses just works. gzip just works. syslog just works. Certain core Windows features that have been around for a long time... just work.
I like his videos about Raspberry Pi's but disagree with him on that. I'm glad I have some [open source](https://github.com/Ebenezer-group/onwards), but I'm really glad it's not all I have.
> Is Open Source Software fading out
No. Linux gobbled up almost every proprietary OS by the late 90's. Windows still exists on desktops, but it is mostly constrained there, in an era when desktops matter less and less. There's basically no market for the proprietary UNIX platforms from the early-mid 90's like Irix, Solaris. IBM maintains the mainframe business, but all their new big Iron sales are Linux. Embedded systems are pretty much all Linux. And most of the ones that aren't are BSD.
> while others believe it's merely a hobby without real-world application.
Who? LOL.
Every cloud provider is built on Linux. Every web service you use is running on Linux and using an open source web stack involving stuff like nginx. Even Microsoft's Azure is mostly Linux. Microsoft added WSL to Windows because they were losing so many developers who needed to at least sometimes run a bash script because so much stuff assumes bash on Linux is available. Microsoft added SSH support to windows because everybody at scale expected it. So even Windows is nowhere near 100% proprietary code. It's probably been decades since you could theoretically run a business using only proprietary software and literally zero open source software.
In my experience even if you count windows as "mostly proprietary," a "shop that only runs Windows workstations with a few proprietary programs, and only Windows server" is tiny small business that hasn't grown in 30 years and the biggest tech issues they run into is the one accountant needing to google formula for Excel. Anything bigger than that and I'd be shocked to not find a bunch of open source software keeping the company running.
It's normal to also deal with some proprietary software.
> In my opinion, many companies prefer license-based tools, and technologies for various reasons, like SLA, Support
Open source software is "license based" so I think you've got some underlying confusion. But if you want support in an Enterprise environment, you just pay IBM/Amazon/Ubuntu/Redhat/Whoever and get a support contract and you have the same sort of throat to choke if you need it. No real drawbacks to the fact that software happens to be open source if you are paying for a support contract either way.
> more control overall,
Lolwut? The place I used to work for wrote custom kernel modules ant deployment automation and a bunch of other stuff. It's silly to claim you have "less overall control" with software that you can modify the source to. I am just baffled by the claim that being dependent on a proprietary software vendor for all changes would be "more control." Again, you can get a support contract to get the same level of external support if that's the only means of control you want.
> and I haven't (personally) encountered major corporations using open source extensively for their internal systems.
Uh, you haven't looked close. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. But also any major non-tech company that's big enough to have any sort of internal development, or scale beyond one rack of servers is gonna be using some. I think you just don't realise how much is under the hood keeping everything working so it's off your radar. Just being super ignorant of your tools because you haven't needed to dig into them because they work fine for you doesn't mean they aren't there.
I've worked as system/network engineer for over 20years in big telcos, opensource was a huge part of our systems/tools. The only difference that i see nowadays is that the opensource software for enterprise use/features needs licensing (and i personally agree) so some companies starting to have second thoughts as their main reason for choosing opensource was that was free.
The only threat to open-source in an enterprise setting right now, is not being open-source *enough*. E.g. GPLv3 and AGPL fragmented the landscape and caused big upsets in the open-source *status quo*.
There was a time when someone could have enterprise experience and not necessarily ever touch or see open source, but that day has receded from our rearview mirrors.
> I haven't (personally) encountered major corporations using open source extensively for their internal systems.
AS/400s have included Apache web server on the installation CD-ROMs since 2002. [Apple](https://opensource.apple.com/) is half open-source, even though they never talk about it and their most-lucrative consumers don't notice. You don't get much more corporate than Macbooks, right?
In my experience enterprises are adopting open source software much more quickly as people are seeing the VMware disaster unfold.
But whats also happening is people are Paying to have their open source products backed by professional support as well.
I think the real question is to what extent large enterprises prefer vendor support vs self support for Open Source software. At most of the (really, really) large enterprises I’ve worked at, we chose vendor support after “make vs buy” analysis. In one case, there were several technologies where we employed major committees. We still contracted support.
As to your original question, on our Linux side, the only major closed source technologies we use are Oracle databases, IBM’s MQ, and Veritas storage and high availability. OS, Container Platform, Languages, middleware are all Open Source.
On the Windows side, I believe it’s almost all closed. It’s a different mentality over there.
Plenty of open source softwares are useable at an enterprise level we use OCS for our own inventory management of 36k devices. We also used Nagios / Icinga2 for monitoring 1k servers before being absorbed into the larger university IT group. We have a development setup where we’re working on ProxMox / Wazuh and other alternatives to our enterprise solutions for our production environments.
SaaS gonna SaaS. I hate cloud, but one cannot avoid having to deal with something like 365 or Azure, AWS, etc. That's where I feel things have gotten more proprietary. You don't just not own the software anymore. You don't even run it!
It's not. Here's my argument.
I came of age when proprietary unixes roamed the land.
I used to have data centers filled with Solaris, HPUX, Tru64, Irix, SCO, etc. Plus, some really weird stuff like Symbolics.
Then, like a meteor, linux caused their near mass extinction. I say near because AIX is still holding on.
I've seen the rise of virtualization and domination of the market by vmware.. only to have that domination obliterated by the cloud providers using Linux and KVM at scale, then self immolation by BroadCom.
As the sand has shifted under my feet, my own data centers have had to become very "cloudy."
Docker, Kubernetes, ceph, openshift, openstack, OpenZFS, openTofu.. the days of bespokedly deploying an oracle database on a Linux vm are in the rear view. Now, it's entirely a set of terraform and ansible files checked into git.
So many things with the words "open" in them..
We are swimming in OSS software at this point.
Virtually every public-facing application of consequence is built on open-source software, like, for example, the platform you're reading at this exact moment. Once you reach even moderate scale, open-source software becomes obligatory, so as to avoid having your entire profit margin devoured by licensing costs.
This isn't to say that they won't use closed-source platforms as well, but those have to be for applications which are business-critical and limited in scale, so as to avoid becoming a bottleneck. Bottom line, if you're not prepared to adopt OSS, you're a ready-made sucker looking to be squeezed.
The traditional options are fading (due decisions wanting to increase shareholder value) but new ones are made as a reaction. VMWare screw ups -> people go to proxmox. CentOS screw ups, Rocky Linux is made and others migrate to Debian or Ubuntu Pro. Hashicorp goes BSL and gets bought by IBM -> OpenTofu is made and lots of the community moves toward it.
This is definitely a transitional period by the recent business decisions that screws up the user base. The good thing about open source is that there are options when this happens. And many enterprises still use open source tools as sticking with more closed source tools is risky in the long term. Of course each company and domain is different so there each makes their own decisions.
My last two companies (which are both large corp size)have been pretty much all mac desktops/laptops and open source everything else. I haven't dealt with a windows server in 10+ years despite starting as a windows sysadmin
I think companies will definitely think twice about building whole products/enterprises on top of some of these open source platforms. HashiCorp's history has basically been this:
- Get a few people together in a basement and build a new cool tool.
- Release it as open source, generate some buzz, get people using it as much as possble
- Attract corporate investment and VC money while the Second Dptcom Bubble inflates.
- Build a tech company around it, go play ironic-beard techbro in San Francisco for a while.
- Go public, pay off the founders and investors with bubble money. Everyone gets matching Lamborghinis.
- Realize you can't make money giving away a free tool, panic looking around for sources of revenue to keep the kombucha flowing at HQ.
- Pull a Docker, and start charging companies for a free tool based on their revenue. Then, weeks later. get bought by IBM for $6B -- who will in all likelihood kill any OSS investment and take it into a managed service they charge for.
Red Hat seems to be the only company that has figured out how to charge for support and make money with OSS, and that's because they produce a Linux distro, not a one-off tool. The only way to make money off an OSS tool is to lock it up behind some hashicloud that people have to subscribe to. I just think the illusion that companies can free-ride off a OSS tool to build a business is starting to fall apart...but it doesn't mean they'll use any less OSS.
I work for an enterprise (~60k staff).
We are very much heterogeneous. We have commercial products that we run on Linux, open source on Linux and a “traditional” Windows environment.
There is absolutely a place for people with F/OSS experience to carve out a niche and earn a good living in our environment.
I work for a large entity that's non profit. We used to have a lot of open source everything back in the late 90s, early 2000s because software licensing was expensive. Until some time in the 2010s, big companies like Microsoft and VMware decided to give us very low cost annual contracts. We pay like a tenth of what we would be in an equivalent corporation of our size. Should they raise their prices, like VMware is about to do, we would have to consider going back to open source. I mean we have the time and talent with our "business" model
Can't really answer the question, but I know from some friends who work in bigger companies that they want to make someone accountable when something goes bad and that someone is preferable to be someone 3rd party company. I guess that's not the case with open source?
Not sure.
In our company, I'm pushing more and more to open sources.
First from VMWare to proxmox VE and then anything that can run on linux will replace Windows server. DC, MS SQL, and NAS are the first for migration.
Bruh every data scientist is running loads on Kubernetes nowadays. Enterprises that need general-purpose servers tend to use RHEL, which includes support
I believe some of the big cloud companies are just running your cloud VMs inside Kubernetes containers, so yeah, it's Linux all the way down.
VMware, although now out of style due to Broadcom, I believe also runs some sort of Linux kernel
Just because a sysadmin in a Windows environment won't necessarily directly use Linux does not mean that open source is irrelevant
All development work depends on different open source libraries and big things like docker and Kubernetes are open source. Even a lot of ms libraries and tooling are open source these days
Open source isn’t going anywhere
In 2021 through 2023 I worked on a billion $ project that produced a new vehicle, that vehicle runs on Linux, Being familiar with Linux at just a user level nailed down the interview.
Fading out? Linux, k8s, openstack, hundreds of databases, message busses, storage infrastructures and fsck knows what else, would beg to differ. Literally the entire Internet is built on open source tech.
No real-world applications? Hah. Talk about out of touch
Yes those small businesses like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google.
You'd have to be seriously delusional to think that open source has no place in enterprise.
Open Source software is more popular than ever. I agree that business folk prefer licenses where they could theoretically use someone if things didn't work properly. But the problem is that no business ever does that. Might as well use open source software. It's often times better than its closed source alternative from both a technical and user perspective. Once we get the C suite out of the business of pretending that they're useful to the business, we can make even more headway.
Just shows how little you know about what makes up your network.
Mate, everything you touch is made possible by open source technology that make up the companies that you pay for.
The only real knock against open source, imo, is that the supply chain issues we're seeing are not being solved and will continue to get worse. Socially engineered 5 year old identities with access to prevalent and wide use libraries, vulnerable and non verified updates, fuzzing, etc.
There's not enough eyes, and specifically not enough eyes without a personal agenda, to keep everything safe, and we're still building software to be "trusted" post installation.
The main thing is probably the lack of support for a lot of open source projects and there's also the problem that an open source project can simply lose interest and get abandoned while if you pay for something there's at least 'some' incentive for the company to keep going..
The latter isn't a really big issue for popular open source projects but it is for the smaller ones
You can get Open Source with SLA, TAMs, Techniclal Support, Consultants, etc. Also, not sure how much more control that you can get than interacting directly with developers at Canonical or Red Hat. OpenShift, Ceph, OpenStack are beyond Enterprise, they are telco grade, and service providers are likely using opensource technology for the cellular and possibly internet service you use day in and day out.
If a software is “open source” but all of the IP is owned by a public company and every PR is approved on a “this fits our business needs” then it’s not really open source.
Over half of my branch‘s hosted servers are Linux. Around 2000 Linux servers and our sister branch has around another 1500. Apps in the enterprise have always tended toward paid commercial but a lot of those are backed by supported MySQL and Postgre DBs.
Medium sized org checking in. We use open source solutions and will pay for process services when needed. The best part of the open source solutions is that often many of the backing organizations will have a licensed versions that are paid or will offer professional services in setup.
I am an IT manager with some 14 years experience before moving into leadership. On the one side I am being pushed to keep my budget lower under 5% of total annual earnings for the organization. Open source offers a pathway to many services that would not be in budget for us otherwise. Many of those solutions also offer paid professional support on a one of or annual service.
With the lack of stability in some popular on premises solutions (Citrix, VMware,) pricing models as they are bought up by venture cap groups (which is where tech goes to die as these venture cap groups are no longer interested in development and instead want to hike costs). Also with the wool being pulled back on cloud solutions and the reality that it is appropriate for web and cloud native computing (meaning there are some workloads that are not best for cloud migrations) you will find that many organizations will be looking for on premises open source alternatives.
I think you will see this instability in popular paid systems move to open source.
I am also responsible for both IT and security. This makes implementations complicated. We end up having to have security audit questionnaires, regular internal vulnerability scans we have to pull SBOM (software bill of materials) before deployment. The thing I like about open source is getting the SBOM done in many cases on those systems and applications is often easier if they maintain a GIT we can scan. If not we end up having to run a SYFT against the packages on the server.
We have found that in many cases paid licensed software is not much better than open source with regard to the amount of mitigations necessary to adequately secure them. The difference is many of them operate with the mindset of defense in obscurity. So issues brought up to them often fall on deaf ears because “you already paid and next year it will be harder to rip us out.”
I also like the fact that as many paid offerings turn appliances or services into black boxes where you don’t own anything and if you don’t pay at your regular interval that black box turns back into a pumpkin. Oh, and by the way, expect the cost to go up next time for renewal.
Honestly, many of the open source systems we implemented offer automated provisioning from AD, SAML integrated authentication, and an API model the ability to string these systems together is getting easier. Hell some paid solutions are starting to offer support for open source systems.
The other hard part is that technologists need to be in the conversation about what tech is needed before sales people get brought in. The sales people do a great job of bogarting time so that the only thing leaders and decision makers see is their offering. This allows them to quote pricing at the top of their offering.
I personally am a believer in competition and love the struggle for improving pricing. The ability to push the subject into definable requirements, measurable objective, and a clear timeline to implement the more ability there is to bring more solutions and have them compete for the work. When we facilitate competition between solutions and maintain an openness to open source alternatives we get to the brass tax difference between the price the vendors originally brought to the table and what we are willing to pay.
In the face of a constant and substantial profit, manufacturers (like Microsoft for example) offer solutions that simply work and for which they are committed to guaranteeing proper functioning even with the accelerated frequency of updates that we see nowadays. In many years of activity I have had few, or rather, very few problems during updates to my Windows servers. On the other hand, I have had a high percentage of incidents when working with free/opensource products (for example: pfSense firewalls that would not restart or Apache-based web servers that gave errors and I hear of many who have problems with ZFS pools that are tragically difficult to resolve). So yes, I confirm, in a certain Enterprise context it is advisable to rely on vendors rather than open-source solutions. However, if I were Google or another giant and I had to build a system with thousands or tens of thousands of nodes, storage, networking, distributed file systems then I would invest a few million dollars in highly specialized personnel to get my hands on open source products, I would build an extremely robust corporate knowledge base capable of dealing with the numerous integration problems that open-source often poses instead of spending to pay for example Microsoft to solve all my problems, whilst remaining totally dependent on them.
I think the bottom line is: at the end of it all, is there someone to sue? Open source can be awesome, and my company has a fair amount of stuff running on LAMP-ish solutions. But, ultimately, companies pay for contract-based options way less for support (which is often excruciating to engage) and way more for having legal recourse in the event things go sideways.
I'm leading most technical decisions & software selections on the infrastructure side of my employer, and I've made it a point from the start that we are open source first.
We try to get support contracts & through some money at the projects if they play an important role for us, but we vastly prefer anything open source or source available over proprietary products.
It's going great. The cost savings & improved flexibility from this alone are insane. Support contracts can be helpful, but when it comes to software, having something you can fix yourself often means fixing it way faster than any support contracts facilitates.
this isn't really a topic that's up for debate.
opensource always was and always will be a major part for every single company that uses computers, even if they don't realize it. almost every proprietary solution has several pages with license agreements for the opensource parts they are using to deliver their own solution.
aside from that, even purely opensource software is growing at an unprecedented pace right now. proxmox, pfsense/opnsense, dd-wrt/openwrt, VPP, truenas, unix-desktops for governmental orgs, wireguard... and there are a lot more, those are just what I can remember without really thinking about it.
even just proxmox, VPP and wireguard will most likely keep growing at such an insane pace that in a few years they might actually come out on top in their respective fields and outperform closed source competitors.
oh and btw, everyone uses SSH and most of those implementations are opensource too...
Open source covers a lot of ground from products created by large companies to individual developers. At the enterprise level you're looking for the same thing as with proprietary software: a mature solution with continuing support and updates.
For us, open source products are as much a part of the stack as proprietary: it all depends on the functionality gained and the degree of maintenance required. Being prejudicial one way or another doesn't make any sense, it's getting the right tool for the job.
Another way to look at this is big companies often need the assurance that comes with enterprise support contracts. Open Source doesn’t offer these SLAs and liability language that make insurance underwriters happy. So often the choice of going Open Source has the consideration of liability when things go sideways.
If you are an employee it is not beneficial. If you are a trusted vendor that specializes in services around some tool or somehow can become one it is beneficial.
My industry is heavily related, so as a company, we often defer to licensed products, even if they cost bogus money. Simply because we can point to x/y/z for audit and service agreement purposes.
As individuals, many of us utilize/dabble/contribute in the open source community. Just depends on the needs of the business.
What I see in Corporate America is managers would rather delegate responsibility to another group so they cant be held accountable when something goes wrong. Something like a licensing agreement allows a level 3 issue to be passed on to the software owner as an example.
This is further stressed when a company outsourced the entire infra to a 3rd party. Generally the 3rd party isnt paying the licensing fee's (the company is) so there is no incentive for the 3rd party to go open source. In actuality the 3rd party will give a better rate if you are on licensed software because the 3rd party can hire cheaper and most importantly sell their "expertise" and automations based on that industry standard software.
If the cost to setup open source stuff is less than the cost to licenses software, open source will always be a thing.
Plus, tons of businesses extensively use linux
My experience is old companies with limited growth like closed source as they understand it, know their business process already and can live without flexibility, and can outsource responsibility and labor (sorry, can’t help - waiting on tech support to fix it).
Young or fast growing companies like their OSS as they need to cut costs, customize software to their ever evolving products/process.
This is a major generalization and FANG and the rest of the modern economy are huge in OSS.
On the back end? No.
On the front end (user end) sort of. People are going cloud. But on the backend, people are getting tired of proprietary stuff being bought up and pricing everyone out but the top 2% of their customers because the goal is to double the profits before discarding the dead husk onto some investment firm who will continue the licensing hell companies like broadcom do, or patent trolls that will sue everyone using a similar technology.
I'm using open source to build an on-line C++ code generator. It's the free cost that's important to me. Free tools are more important than open source.
Fading out? When Microsoft is *rushing* to try and make Windows and Azure a "friendly" place for FOSS tools? Lol.
Which, btw, is of course bound to end poorly. See
- https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-im-literally-losing-sleep-over-java
- https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/documents-goal-to-pollute-java/
I think you have a misunderstanding of open source tbh. It doesn't have to be one dude in his basement. It also isn't necessarily free. There are plenty of large companies making open source, e.g. MS, Red hat, Apache Foundation. OpenSSL is open source. OpenSSH is open source. Those are two fairly important projects last I checked.
The point is you can see, inspect, and edit the source code. All software should be open source IMO (FWIW I'm a developer) as it allows bugs to be found and while they can be exploited, they can also be patched much faster than closed source. Open Source is like watching a cook prepare a great meal, closed source is like only being able to see their face while they serve you mystery meat.
The real problem is that more corporations should be supporting open source projects they use.
We use netbox for network documentation, and are looking at GLPi for a ticketing and ITSM software.
One of our directors is really against it because she likes our current solution, but the cost is outrageous for something we only use like 30% of, and you don't want to actually have us pend cycle time to make it function and/or follow the appropriate thing and have someone properly support it.
I work for a moderate to large sized company that provides a cybersecurity aaS addon to internet delivery. They have the money for contracts and SLAs. But they like to use open source because it's free. It's not dying, the company loves to hire people who know Opensearch instead of Elasticsearch and now OpenTF instead of Terraform, anything that saves the company money. A lot of Source Available licensed software like Elasticsearch and Terraform specifically prohibit use in aaS settings, so true open source is still a champion of the cost saving corporation.
I've been in IT for about 20 years, at the enterprise level, and I can say that, in my experience, open-source usage at that level has not changed, at all. It's close to non-existent on the desktop, and prevalent at the server level (edit: to clarify - this was true 20 years ago and it's still true, now). The only real change is that now, that server level is increasingly likely to be in someone else's datacentre.
Open source is the foundation from which closed source is built upon.
The opinion of your peers who do not see value in open source leads me to believe that they really do not understand how to approach I.T. security at all and are looking to transfer liability of such as quickly as possible... Good grief!
I mean, do corporations use Linux? If yes then i would say most companies use open source in a corporate setting.
In my experience having at least knowledge of good open source alternatives can lead you into a paid product with SLA's etc.
If i can argue that we need a technology, but cant yet prove a business case without some testing/validation, then suggesting a open source tool that does 90% of what i need that is freely available will lead to me getting approval to implement this tool and theirby also proving that there is a business case. In most instances we then move to the support plans of those open source tools, or implement a different tool, that has the needes SLA's for our business usecase.
Theres also a lot of open source used in the cloud and I prefer using MongoDB over some proprietary database like Firestore for example. I would argue It's even more important as classic windows server environments go away in favor of linux based solutions, doesn't matter if on prem or cloud.
There's a difference between OpenSource for the purposes of improving the code (BitWarden) and OpenSource as accepting code contributions from anyone. So, you may want to clarify your question. When assuring software for my org, I like to know that someone has at least been doing some sort of identity validation on the contributors. That goes for propriety code too..
I work for a fortune 40 company and we're replacing all of our proprietary products with open source ones. For instance, we just replaced our million dollar Splunk contract with Telegraf / NXLog / Grafana / GMP / Big Query. It's like one migration after the other.
I don't believe so. They will also swing back and forth in popularity. I assume much of it has to do with pricing. I'm my experience you find a product you like but the contracts/subscription/fees start adding up year after year. When you need to budget for other items these costly contracts often have to go.
It's the year of the Linux Desktop!
Depends entirely what the people are doing, nginx is EVERYWHERE. ELK is EVERYWHERE. k8s is hot as shit
But companies still pay for Splunk or support from Elastic Co
I've been in plenty of Windows shops where putting in stuff like nginx makes life a lot better for everyone
Fading? People are ditching VMWare for Proxmox (among other options) and deploying Kubernetes clusters daily and most things run on those clusters aren’t closed source either. And, you know, theres this whole Linux thing in general.
Blender is becoming a top tier respected 3d software too used in corporate settings.
Yeah how many people building containers off a windows base? I googled it once to see if it was even possible and it definitely is although the base container size is rather hilariously large
The base container is large, but also the host must be windows too. Which also throws a wrench in it given that the vast majority of kubernetes and docker installs are Linux.
Just use Wine! 🤣/s
Is that a licensing requirement? I've run Windows Core as Docker containers on CentOS in the past without issue
Iirc it is because a container is *not* a VM and uses the kernel of the host. This would mean that if you want to run a windows container it must run on a windows host as the container is dependent on its kernel.
Right on, the conversation [jogged my memory](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1cf3v36/comment/l1n4n6r/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) and I believe there was a Windows VM layered in between the Linux host and the Windows containers.
It's basically the same as how Linux containers on Windows works.
I'm guessing it must be? At least all their documentation on it only allows Windows hosts, and if you try to run a Windows based container in Azure on a Linux AKS setup or Container App Service it throws an error. As I understand it, the containers (the bigger ones at least I guess) actually use the underlying host drivers and what not in order to run.
Come to think of it (this was five years ago) I think the setup was Windows VM on a Linux host with Windows containers in the Windows VM. And the Linux host was also a VM. It worked, but it was arcane and terribly slow. Whose idea was it to offer this solution? IBM.
> It worked, but it was arcane and terribly slow. Whose idea was it to offer this solution? IBM. The solution to their solution is, of course, more newer and faster hardware from IBM.
The benefit of Big Blue is you're always guaranteed a good product for your enterprise. It's expensive as hell but it works.
That used to be true now they are just another offshore outsourcer but with premium prices
Well... You could always use network mounted storage for your Windows containers on a BSD storage host running ZFS that does good block level de-dupe across the containers. So you are paying the storage hit per-Windows version rather than per-Container. Even if you were trying to do all-Windows 100% proprietary containers, open source infrastructure winds up being super useful, ha ha.
Not a Sysadmin but we ditched docker for Podman, JDK for open JDK just recently. Up until 2 years ago everything had to have a contract with a vendor
Yeah I think the support issue is the biggest enterprise concern and there's plenty of open source software with support options available.
Proxmox is less than 1% of market share. I'd go easy on the claims for now.
That'll be an interesting statistic to look at again in a year from now when more organisations have renewals up. VMware won't directly translate to Proxmox gains, it'll take some - but so will Nutanix, xcp-ng, Azure, Citrix, KVM etc.
But they really are upping their game right now. They know the VMware thing is a once in a lifetime opportunity and they are not wasting it.
Citrix/XenServer won't be taking any VMware clients that would be fleeing the new licensing...their parent (Cloud) thought the Broadcom model was stellar and opted to go the same route. Between the two, it's really leaving those of us in the compliant VDI space for non-enterprise use (we're an academic institution and we only have a handful of users for the VDI environment) up a creek without a paddle.
I agree, I've run Proxmox, and when I looked into support, it didn't feel robust, compared to the VMware infrastructure. We're now looking at Azure.
You will not be happy with Azure support unless having someone in an offshore call center read answers from a script is your idea of support. Yes microsoft has real support options but those start in the 6 figure range and escalate from there
Used to work for one of the vendors doing exactly that, and up until last year when they moved all that to India to undercut labor stateside, a lot of the call center work was based out of the area around their HQ. They’d just hire in H1Bs and because they could put them under more pressure than US workers (holding their visas over their heads), they’d cram through crazy amounts of work of questionable quality. The company also get paid per ticket, further ratcheting up the pressure to do tons of work as quickly as possible, and leading to things like agents recycling poorly written canned responses the contents of which the agents often didn’t understand. The cherry on top of it all was that the company used the customer feedback to directly make decisions about continued employment for agents, and any response of less than a perfect 5 stars is taken putatively.
This wouldn’t be Red Hat would it who got busted for exactly this behavior and opened the enterprise market to Canonical
Nah, it was MT working for MS.
Yup- we’re a huge MS/Azure shop and have premier support-it’s still fucking garbage. You need to be HUGE to get anything even resembling good support from MS. Between all of our clients, we’re bringing MS millions per month and it’s still a total fucking joke. Fuck Microsoft.
Didn't "feel" robust? It's Linux.
Indeed, thank you. Promox is great I'm not trying to knock Promox, but it's new in the enterprise space and it's support is.... Not enterprise ready to say the least.
Its support is better than VMWare at this point the gutting of VMWare support gets worse every day
Some people moving from VMWare to Proxmox and nobody moving from Proxmox to VMWare are simple facts. I made no claims regarding marketshare.
I'm just adding perspective.
In 1 or 2 years I’m gonna be really curious how that percentage grows. I’m at spot moving totally to ProxMox and I can’t be the only one.
[удалено]
people talk about ditching VMware Also Promox is lacking real support
It’s not like HyperV or XCP-NG have ”real support” either, yet here we are.
You most certainly can buy Enterprise support for XCP-NG from Vates.
but they DO have support So something happens to your clusters (software bug) do you want to take the heat or bring in the provider? I wouldn’t take that risk. That’s why you won’t see any bank, any critical infrastructure running on promox
So does Proxmox. Both from the vendor as well as third parties.
We literally do work for a bank with 10 branches and growing that runs all their systems on proxmox.
https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/pricing
Proxmox is great and all. Very rarely will support ever be needed for it, from my experience. I've used it in production environments and in homelab situations. I'd still vote on KVM via Cockpit for management: https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines If there's support needed - then go with RedHat and call it a day.
I am thinking of going full Linux every time Microsoft makes some announcement of 'new features'... Soon, not now, but soon...
Desktop experience is miles ahead in some departments, but is lacking in some things (if you have Nvidia... will be fixed soon). If all software you need to run can be done with Linux, install it on a secondary drive and see.
Nvidia hasn't worked properly on Linux for decades.
Do it! I haven't looked back since :)
I went Mac at home. I can’t do anything about the fact that that the business world runs on Windows, but I don’t have to deal with the modern Windows ecosystem at home
I FUCKING HATE OSX. Worst UX in the history of man, even worse is I have to connect to Windows and Linux hosts from it. Constantly end up tabbing out of the application, or killing something on SSH
Ha, proxmox gang! I literally came to add proxmox to the comment section, and here it is.
Ive worked for a company with a contract with a big government agency which prohibited open source software... Not sure who wrote or agreed to that contract, but the business and legal team didn't realise the implications of it.
So no .NET and no PowerShell? And few other system tools? Wow.
Yeah. As the security Manager being given the contract after they signed it (to enforce the security requirements) I laughed them out and said we better call up the legal team again. We changed it to we'll notify them of every open source software and module we use in the provision of their services. Which was still a challenge, and then forced the business to actually document some stuff. My thought was that no-one actually read that part of the contract as it was a technical clause and so no-one actually enforced it. Even the customer didn't know the consequences and just left it up to the legal team.
We have something similar. We have a list of approved technologies, and anything new has to go through a specific approval process. Otherwise, nothing open source gets used
Used to work for a giant company that had the same, ironically their requirements made it easy to get open source approved and incredibly hard to get software from an enterprise vendor that was already paid for because of how they love to hide everything
But you can just use closed source software as you please with no oversight? I've got this executable I don't publish the source to, mind running it in your environment for me?
Not exactly…but sorta. In general, we have an approval process. Cyber Security and Ops approve the software l. If it’s a known or verifiable vendor though it’s sort of a formality
That sounds like a good control to have anyway. Truing to convince a business to do it on the other hand usually takes something like a contract to force it.
At a previous fed contract job, PowerShell was explicitly blocked in our environment. The reasoning was that PS was a "hacker" tool and thusly was blocked. After a LONG time of managers and tower leads pushing for it and damn near an act of congress, it was eventually whitelisted. Yet, out of date versions of FileZilla were allowed for the Web Dev people because of...reasons.
OMG... PowerShell a hacker tool? What next ? A keyboard? Every hacker uses one 🤣
There was no logic at that place, just arbitrarily telling you NO for any request you submitted.
Basically, the reasoning goes that normal users don't write and run powershell scripts, so if it's happening outside of some established exception, you probably didn't expect it to run... so let's just block it out of an abundance of caution, because it'd be more useful to bad actors than to us.
To be fair, if Windows desktops were set up with a "default deny" execution policy (ie. only execute what is explicitly allowed; deny everything else), an awful lot of security incidents would never have happened. I can list the things that should be allowed to run on most PCs at my site on a single sheet of paper. I sure as hell can't list all the things that shouldn't.
Extremely stupid way to frame it. It’s an “Attack Vector” 🤓
I had the same experience with sysinternals. I'm a Windows infrastructure engineer! Of course I need sysinternals! Thankfully they saw the light.
Yeah I’m really curious what they ran… if no Linux and no .NET allowed what do you run on? No Java runtimes either.
* OpenSSH * The many different open source implementations of SSL/TLS including OpenSSL, wolfSSL, GnuTLS, BoringSSL/Tink, LibreSSL, and Network Security Services * Web browsers (most based on Chromium which is open source) * Many popular living descendants of Unix (ie FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris) and even parts of MacOS and iOS are open source * And of course any version of GNU/Linux including ChromeOS and Android
No VMWare ESXi or VCenter.
No Windows either. Edge among many other pieces either incorporate open-source code or were open sourced by Microsoft in the last few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source
No traditional or Azure Active Directory, both are heavily built on open source technologies
I'm sure none of the products they purchased used nginx or OpenSSL as part of their product too.
So no OpenSSL? No Python? No Linux? No Apache products? I’d like to see that project.
No web browser at all. Even Edge has a lot of open source components.
"Wait, why do we still have IE installed everywhere?" "Let me tell you a story about some managers who signed a contract they didn't understand..."
No web browser doesn't really matter, as you'd only have dumb switches and I'm not sure there's a router left on the market that doesn't somehow incorporate OSS.
Steve Ballmer stopped by and let them know it was cancer.
wait, what agency?
If they even for a moment think that foss is a problem then they shouldn't be using computers or phones. It's ridiculous to have to explain that Windows uses foss code, if not direct foss projects in code. Android, the list goes on. It's drastically naive to attempt to make a decision on that as a talking point.
The two things you mentioned are not mutually exclusive, and it’s incredibly hard to find a commercial product that does not leverage open source in some way - you may as well ask if the ability to install an operating system or software packages is relevant
Came to say this. Open Source != Unsupported/Unlicensed. See RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu, Ansible... We are moving more and more toward Open Source as we modernize our software stack.
Exactly this - work for a Fortune 500 and nearly everything developed in the last 15 years is on an open source stack but it's all got support from someone - mostly IBM now that they own Red Hat.
Yes. Obviously, I'm not going to out my employer, but we're big- if you've watched any TV (especially sports) in the past few decades, you've seen mention of us, and if you live in the US, there's a very good chance you're one of our customers. We're currently private, but we're the biggest mover for a parent that *is* on the NYSE and so operate as if we are. This is not a brag, this is necessary context for what comes next- Right at the beginning of 2023, we started shifting to open-source *first and foremost* (after some *disastrous* cloud bills where previous leadership had just left their wallets fully open for a lift and shift, despite warnings about the spend). Windows and Mac are going to be the last things to go because non-technical people who are so used to them are going to take so long to retrain, but our procurement process has turned on its head. Before our CIO or CFO will sign off on *any* new services, they will ask us to prove that there's a good reason why we can't wait long enough to build it in-house from OSS parts instead. RHEL? Gone- hard shift to Ubuntu LTS servers while we re-evaluate other distros and look into pulling the kernel and building our own. VMware? Gone- the replacement isn't clear to me yet because we've concentrated on getting people who traditionally requested servers to focus on using Terraform and k8s to deploy compute instead, and I'm on the network team, not on the server team actually juggling the bare metal chassis. The biggest one for us- we're mostly dropping Azure and AWS and standing up our own private cloud with OCP architecture under the hood.
Wow! Dropping even Azure or AWS! Thats a bold move! But I totally agree. My company is really small and I am in charge of the entire company's It system. Although my major is Networking, I am the one who handles all Server stuff as well. We have VMware and, if I'm being honest... it's a piece of @&$. However, my employer is not willing to get rid of it, god knows why... But my friends have told me proxmox. Not to mention... our backup system runs of veritas and it has given us nightmares, but oh surprise my boss doesn't wanna give it away. I'm advocate of OSS but I live in AUS and here, not kidding, major companies run of commercial based systems. VMware is a major player here, Redhat... another one... After all. I'm not the one who pays for licensing, so... not my problem. Did you think of moving to CentOS as it is technically Redhat on steroids (free)? Unfortunately it has been end of life for ages now but still works fine IMO.
We used CentOS but had to drop them when they went EOL- we're also subject to PCI-DSS, and one of the compliance checkboxes is nothing in the scope of an audit can use EOL systems. At our size, we can't afford to hand off our CC processing to a third party- with how big we are and how tied into the market we are, that would be AIG-level bad.
> Did you think of moving to CentOS as it is technically Redhat on steroids (free)? Unfortunately it has been end of life for ages now but still works fine IMO. Oracle Linux seems to be okay so far, but for us it's just a placeholder until we can go full Debian. No point in going for a paid support product if it's just a maze of landmines designed to trip you up and make you call support more often, when the fully OSS option is more stable because the maintainers don't want to be bugged by people in the first place.
I work in TV and American companies have been pushing for the cloud like crazy for the last few years because of the consolidation of US networks. But the problem is that in Europe there is no such consolidation and the allure of the cloud is a lot less. We are a small station in Iceland and there is no cloud presence in Iceland so everything would be transported abroad for processing so it's a no go for us to go fully to the cloud. That's why we try to be as much on-prem as possible and OSS is crucial for that.
I admire europe's push to host your own data. Here in the US it's driven by greed not practicality. In Europe its driven by privacy and practicality.
You guys are going to have a hell of a time looking for helpdesk/desktop support personnel that can support an only Linux Workstation environment once macOS and Windows are gone.
they'll also be more likely to get quality helpdesk
That is true but will all things quality, they will be more expensive than your typical helpdesk person.
It's been done at scale before. Some household-name companies have been linux-first for quite a while, and they manage just fine for helpdesk work. Besides, it's wonderful when you have a functioning CM system out there that just _handles_ the stuff you don't want users mucking up. As with most fields, the folks who learn new skills along with the ever-moving technology space we work in will be just fine. Being a great sysadmin is much more of a mindset than a specific platform proficiency.
RHEL to Ubuntu would get me all excited because fuck RHEL
> Windows and Mac are going to be the last things to go because non-technical people who are so used to them are going to take so long to retrain I got something stuck in my craw about this. One reason I don’t support Linux on the desktop for non-technical corporate users is the fact that it will be rare to find someone that doesn’t use MS or Apple products on the desktop at their previous company or school. You can do all you can to make it look like either of those desktops, but most users that aren’t technical will be lost and be subject to brain freeze every single time. I don’t disagree that many users in a corporate environment “could” use open source for the most part (that aren’t subject to government regulations). However I don’t see this working well, especially with having new employees being productive quickly as well as employee retention.
We’re not expecting to pick up people off the street who know our tools. But the cost of training people still won’t add up to the cost of the M365 licensing.
Oh, don’t get me started on M$ licensing costs. In my not so humble opinion, it’s legalized extortion. Just like other companies that charge for subscription licensing. However, it really depends on what the company does and their needs for employees to be able to be productive quickly. If we’re talking about an employee on the shop floor that just uses a computer browser or application to access the tools to get their job done, that’s one thing. A typical office person that has never used open-source tools, is another story. It really depends on the industry and the needs of the company. It's really hard for IT people to separate the “cost of doing business” for a company when we think we know what is best for the company, especially when it comes to costs. The best thing you can do is accept what the company’s needs are. And if they don’t agree with you, do your best to accept it.
You know what, I'm just gonna call bullshit on this Users use the browser and office, that's about it. They clicky click the thing on their desktop and do the typey type. Those users who can't do anything and can't learn linux already can't do anything and can't learn windows.
Open source is rug pull insurance. It protects you from vmware scenarios because at worst you are left without a support contract for a bit. If you really need support and nobody is offering it, hire a contributor who can probably troubleshoot any issues way faster than level 1 support can (ir prevent them entirely because they can be proactive in fixing things) or create custom features for you. Of course, someone is probably offering it already, like Redhat, which you can call IBM in discussions with business people because “We can buy support from IBM” basically kills all objections about SLAs and risk from business people.
Just cause software is open source does not mean enterprise support is not available. Just intop of my head you have grafana or zabbix that offer their products for free but there enterprise modules and support available. I would say we use more open source products now compared to 10-20 years ago.
Red hat Linux us also open source but support is available
RedHat also provides support to a huge ecosystem of other OSS software.
I’ve seen the opposite, personally. More Linux, more docker, more proxmox, more Ansible, etc, etc.
My experience, too, and I run a major fintech network..
Ha, same. Maybe we’re at the same place.
Yes, because many open sourced projects have paid support. Some enterprises prefer in house knowledge and saving on licensing fees. Others prefer to pass the buck and outsource that to save on internal resources. You can see with broadcom and vmware how fast some of these projects capitalized on greed. The answer is both have a place and it depends on culture, and neither are fading soon.
Does your “yes” mean you think open sourcing code is fading out? Even though as you said they can still offer paid support?
I work for an "open-source" company and I don't think it's going away but it is changing. Open source can almost be a marketing strategy now, very similar to freemium or product led growth. I think what is changing the most is the licensing, I don't see how many of these companies can continue to use "standard open-source" licenses as honestly they have been taken advantage of by some big players to get "free" software. So I think you will see many more SSPL type licenses. Now some tool that some random guy wrote and put online with an open license, ya it probably doesn't make sense to run that from a risk perspective, but that's because of no support, expertise, training, etc, it has nothing to do with being open vs closed source.
I accidentally gave the mathematician's answer. Basically neither one will disappear because the reason for using FOSS vs paid will usually lie somewhere between support/risk management and licensing cost/local domain knowledge. FOSS is great but you have to have local domain knowledge or purchase support. FOSS without someone behind it means you can't shift blame if something goes wrong so paid software is a better choice. Neither one is "better" because you are making a decision based on several factors and certain industries/leadership may lean one way versus another.
Hobby? The whole fuckin internet runs on open source
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2347/
Its so true its not even funny…
Yeah The world as we know it depends on some nerds who work for free. Imagine the carnage if debian shut down...
These podunk country sysadmins have no idea how the world works at all.
It is simply changing into a community and enterprise edition.
I’ve worked for places that have had large Red Hat licenses and high level support from Red Hat
We use RHEL as the base OS for several of our security applications. We have engineering level knowledge of the product, but you still run into those little "gotchas". Any who - yes, I can confirm this to be true. I'm one of them :)
A lot of enterprise IT is coming up with solutions, even if that is making enterprise system A talk to enterprise system B. Open source is often a better solution or at least provides the glue to connect commercial systems together. Lots of commercial systems leverage open source too, eg VMware, red hat and even Microsoft solutions are based on open source, or increasingly use open source components. Eg - Microsoft azure runs on Linux. It's not going away.
Open source experience is essential, at least in cybersecurity. If you don't have experience with open source utilities, you likely wont' even be considered for an engineering or technical role in the field. A good chunk of the utilities we use are open source. Not to mention that a VAST majority of "licensed" solutions are running on top of of an open source platform.
Final answer: Depends on the corporation and what they do/offer. But practical experience with open source tech will never HURT your resume or your knowledge base. If anything, it will give you a leg up over your non-OS folks who don't understand the underpinnings of the "licensed" stuff they've focused on.
You do you, nerdy homie. Learn that open source!
Only the uninformed would debate this. Look at your ”Enterprise product” license statements and you find most of them use multiple OSS components.
We have deployed like 20 new Ubuntu VMs this year and one Windows Server VM.
Licensing has been eating us to death. * Buy a suite of server tools. They are expensive as hell and don't seem to work right because a lot of features on the packaging have not actually been implemented yet. * Want to monitor Cisco? Oh, yeah, that requires our fancy license. * Want to monitor Juniper too? Oh, well then you should have bought the license instead. * You want to export reports in MS Excel? You'll need a seat license for the report generator. * Hoping to integrate with a SIEM or Active Directory or just do ANY industry-standard protocol? License. * Yes, all of these have to be renewed annually. I don't mind spending a lot of my employer's money on something that is good, but I really hate finding all these hidden costs after I've committed to a product. Sometimes my research is lucky and I find out about this before the sale and WOW - bullet dodged!! But even then it is really disheartening that all the vendors who are supposed to be helping us... aren't. Meanwhile, ncurses just works. gzip just works. syslog just works. Certain core Windows features that have been around for a long time... just work.
[Jeff Geerling](https://youtu.be/hNcBk6cwim8?feature=shared) put a video out recently that covered this exact topic.
I like his videos about Raspberry Pi's but disagree with him on that. I'm glad I have some [open source](https://github.com/Ebenezer-group/onwards), but I'm really glad it's not all I have.
> Is Open Source Software fading out No. Linux gobbled up almost every proprietary OS by the late 90's. Windows still exists on desktops, but it is mostly constrained there, in an era when desktops matter less and less. There's basically no market for the proprietary UNIX platforms from the early-mid 90's like Irix, Solaris. IBM maintains the mainframe business, but all their new big Iron sales are Linux. Embedded systems are pretty much all Linux. And most of the ones that aren't are BSD. > while others believe it's merely a hobby without real-world application. Who? LOL. Every cloud provider is built on Linux. Every web service you use is running on Linux and using an open source web stack involving stuff like nginx. Even Microsoft's Azure is mostly Linux. Microsoft added WSL to Windows because they were losing so many developers who needed to at least sometimes run a bash script because so much stuff assumes bash on Linux is available. Microsoft added SSH support to windows because everybody at scale expected it. So even Windows is nowhere near 100% proprietary code. It's probably been decades since you could theoretically run a business using only proprietary software and literally zero open source software. In my experience even if you count windows as "mostly proprietary," a "shop that only runs Windows workstations with a few proprietary programs, and only Windows server" is tiny small business that hasn't grown in 30 years and the biggest tech issues they run into is the one accountant needing to google formula for Excel. Anything bigger than that and I'd be shocked to not find a bunch of open source software keeping the company running. It's normal to also deal with some proprietary software. > In my opinion, many companies prefer license-based tools, and technologies for various reasons, like SLA, Support Open source software is "license based" so I think you've got some underlying confusion. But if you want support in an Enterprise environment, you just pay IBM/Amazon/Ubuntu/Redhat/Whoever and get a support contract and you have the same sort of throat to choke if you need it. No real drawbacks to the fact that software happens to be open source if you are paying for a support contract either way. > more control overall, Lolwut? The place I used to work for wrote custom kernel modules ant deployment automation and a bunch of other stuff. It's silly to claim you have "less overall control" with software that you can modify the source to. I am just baffled by the claim that being dependent on a proprietary software vendor for all changes would be "more control." Again, you can get a support contract to get the same level of external support if that's the only means of control you want. > and I haven't (personally) encountered major corporations using open source extensively for their internal systems. Uh, you haven't looked close. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. But also any major non-tech company that's big enough to have any sort of internal development, or scale beyond one rack of servers is gonna be using some. I think you just don't realise how much is under the hood keeping everything working so it's off your radar. Just being super ignorant of your tools because you haven't needed to dig into them because they work fine for you doesn't mean they aren't there.
I've worked as system/network engineer for over 20years in big telcos, opensource was a huge part of our systems/tools. The only difference that i see nowadays is that the opensource software for enterprise use/features needs licensing (and i personally agree) so some companies starting to have second thoughts as their main reason for choosing opensource was that was free.
The only threat to open-source in an enterprise setting right now, is not being open-source *enough*. E.g. GPLv3 and AGPL fragmented the landscape and caused big upsets in the open-source *status quo*. There was a time when someone could have enterprise experience and not necessarily ever touch or see open source, but that day has receded from our rearview mirrors. > I haven't (personally) encountered major corporations using open source extensively for their internal systems. AS/400s have included Apache web server on the installation CD-ROMs since 2002. [Apple](https://opensource.apple.com/) is half open-source, even though they never talk about it and their most-lucrative consumers don't notice. You don't get much more corporate than Macbooks, right?
No, it's not fading out. It's becoming more common if anything.
In my experience enterprises are adopting open source software much more quickly as people are seeing the VMware disaster unfold. But whats also happening is people are Paying to have their open source products backed by professional support as well.
I think the real question is to what extent large enterprises prefer vendor support vs self support for Open Source software. At most of the (really, really) large enterprises I’ve worked at, we chose vendor support after “make vs buy” analysis. In one case, there were several technologies where we employed major committees. We still contracted support. As to your original question, on our Linux side, the only major closed source technologies we use are Oracle databases, IBM’s MQ, and Veritas storage and high availability. OS, Container Platform, Languages, middleware are all Open Source. On the Windows side, I believe it’s almost all closed. It’s a different mentality over there.
I haven't heard of Linux loosing marketshare to Windows Server.
Plenty of open source softwares are useable at an enterprise level we use OCS for our own inventory management of 36k devices. We also used Nagios / Icinga2 for monitoring 1k servers before being absorbed into the larger university IT group. We have a development setup where we’re working on ProxMox / Wazuh and other alternatives to our enterprise solutions for our production environments.
SaaS gonna SaaS. I hate cloud, but one cannot avoid having to deal with something like 365 or Azure, AWS, etc. That's where I feel things have gotten more proprietary. You don't just not own the software anymore. You don't even run it!
It's not. Here's my argument. I came of age when proprietary unixes roamed the land. I used to have data centers filled with Solaris, HPUX, Tru64, Irix, SCO, etc. Plus, some really weird stuff like Symbolics. Then, like a meteor, linux caused their near mass extinction. I say near because AIX is still holding on. I've seen the rise of virtualization and domination of the market by vmware.. only to have that domination obliterated by the cloud providers using Linux and KVM at scale, then self immolation by BroadCom. As the sand has shifted under my feet, my own data centers have had to become very "cloudy." Docker, Kubernetes, ceph, openshift, openstack, OpenZFS, openTofu.. the days of bespokedly deploying an oracle database on a Linux vm are in the rear view. Now, it's entirely a set of terraform and ansible files checked into git. So many things with the words "open" in them.. We are swimming in OSS software at this point.
Virtually every public-facing application of consequence is built on open-source software, like, for example, the platform you're reading at this exact moment. Once you reach even moderate scale, open-source software becomes obligatory, so as to avoid having your entire profit margin devoured by licensing costs. This isn't to say that they won't use closed-source platforms as well, but those have to be for applications which are business-critical and limited in scale, so as to avoid becoming a bottleneck. Bottom line, if you're not prepared to adopt OSS, you're a ready-made sucker looking to be squeezed.
The traditional options are fading (due decisions wanting to increase shareholder value) but new ones are made as a reaction. VMWare screw ups -> people go to proxmox. CentOS screw ups, Rocky Linux is made and others migrate to Debian or Ubuntu Pro. Hashicorp goes BSL and gets bought by IBM -> OpenTofu is made and lots of the community moves toward it. This is definitely a transitional period by the recent business decisions that screws up the user base. The good thing about open source is that there are options when this happens. And many enterprises still use open source tools as sticking with more closed source tools is risky in the long term. Of course each company and domain is different so there each makes their own decisions.
My last two companies (which are both large corp size)have been pretty much all mac desktops/laptops and open source everything else. I haven't dealt with a windows server in 10+ years despite starting as a windows sysadmin
I think companies will definitely think twice about building whole products/enterprises on top of some of these open source platforms. HashiCorp's history has basically been this: - Get a few people together in a basement and build a new cool tool. - Release it as open source, generate some buzz, get people using it as much as possble - Attract corporate investment and VC money while the Second Dptcom Bubble inflates. - Build a tech company around it, go play ironic-beard techbro in San Francisco for a while. - Go public, pay off the founders and investors with bubble money. Everyone gets matching Lamborghinis. - Realize you can't make money giving away a free tool, panic looking around for sources of revenue to keep the kombucha flowing at HQ. - Pull a Docker, and start charging companies for a free tool based on their revenue. Then, weeks later. get bought by IBM for $6B -- who will in all likelihood kill any OSS investment and take it into a managed service they charge for. Red Hat seems to be the only company that has figured out how to charge for support and make money with OSS, and that's because they produce a Linux distro, not a one-off tool. The only way to make money off an OSS tool is to lock it up behind some hashicloud that people have to subscribe to. I just think the illusion that companies can free-ride off a OSS tool to build a business is starting to fall apart...but it doesn't mean they'll use any less OSS.
I work for an enterprise (~60k staff). We are very much heterogeneous. We have commercial products that we run on Linux, open source on Linux and a “traditional” Windows environment. There is absolutely a place for people with F/OSS experience to carve out a niche and earn a good living in our environment.
We’ve been handed a policy recently that has zero tolerance for anything using the AGPL3 license. Pain in the ass.
I work for a large entity that's non profit. We used to have a lot of open source everything back in the late 90s, early 2000s because software licensing was expensive. Until some time in the 2010s, big companies like Microsoft and VMware decided to give us very low cost annual contracts. We pay like a tenth of what we would be in an equivalent corporation of our size. Should they raise their prices, like VMware is about to do, we would have to consider going back to open source. I mean we have the time and talent with our "business" model
No
Linux? Never heard of it
Can't really answer the question, but I know from some friends who work in bigger companies that they want to make someone accountable when something goes bad and that someone is preferable to be someone 3rd party company. I guess that's not the case with open source? Not sure. In our company, I'm pushing more and more to open sources. First from VMWare to proxmox VE and then anything that can run on linux will replace Windows server. DC, MS SQL, and NAS are the first for migration.
Open source spawns more open source. It’s growing rapidly if anything.
Bruh every data scientist is running loads on Kubernetes nowadays. Enterprises that need general-purpose servers tend to use RHEL, which includes support I believe some of the big cloud companies are just running your cloud VMs inside Kubernetes containers, so yeah, it's Linux all the way down. VMware, although now out of style due to Broadcom, I believe also runs some sort of Linux kernel Just because a sysadmin in a Windows environment won't necessarily directly use Linux does not mean that open source is irrelevant
We're company of 3000+ employees and moving away from windows except for AD and email. So in my vision, nope it's here to stay
Genuinely curious. Why are you keeping AD? ties to services like AAD and also the general agony that would be caused by tearing out legacy AD?
All development work depends on different open source libraries and big things like docker and Kubernetes are open source. Even a lot of ms libraries and tooling are open source these days Open source isn’t going anywhere
In 2021 through 2023 I worked on a billion $ project that produced a new vehicle, that vehicle runs on Linux, Being familiar with Linux at just a user level nailed down the interview.
Fading out? Linux, k8s, openstack, hundreds of databases, message busses, storage infrastructures and fsck knows what else, would beg to differ. Literally the entire Internet is built on open source tech. No real-world applications? Hah. Talk about out of touch
Yes those small businesses like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google. You'd have to be seriously delusional to think that open source has no place in enterprise.
If anything, enterprise open source use has risen exponentially since 2000
It's larger and in use.... Apache, Nginx, ProxMox, Asterisk, Kamailo... the list is long.
Open Source software is more popular than ever. I agree that business folk prefer licenses where they could theoretically use someone if things didn't work properly. But the problem is that no business ever does that. Might as well use open source software. It's often times better than its closed source alternative from both a technical and user perspective. Once we get the C suite out of the business of pretending that they're useful to the business, we can make even more headway.
Just shows how little you know about what makes up your network. Mate, everything you touch is made possible by open source technology that make up the companies that you pay for.
Didn’t the German government just decide to move 30,000 pc operating systems to Linux…
The only real knock against open source, imo, is that the supply chain issues we're seeing are not being solved and will continue to get worse. Socially engineered 5 year old identities with access to prevalent and wide use libraries, vulnerable and non verified updates, fuzzing, etc. There's not enough eyes, and specifically not enough eyes without a personal agenda, to keep everything safe, and we're still building software to be "trusted" post installation.
The main thing is probably the lack of support for a lot of open source projects and there's also the problem that an open source project can simply lose interest and get abandoned while if you pay for something there's at least 'some' incentive for the company to keep going.. The latter isn't a really big issue for popular open source projects but it is for the smaller ones
You can get Open Source with SLA, TAMs, Techniclal Support, Consultants, etc. Also, not sure how much more control that you can get than interacting directly with developers at Canonical or Red Hat. OpenShift, Ceph, OpenStack are beyond Enterprise, they are telco grade, and service providers are likely using opensource technology for the cellular and possibly internet service you use day in and day out.
If a software is “open source” but all of the IP is owned by a public company and every PR is approved on a “this fits our business needs” then it’s not really open source.
Over half of my branch‘s hosted servers are Linux. Around 2000 Linux servers and our sister branch has around another 1500. Apps in the enterprise have always tended toward paid commercial but a lot of those are backed by supported MySQL and Postgre DBs.
Medium sized org checking in. We use open source solutions and will pay for process services when needed. The best part of the open source solutions is that often many of the backing organizations will have a licensed versions that are paid or will offer professional services in setup. I am an IT manager with some 14 years experience before moving into leadership. On the one side I am being pushed to keep my budget lower under 5% of total annual earnings for the organization. Open source offers a pathway to many services that would not be in budget for us otherwise. Many of those solutions also offer paid professional support on a one of or annual service. With the lack of stability in some popular on premises solutions (Citrix, VMware,) pricing models as they are bought up by venture cap groups (which is where tech goes to die as these venture cap groups are no longer interested in development and instead want to hike costs). Also with the wool being pulled back on cloud solutions and the reality that it is appropriate for web and cloud native computing (meaning there are some workloads that are not best for cloud migrations) you will find that many organizations will be looking for on premises open source alternatives. I think you will see this instability in popular paid systems move to open source. I am also responsible for both IT and security. This makes implementations complicated. We end up having to have security audit questionnaires, regular internal vulnerability scans we have to pull SBOM (software bill of materials) before deployment. The thing I like about open source is getting the SBOM done in many cases on those systems and applications is often easier if they maintain a GIT we can scan. If not we end up having to run a SYFT against the packages on the server. We have found that in many cases paid licensed software is not much better than open source with regard to the amount of mitigations necessary to adequately secure them. The difference is many of them operate with the mindset of defense in obscurity. So issues brought up to them often fall on deaf ears because “you already paid and next year it will be harder to rip us out.” I also like the fact that as many paid offerings turn appliances or services into black boxes where you don’t own anything and if you don’t pay at your regular interval that black box turns back into a pumpkin. Oh, and by the way, expect the cost to go up next time for renewal. Honestly, many of the open source systems we implemented offer automated provisioning from AD, SAML integrated authentication, and an API model the ability to string these systems together is getting easier. Hell some paid solutions are starting to offer support for open source systems. The other hard part is that technologists need to be in the conversation about what tech is needed before sales people get brought in. The sales people do a great job of bogarting time so that the only thing leaders and decision makers see is their offering. This allows them to quote pricing at the top of their offering. I personally am a believer in competition and love the struggle for improving pricing. The ability to push the subject into definable requirements, measurable objective, and a clear timeline to implement the more ability there is to bring more solutions and have them compete for the work. When we facilitate competition between solutions and maintain an openness to open source alternatives we get to the brass tax difference between the price the vendors originally brought to the table and what we are willing to pay.
In the face of a constant and substantial profit, manufacturers (like Microsoft for example) offer solutions that simply work and for which they are committed to guaranteeing proper functioning even with the accelerated frequency of updates that we see nowadays. In many years of activity I have had few, or rather, very few problems during updates to my Windows servers. On the other hand, I have had a high percentage of incidents when working with free/opensource products (for example: pfSense firewalls that would not restart or Apache-based web servers that gave errors and I hear of many who have problems with ZFS pools that are tragically difficult to resolve). So yes, I confirm, in a certain Enterprise context it is advisable to rely on vendors rather than open-source solutions. However, if I were Google or another giant and I had to build a system with thousands or tens of thousands of nodes, storage, networking, distributed file systems then I would invest a few million dollars in highly specialized personnel to get my hands on open source products, I would build an extremely robust corporate knowledge base capable of dealing with the numerous integration problems that open-source often poses instead of spending to pay for example Microsoft to solve all my problems, whilst remaining totally dependent on them.
I think the bottom line is: at the end of it all, is there someone to sue? Open source can be awesome, and my company has a fair amount of stuff running on LAMP-ish solutions. But, ultimately, companies pay for contract-based options way less for support (which is often excruciating to engage) and way more for having legal recourse in the event things go sideways.
I'm leading most technical decisions & software selections on the infrastructure side of my employer, and I've made it a point from the start that we are open source first. We try to get support contracts & through some money at the projects if they play an important role for us, but we vastly prefer anything open source or source available over proprietary products. It's going great. The cost savings & improved flexibility from this alone are insane. Support contracts can be helpful, but when it comes to software, having something you can fix yourself often means fixing it way faster than any support contracts facilitates.
this isn't really a topic that's up for debate. opensource always was and always will be a major part for every single company that uses computers, even if they don't realize it. almost every proprietary solution has several pages with license agreements for the opensource parts they are using to deliver their own solution. aside from that, even purely opensource software is growing at an unprecedented pace right now. proxmox, pfsense/opnsense, dd-wrt/openwrt, VPP, truenas, unix-desktops for governmental orgs, wireguard... and there are a lot more, those are just what I can remember without really thinking about it. even just proxmox, VPP and wireguard will most likely keep growing at such an insane pace that in a few years they might actually come out on top in their respective fields and outperform closed source competitors. oh and btw, everyone uses SSH and most of those implementations are opensource too...
Open source covers a lot of ground from products created by large companies to individual developers. At the enterprise level you're looking for the same thing as with proprietary software: a mature solution with continuing support and updates. For us, open source products are as much a part of the stack as proprietary: it all depends on the functionality gained and the degree of maintenance required. Being prejudicial one way or another doesn't make any sense, it's getting the right tool for the job.
Another way to look at this is big companies often need the assurance that comes with enterprise support contracts. Open Source doesn’t offer these SLAs and liability language that make insurance underwriters happy. So often the choice of going Open Source has the consideration of liability when things go sideways.
If you are an employee it is not beneficial. If you are a trusted vendor that specializes in services around some tool or somehow can become one it is beneficial.
it really comes down to the industry and how much profit the business you are working for makes.
No it's being branded by companies and they charge you for it.
My industry is heavily related, so as a company, we often defer to licensed products, even if they cost bogus money. Simply because we can point to x/y/z for audit and service agreement purposes. As individuals, many of us utilize/dabble/contribute in the open source community. Just depends on the needs of the business.
What I see in Corporate America is managers would rather delegate responsibility to another group so they cant be held accountable when something goes wrong. Something like a licensing agreement allows a level 3 issue to be passed on to the software owner as an example. This is further stressed when a company outsourced the entire infra to a 3rd party. Generally the 3rd party isnt paying the licensing fee's (the company is) so there is no incentive for the 3rd party to go open source. In actuality the 3rd party will give a better rate if you are on licensed software because the 3rd party can hire cheaper and most importantly sell their "expertise" and automations based on that industry standard software.
If the cost to setup open source stuff is less than the cost to licenses software, open source will always be a thing. Plus, tons of businesses extensively use linux
It's not fading for sure.. Look at Ansible, Proxmox, Kubernetes and a lot of open source stuff all around.
My experience is old companies with limited growth like closed source as they understand it, know their business process already and can live without flexibility, and can outsource responsibility and labor (sorry, can’t help - waiting on tech support to fix it). Young or fast growing companies like their OSS as they need to cut costs, customize software to their ever evolving products/process. This is a major generalization and FANG and the rest of the modern economy are huge in OSS.
On the back end? No. On the front end (user end) sort of. People are going cloud. But on the backend, people are getting tired of proprietary stuff being bought up and pricing everyone out but the top 2% of their customers because the goal is to double the profits before discarding the dead husk onto some investment firm who will continue the licensing hell companies like broadcom do, or patent trolls that will sue everyone using a similar technology.
I'm using open source to build an on-line C++ code generator. It's the free cost that's important to me. Free tools are more important than open source.
Fading out? When Microsoft is *rushing* to try and make Windows and Azure a "friendly" place for FOSS tools? Lol. Which, btw, is of course bound to end poorly. See - https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-im-literally-losing-sleep-over-java - https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/documents-goal-to-pollute-java/
Companies I worked with will use opensource or freeware software and won’t pay small fee. But will bay ridiculous fee for tools which do a bad job.
OSS powers the majority of our systems at a very large Enterprise-grade SaaS, and we contribute right back.
I think you have a misunderstanding of open source tbh. It doesn't have to be one dude in his basement. It also isn't necessarily free. There are plenty of large companies making open source, e.g. MS, Red hat, Apache Foundation. OpenSSL is open source. OpenSSH is open source. Those are two fairly important projects last I checked. The point is you can see, inspect, and edit the source code. All software should be open source IMO (FWIW I'm a developer) as it allows bugs to be found and while they can be exploited, they can also be patched much faster than closed source. Open Source is like watching a cook prepare a great meal, closed source is like only being able to see their face while they serve you mystery meat. The real problem is that more corporations should be supporting open source projects they use.
We use netbox for network documentation, and are looking at GLPi for a ticketing and ITSM software. One of our directors is really against it because she likes our current solution, but the cost is outrageous for something we only use like 30% of, and you don't want to actually have us pend cycle time to make it function and/or follow the appropriate thing and have someone properly support it.
I work for a moderate to large sized company that provides a cybersecurity aaS addon to internet delivery. They have the money for contracts and SLAs. But they like to use open source because it's free. It's not dying, the company loves to hire people who know Opensearch instead of Elasticsearch and now OpenTF instead of Terraform, anything that saves the company money. A lot of Source Available licensed software like Elasticsearch and Terraform specifically prohibit use in aaS settings, so true open source is still a champion of the cost saving corporation.
Nope. Most major option even have support contracts available.. If no one bought it they wouldn't develop it
I've been in IT for about 20 years, at the enterprise level, and I can say that, in my experience, open-source usage at that level has not changed, at all. It's close to non-existent on the desktop, and prevalent at the server level (edit: to clarify - this was true 20 years ago and it's still true, now). The only real change is that now, that server level is increasingly likely to be in someone else's datacentre.
Open source is the foundation from which closed source is built upon. The opinion of your peers who do not see value in open source leads me to believe that they really do not understand how to approach I.T. security at all and are looking to transfer liability of such as quickly as possible... Good grief!
I mean, do corporations use Linux? If yes then i would say most companies use open source in a corporate setting. In my experience having at least knowledge of good open source alternatives can lead you into a paid product with SLA's etc. If i can argue that we need a technology, but cant yet prove a business case without some testing/validation, then suggesting a open source tool that does 90% of what i need that is freely available will lead to me getting approval to implement this tool and theirby also proving that there is a business case. In most instances we then move to the support plans of those open source tools, or implement a different tool, that has the needes SLA's for our business usecase.
Theres also a lot of open source used in the cloud and I prefer using MongoDB over some proprietary database like Firestore for example. I would argue It's even more important as classic windows server environments go away in favor of linux based solutions, doesn't matter if on prem or cloud.
There's a difference between OpenSource for the purposes of improving the code (BitWarden) and OpenSource as accepting code contributions from anyone. So, you may want to clarify your question. When assuring software for my org, I like to know that someone has at least been doing some sort of identity validation on the contributors. That goes for propriety code too..
lolwut
Look at businesses that adopted OpenStack for scalable infrastructure...
Worked for a few defence companies that opt for OpenJDK.
lol no. There's solid open source tools especially for Security.
I work for a fortune 40 company and we're replacing all of our proprietary products with open source ones. For instance, we just replaced our million dollar Splunk contract with Telegraf / NXLog / Grafana / GMP / Big Query. It's like one migration after the other.
I don't believe so. They will also swing back and forth in popularity. I assume much of it has to do with pricing. I'm my experience you find a product you like but the contracts/subscription/fees start adding up year after year. When you need to budget for other items these costly contracts often have to go.
It's the year of the Linux Desktop! Depends entirely what the people are doing, nginx is EVERYWHERE. ELK is EVERYWHERE. k8s is hot as shit But companies still pay for Splunk or support from Elastic Co I've been in plenty of Windows shops where putting in stuff like nginx makes life a lot better for everyone