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Comment by matfil | Hacker News Reader

Twenty years ago (crikey, that long?), I was a pretty vocal Open Source advocate. At the time, it seemed like the only way to avoid a Microsoft monoculture, and I'm still not sure that wasn't true. But now we're seeing monocultures of corporate-sponsored open source (Chrome/Blink's dominance seems particularly alarming in this sense), and managers who are more reluctant than ever to accept technical solutions which aren't "standard".

I'd love to know how to bring back a bit more diversity to everyday computing. Beyond using niche systems for hobby projects, leverage seems rather limited right now.

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The Cloud is similarly tricky: As we can factor our non-essential costs and push them to someone who can trade on their efficiency- there may still be competitors to Amazon, but monoculture is creating a strangling-effect there as well.

I'm hoping that privacy and legislative effects will force companies to pull more things in-house so that they can provide controls and guarantees about their use. This can be good for software: If your medical data has to be on-prem, they have to build the right security controls to do so. If it can be in the Cloud, then they just need the security controls on paper. That creates a risk that maybe we can convince people to understand.

I'm certainly with you on The Cloud. I've been expecting a backlash for a while, but not much sign of it so far. A big monthly bill from $CLOUD_VENDOR_OF_CHOICE seems to have become this century's equivalent of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM".

Makes me think: a few years ago, there was some or other beer in the UK that was (heavily) advertised with the slogan "reassuringly expensive". The Cloud vendors (perhaps AWS in particular) seem to be going down that path a bit. Very interesting to juxtapose the reluctance to pay for software with an apparent eagerness to pay for Cloud services.

Stella! And then everyone started calling it "wife beater", because whilst it was slightly more expensive, it had a higher alcohol content.

Weirdly I predict a similar fate: I expect some Cloud employee will walk off with some banks cloud-hosted server containing gobs of financial data (if it hasn't happened already) and that'll be the end of that. There'll probably be a rush of "security enhanced" cloud solutions after that, but it'll probably hurt them badly in the process.

With language runtimes abstracting OS and hardware, the Cloud providers have become the new OSes, and coupled with the Web, we are back to the timesharing days, with the browser as a pretty VT100.

Yes.

The one strange thing is that it seems to have caught IBM somewhat off-guard.

Yes, but now that they own Red-Hat and OpenShift, lets see how that goes.

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