Shaun HillsHot take: in 20yrs time we’ll mock the use of proprietary #DevOps tools with the level of derision used right now for proprietary operating systems & programming languages.
And we’ll be right to do so.
Basil Berntsen@hillsy sometimes those proprietary tools started off as open source.
@Basil404 /me nods in agreement.
Also often there’s a free (small-f) or FLOSS version but some of the useful features only come paid-for.
Devs need to eat of course. But this seems to be a solved problem for Linux, Python, Postgres etc and not so much for DevOps tools.
@hillsy open source is a peculiar system. Idealistic volunteers are not enough on their own. For a project to go critical, I think it takes companies who view an open source alternative to their competition as an advantage, and hire professional development teams to contribute.
Open source software, like all software, requires certain types of work less likely to be done by individual contributors. Documentation and bug fixing for example. Individual volunteer contributors are more likely to build new features.