Re: REST impact paper
"J. Andrew Rogers" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> On Sep 8, 2017, at 6:30 PM, Greg Bolcer <[email protected]> wrote: > > While I completely understand where you are coming from and agree in some small way at the edges, I strongly disagree about the state of open source. The packages I use are politics free, well tested, widely reviewed, I agree with the above. > and optimized as all hell in ways that are better than any proprietary code. This is simply false, there is no evidence to support it. Properly designed code is typically 10-100x higher throughput and efficiency than open source, virtually across the board. Open source doesn’t prioritize it. I’ve made a living demonstrating this across most parts of the tool chain, often with code bases that are smaller than the open source they replace. Open source software is atrociously inefficient. This is its Achilles’ Heel. There are exceptions in open source, like compilers, but they are rare. Which isn’t to say there isn’t terrible closed source code, just that some proprietary code vastly out-performs open code in most cases. An easily verifiable example is that open source databases don't implement an I/O scheduler; virtually every closed source database of note has for a long time. The difference in throughput is 2-5x depending on the details, assuming all else is equal (it's not). You can demonstrate the same kinds of things in several places across every part of the software stack. Open source ignores mountains of low hanging fruit, and the open source contributors frequently lack the domain expertise to recognize many other optimizations that are not in the literature. No one wants to hear it but I’ve been beating this drum for a long time. If open source wants to remain relevant, it cannot have the abysmal efficiency it currently has. Unfortunately, it is really, really poorly optimized from top to bottom in most cases. Anecdotally, the only open source software my teams use that hasn’t been superseded by vastly better closed source is LLVM. Everything from JSON parsing to computational geometry to database engines, on the other hand, migrated to proprietary implementations. And the difference in optimization isn’t even close. Open source communities are typically hostile to a wholesale overhaul of fundamentally broken architecture. Open source software has many positive properties, but performance, throughput, and efficiency are not remotely among them. Arbitraging this is a cloud company business model. _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork