Ask HN: Before Open Source took over the server, what was the discourse like?

9 points by mbgerring 8 days ago | 4 comments

My understanding of the early Internet is that there was fierce competition among commercial, closed-source server and database software, and that the dominance of Linux, Apache, MySQL (and now PostgreSQL) etc were far from obvious or guaranteed. I think we’re in a similar moment with LLMs, and I’d love to read some stories, or see some examples of discourse on mailing lists, forums, or whatever on this subject from that earlier period. I think it would be helpful for grounding present-day discussions. What can you share from this era?

wmf 8 days ago |

It was definitely like that. One landmark that comes to mind is the Microsoft "Halloween documents" attempting to slow the rise of open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents Microsoft also advertised NT and IIS as being faster than Linux (implicitly admitting that Linux was worth considering) which motivated a lot of back-and-forth "benchmaxing". http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/first-nts4rhlinux.html https://www.kegel.com/nt-linux-benchmarks.html

Sun was also a huge loser to open source and x86 but instead of fighting it their CEO Jonathan Schwartz embraced it. In retrospect this "Glasnost" approach didn't help Sun survive. I remember the Sun fans used to complain that Linux/x86 was winning in benchmarks but Sun was worth paying N times more (of your employer's money) because it just felt faster and more robust. Parallels to today are left as an exercise for the reader.

dnnddidiej 7 days ago |

As a .NET guy there wasn't much discourse. We used SQL Server and collected a pay cheque. Open source wasn't as big. I heard of MySQL and Postgres but thought they were cheap shared hosting thing and university academic thing respectively.

bruce511 6 days ago |

It's easy to look back with nostalgia, but perhaps a reality check is worthwhile.

Firstly, at the time (mid to late 90s) most computers were desktop. There were relatively few servers, and the internet was small.

During this period Linux wasn't terribly good. Windows was a better desktop that "just worked". It was a loooong way from perfect, and rebooted regularly, but hardware support worked, you could print to any printer, network and so on. Macs had better design, and a better interface. Linux on the desktop required endless fiddling, very specific hardware. And couldn't play games.

Sun, Unix, VMS et al made better servers. They supplied software and hardware. They came with support departments etc. And were very (very) expensive.

As the volume of servers grew, as commodity hardware got better and cheaper, Linux was able to compete simply on price. As adoption grew, so did hardware support etc. Linux is especially well suited to servers (very limited software library needed, very little need for UI and do in.)

The desktop market was a lot more competitive. Windows was at most $100, and choosing an OS based on $100 saving is silly. And in pretty much all measures (perhaps excepting reboots) Windows or Mac was better. Linux has never gained much of the desktop market mostly because it was objectively a worse desktop. And has no business model to get onto the desktop so loses completely on the marketing front. (And marketing matters. Without software the OS is meaningless.)

Fast forward to today, and your question. All the items you mentioned are server related. All are as good or better than commercial offerings.

Open-source AI is certainly a server based activity. But there are no trillion $ AI data centre's. So the obvious niche is on-prem AI. No tracking etc. The barrier to entry there is the hardware cost. To provide a similar experience to say Anthropic you need to spend a LOT. To spend that kind of money you need to be reasonably sure of results.

As hosted AI gets more expensive it will become easier to argue. But with the pace of model evolution (and tools surrounding those models) buying local hardware is (at best) a purchase best deferred till later.

Eventually OSS will catch up. But that may be a decade or two away.

mattbrewsbytes 7 days ago |

Back then your typical management, who frequently followed "you can't go wrong with picking IBM" in their decision making, would question open source software and take actions to stop it from being used (like blocking sites in a corp firewall). Open source software was a counter culture then, now its common and mainstream.

Another difference is large companies using user's data in various ways, some creepy and maybe nefarious. This wasn't done 25 years ago, UI heat maps didn't come about until 20ish years ago, much less collecting data specific to one person.

These days, there's no push back on OSS and companies and individuals might prefer to not have all their usage and data sent to a giant corporation. There could be a turning point for OSS LLM's that can add value and run on personal devices (laptops, phones). Maybe there will be a resurgence of apps (desktop/phone) that have AI features but don't collect your data. Maybe that's the next digital counter culture movement - keeping data private.