The thing is, there really is no such thing as a "free market" as most who are in love with the term envision
ALL markets are BORN of regulations. A market is what emerges when you lay some shared ground rules: here's what a pound is, here's a standard currency, here's some laws about commerce, here's a court system for mediating disputes.
So the question isn't ever really about free or not free—it's what are the rules and who sets them
99 out of 100 times the people spending money pushing the virtue of a "free market" really just want to be the ones setting the rules and steering them in their favor
Replace "free market" with "competitive market"—what most people actually want when they talk about free markets—and suddenly a lot of what Bezos is going to argue for stops making sense
^ This right here. This article is pretty hogwash IMO
Points 1 and 3 aren't relevant if they aren't recording the data. Companies in other jurisdictions have no magic invulnerability you can trust to their data getting out (legally or illegally) if they're storing it.
Points 2 and 5 are equally true of any open source project unless you run it yourself from source. There are _plenty_ of examples of users getting phished by maliciously built/hosted open source tools
Point 4 is obviously not malicious tracking and a mistake any project could make
At the end of the day though, unless you're going to run everything yourself (which most people aren't) you have to pick who to trust -- some random person running a server somewhere, or a company with hundreds of employees recruited under the premise of working on a privacy-centric search engine who could all turn whistleblower
Chef's Habitat is a really powerful nix-like system that I find to be a bit more practical. Like nix though it suffers from being a complete paradigm shift that people coming in from the imperative OS world struggle trying to map their existing patterns into
It's kind of sad because it's a far better way to manage deployments and environments...but it takes 1-2 years of practice to really get proficient at
> you wouldn't learn all the meta of a language like C++ in a couple of months.
I think this reinforces OP' point though: what we really need are descriptions more specific than "software developer" but less specific than "$language developer"
> some languages force you to learn so much other "stuff" before you can be professionally productive in it
And it's exactly that stuff that should be the focus of describing the role. e.g. you're looking for a low-level network software developer with proficiency in memory management. If you were recruiting someone to help you with a Go or Rust codebase in that domain, you wouldn't pass over someone with a ton of relevant experience via C++ who hadn't spent much time with Rust/Go yet.
Focusing on the language rather than the skills/application (even when there's a heavy correlation between the language and associated skills) excludes good candidates and includes irrelevant ones
Chef Habitat might be more what you're looking for in that regard, it very much feels like an intellectual derivative of NixOS and focuses on the cloud native story
> Agreed. The only place where software that the OP wants to create can reside is in the hobbyist community or free, open source community. In the real world this isn’t cost effective or viable.
You're talking about a world though where only large enterprises are served well by tailored software. Malleable systems don't make sense in large enterprises and global-scale solutions
But what about all the spaces currently underserved by current "best practices"? Smaller organizations, closer to the ground, where things are inherently less scalable.
Think of all the places it makes sense to use WordPress, but where information/workflow tools being having a website are needed
To give some examples, think about what Linux does for operating systems and what WordPress does for publishing. The antidote for mainframes wasn't every individual maintaining their own system, it was every individual having the right and means to maintain their own system but not needing to because specialization can be distributed across many tiers in an open community.
In those cases you have a ecosystems where you can pick from a plurality of base systems maintained by large projects to start from. Someone who is an expert in something else can get up and running with a functioning system without learning a ton (e.g. installing Ubuntu to build a shared workstation, initializing a WordPress site via Pantheon). You can put your own business content into the system and get your own workflow going. Then you can learn to find and load addons from a community that address shared use cases (e.g. apps, packages, themes, plugins), customizing your system and workflow further to support whatever your operation is. Then you can learn to configure things manually to further tune things to your cases. Then you can hire developers or start learning to code yourself to layer your own scripting and extensions on top that are specific to only your use cases. It's easy to dismiss such installations as poorly architected and unmaintainable, but the 20-year old backoffice desktops and cobbled together wordpress sites are the real workhorses of small orgs operating over the last couple decades.
What is the industry working on to bring these sorts of dynamics to the next 10,000 sorts of on-the-ground operations that are repeated around the world. People are jamming this into WordPress all over the place and it's overloading the publishing platform's design. Where's the hot new app framework that's all about creating ecosystems?
We've built all these tools for developers (npm, composer, etc), but not for implementers and experts of human-scale operational systems that we have thousands of around the world because they're inherently actually connected to humans to scale globally.
The courtbot project aims to deploy friendly user interfaces county-by-county that help residents navigate interactions with their local court systems. This is an inherently local problem/opportunity, each county's systems and processes are going to infinitely vary. There's no nationally-scalable business model or system that can be built to solve this, but does that need to mean technology can't help the people alreadying doing these things manually in their communities?
There are a handful of court systems that tons of counties use, the Courtbot deployers all around the world should be able to collectively maintain a handful of base distributions that onboarding communities could get started with quickly if their data can be grabbed from one of the common systems. There can be toolkits and tutorials for those that need to build their own base systems. What template and toolkit do the core developers have to follow for setting up. Everyone is pretty much on their own right now like before all the pieces came together to make Personal Computers successful, and making the Macs and Windows and Linux of that transformation is the next big leap we need.
When need hardened FOSS architectures for multi-user online environments, a next iteration in the lineage of GNU/Linux and WordPress and in many ways a sort of hybrid of the two. Core developers standing up projects for public primary schools, or libraries, or public defenders, or independent/small-chain restaurants, or expungement projects, need patterns and tools to draw from so what they create can spawn wordpress-like ecosystems from the start, without them having to spend 10 years and 6 major iterations to shake out how to make config and plugins and themes and 3rd-party managed devops (i.e. pantheon, wpengine, wordpress.com) ecosystem stable.
How to act on it: pick any civic technology project and start solving the problems of making them easy to redeploy to thousands of communities that need to do more options than forking or requesting increasingly complex and specific new configuration options. If you figure out some stable patterns for that that work, make a project of it and start sharing it with other verticals.
And to add to that, the more generic saas systems you cobble together, the shorter the likely time window until one of them gets acquired/folds/pivots and disrupts you
Invested in building your workflow on a SaaS system and it's become critical to your business? It doesn't matter how much you depend on it, or how useful it is to you, you have _no rights_ that top the backers' playing their numbers
This effect gets worse the closer to the ground you get, where small orgs don't have the technical capacity to absorb such disruptions. Small orgs are being conditioned to avoid depending on technology, or at least to avoid depending on specialized technology. The net effect this will have is creating yet another bias towards concentrated power winning in the marketplace
Most certainly use a library at least for building and parsing messages. All the complexity is in figuring out how to use your particular library and figuring out any quirks in the systems your connecting re: what fields and formats they expect. It's not really something you can read up on and then know before you start
On top of all this there's the theory that gas giants typically migrate towards their star, it may be rare for a gas giant like Jupiter to find a stable orbit where it can shield the habitable zone
Another thing making earth rare is its high proportion of iron ore. That and our abnormally large moon are thought to be the result of Earth colliding with another large rocky planet. The tidal force of an extra large moon + our extra ironey core give us an extra strong magnetic field to keep the nasties out and hold our atmosphere