Nineteen Years

Posted on February 19, 2022February 21, 2022 by Tarus

Nineteen years ago my friend Ben talked me into starting this blog. I don’t update it as frequently any more for a variety of reasons, specifically because more people interact on social media these days and I’m not as involved in open source as I used to be, but it is still somewhat of an achievement to keep something going this long.

My “adventures” in open source started out on September 10th, 2001, when I started a new job with a company called Oculan to work on their open source monitoring platform OpenNMS. In May of 2002 I became the lead maintainer on the project, and by the time I started this blog I’d been at it for several months. Back then blogs were one of the main ways an open source project could communicate with its community.

The nearly two decades I spent with OpenNMS were definitely an adventure, and this site can serve as a record of both those successes and those struggles.

Nineteen years ago open source was very different than it is today. Today it is ubiquitous: I think it would be rare for a person to go a single day without interacting with open source software in some fashion. But back then there was still a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt about using it, with a lot of confusion about what it meant. Most people didn’t take it seriously, often comparing it to “shareware” and never believing that it would ever be used for doing “real” things. On a side note, even in 2022 I recently had one person make the shareware comparison when I brought up Grafana, a project that has secured nearly US$300 million in funding.

Back then we were trying to figure out a business model for open source, and I think in many ways we still are. The main model was support and services.

You would have thought this would have been more successful than it turned out to be. Proprietary software costing hundred of thousands if not millions of dollars would often require that you purchase a maintenance or support contract running anywhere from 15% to 25% of the original software cost per year just to get updates and bug fixes. You would think that people would be willing to pay that amount or less for similar software, avoiding the huge upfront purchase, but that wasn’t the case. If they didn’t have to buy support they usually wouldn’t. Plus, support doesn’t easily scale. It is hard finding qualified people to support complex software. I’d often laugh when someone would contact me offering to double our sales because we wouldn’t have been able to handle the extra business.

One company, Red Hat, was able to pull it off and create a set of open source products people were willing to purchase at a scale that made them a multi-billion dollar organization, but I can’t think of another that was able to duplicate that success.

Luckily, the idea of “hosted” software gained popularity. One of my favorite open source projects is WordPress. You are reading this on a WordPress site, and the install was pretty easy. They talk about a “five minute” install and have done a lot to make the process simple.

However, if you aren’t up to running your own server, it might as well be a five year install process. Instead, you can go to “wordpress.com” and get a free website hosted by them and paid for by ads being shown on your site, or you can remove those ads for as little as US$4/month. One of the reasons that Grafana has been able to raise such large sums is that they, too, offer a hosted version. People are willing to pay for ease of use.

But by far the overwhelming use of open source today is as a development methodology, and the biggest open source projects tend to be those that enable other, often proprietary, applications. Two Sigma Ventures has an Open Source Index that tries to quantify the most popular open source projects, and at the moment these include Tensorflow (a machine learning framework), Kubernetes (a container orchestration platform) and of course the Linux kernel. What you don’t see are end user applications.

And that to me is a little sad. Two decades ago the terms “open source” and “free software” were often used interchangeably. After watching personal computers go from hobbyists to mainstream we also saw control of those systems move to large companies like Microsoft. The idea of free software, as in being able to take control of your technology, was extremely appealing. After watching companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on proprietary software and then being tied to those products, I was excited to bring an alternative that would put the power of that software back into the hands of the users. As my friend Jonathan put it, we were going to change the world.

The world did change, but not in the way we expected. The main reason is that free software really missed out on mobile computing. While desktop computers were open enough that independent software could be put on them, mobile handsets to this day are pretty locked down. While everyone points to Android as being open source, to be honest it isn’t very useful until you let Google run most of it. There was a time where almost every single piece of technology I used was open, including my phone, but I just ran out of time to keep up with it and I wanted something that just worked. Now I’m pretty firmly back into the Apple ecosystem and I’m amazed at what you can do with it, and I’m so used to just being able to get things going on the first try that I’m probably stuck forever (sigh).

I find it ironic that today’s biggest contributors to open source are also some of the biggest proprietary software companies in the world. Heck, even Red Hat is now completely owned by IBM. I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, look at all the open source software being created by nearly everyone, but it is a long way from the free software dream of twenty years ago. Even proprietary, enterprise software has started to leverage open APIs that at least give a nod to the idea of open source.

We won. Yay.

Recently some friends of mine attended a fancy, black-tie optional gala hosted by the Linux Foundation to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Linux. Most of them work for those large companies that heavily leverage open source. And while apparently a good time was had by all, I can’t help but think of, say, those developers who maintain projects like Log4j who, when there is a problem, get dumped on to fix it and probably never get invited to cool parties.

Open source is still looking for a business model. Heck, even making money providing hosted versions of your software is a risk if one of the big players decides to offer their version, as to this day it is still hard to compete with a Microsoft or an Amazon.

But this doesn’t mean I’ve given up on open source. Thanks to the Homebrew project I still use a lot of open source on my Macintosh. I’m writing this using WordPress on a server running Ubuntu through the Firefox browser. I still think there are adventures to be had, and when they happen I’ll write about them here.

Nextcloud News

Posted on February 8, 2022 by Tarus

I think the title of this post is a little misleading, as I don’t have any news about Nextcloud. Instead I want to talk about the News App on the Nextcloud platform, and I couldn’t think of a better one.

I rely heavily on the Nextcloud News App to keep up with what is going on with the world. News provides similar functionality to the now defunct Google Reader, but with the usual privacy bonuses you expect from Nextcloud.

Back before social networks like Facebook and Twitter were the norm, people used to communicate through blogs. Blogs provide similar functionality: people can write short or long form posts that will get published on a website and can include media such as pictures, and other people can comment and share them. Even now when I see an incredibly long thread on Twitter I just wish the author would have put it on a blog somewhere.

Blogs are great, since each one can be individually hosted without requiring a central authority to manage it all. My friend Ben got me started on my first blog (this one) that in the beginning was hosted using a program called Moveable Type. When their licensing became problematic, most of us switched to WordPress, and a tremendous amount of the Web runs on WordPress even now.

Now the problem was that the frequency that people would post to their blogs varied. Some might post once a week, and others several times an hour. Unless you wanted to go and manually refresh their pages, it was difficult to keep up.

Enter Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

RSS is, as the name implies, an easy way to summarize content on a website. Sites that support RSS craft a generic XML document that reflects titles, descriptions, links, etc. to content on the site. The page is referred to as a “feed” and RSS “readers” can aggregate the various feeds together so that a person can follow the changes on websites that interest them.

Google Reader was a very useful feed reader that was extremely popular, and it in turn increased the popularity of blogs. I put some of the blame on Google for the rise of the privacy nightmare of modern social networks on their decision to kill Reader, as it made individual blogs less relevant.

Now in Google’s defense they would say just use some other service. In my case I switched to Feedly, an adequate Reader replacement. The process was made easier by the fact that most feed readers support a way to export your configuration in the Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) format. I was able to export my Reader feeds and import them into Feedly.

Feedly was free, and as they say if you aren’t paying for the product you are the product. I noticed that next to my various feed articles Feedly would display a count, which I assume reflected the number of Feedly users that were interested in or who had read that article. Then it dawned on me that Feedly could gather useful information on what people were interested in, just like Facebook, and I also assume, if they chose, they could monetize that information. Since I had a Feedly account to manage my feeds, they could track my individual interests as well.

While Feedly never gave me any reason to assign nefarious intentions to them, as a privacy advocate I wanted more control over sharing my interests, so I looked for a solution. As a Nextcloud fan I looked for an appropriate app, and found one in News.

News has been around pretty much since Nextcloud started, but I rarely hear anyone talking about its greatness (hence this post). Like most things Nextcloud it is simple to install. If you are an admin, just click on your icon in the upper right corner and select “+ Apps”. Then click on “Featured apps” in the sidebar and you should be able to enable the “News” app.

That’s it. Now in order to update your feeds you need to be using the System Cron in Nextcloud, and instructions can be found in the documentation.

Once you have News installed, the next challenge is to find interesting feeds to which you can subscribe. The news app will suggest several, but you can also find more on your own.

It used to be pretty easy to find the feed URL. You would just look for the RSS icon and click on it for the link:

But, again, when Reader died so did a lot of the interest in RSS and finding feed URLs more became difficult. I have links to feeds at the very bottom of the right sidebar of this blog, but you’d have to scroll down quite a way to find them.

But for WordPress sites, like this one, you just add “/feed” to the site URL, such as:

https://www.adventuresinoss.com/feed

There are also some browser plugins that are supposed to help identify RRS feed links, but I haven’t used any. You can also “view source” on a website of interest and search for “rss” and that may help out as well.

My main use of the News App is to keep up with news, and I follow four main news sites. I like the BBC for an international take on news, CNN for a domestic take, Slashdot for tech news and WRAL for local news.

Just for reference, the feed links are:

BBC: http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml

CNN: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss

Slashdot: http://rss.slashdot.org/slashdot/slashdotMain

WRAL: http://www.wral.com/news/rss/48/

This wouldn’t be as useful if you couldn’t access it on a mobile device. Of course, you can access it via a web browser, but there exist a number of phone apps for accessing your feeds in a native app.

Now to my knowledge Nextcloud the company doesn’t produce a News mobile app, so the available apps are provided by third parties. I put all of my personal information into Nextcloud, and since I’m paranoid I didn’t want to put my access credentials into those apps but I wanted the convenience of being able to read news anywhere I had a network connection. So I created a special “news” user just for News. You probably don’t need to do that but I wanted to plant the suggestion for those who think about such things.

On my iPhone I’ve been happy with CloudNews.

It sometimes gets out of sync and I end up having to read everything in the browser and re-sync in CloudNews, but for the most part it’s fine.

For Android the best app I’ve used is by David Luhmer. It’s available for a small fee in the Play Store and for free on F-Droid.

Like all useful software, you don’t realize how much you depend on it until it is gone, and in the few instances I’ve had problems with News I get very anxious as I don’t know what’s going on in the world. Luckily this has been rare, and I check my news feed many times during the day to the point that I probably have a personal problem. The mobile apps mean I can read news when I’m in line at the grocery store or waiting for an appointment. And the best part is that I know my interests are kept private as I control the data.

If you are interested, I sporadically update a number of blogs, and I aggregate them here. In a somewhat ironic twist, I can’t find a feed link for the “planet” page, so you’d need to add the individual blog feeds to your reader.

Adventures in Open Source

Month: February 2022

Nineteen Years

Nextcloud News