• futatorius@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    Where would we be without predatory rent-seeking?

    Someone’s going to make a fortune migrating firms off VMWare onto open-source VMs.

    • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      I know people in that predicament and they’re, charitably, helpless little babies when you tell them to read two paragraphs of documentation on how to run one command in a Linux CLI.

      Fundamentally nothing out there really caters to the needs of resellers. Your average resale company couldn’t automate a backup job to save itself from bankruptcy if it doesn’t come with a neat GUI, a 24/7 support contract, and preferably a Microsoft or oracle logo somewhere in the corner to inspire confidence.

      Like I jest but there are Microsoft outfits and FOSS outfits and there is essentially zero professional overlap even though they both sell IT products/solutions. The disconnect is a mile wide. Which translates to wildly different business models where the FOSS people have been running shit in containers for 15 years while the Microsoft slaves are still licensing their monolithic solutions by the CPU Core and doing weird-ass shit like buy 4-core xeons because it’s more economical with these archaic licensing models.

      So sure Proxmox/Suse are certainly very happy with their sales number right now but anecdotally I’m not seeing the migration frenzy that one would expect under such intense price gouging. Broadcom correctly identified that it will take years for these super corporate structures to steer away from “the way we’ve always done things” and in the meantime that’s untold millions in additional short-term profits.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      Man could you imagine what proxmox would be if that project got just a tenth of the money VMware got?

      Classic prisoners dilemma. Nobody wants to invest in proxmox because not enough people invest in proxmox.

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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        13 hours ago

        Suse has been trying pretty hard with Harvester. KVM-based, VMs-as-k8s-pods which leverages all existing k8s tooling, as well as the same multi-cluster federation as RKE2.

        Seems pretty great from afar, though it’s very much under active development.

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        Honestly I think if Proxmox got VMWare money then they’d become stuffed to the gills with business sharks and probably go the same route eventually.

        That is not a Proxmox problem, that is a capitalism problem.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          *Humanity problem.

          There are some solutions invented, but they require work and revolutionary wars. And the functioning system, I think, will be as close to ancap as to Trotskyism. Won’t be clearly “socialist”.

          • TheWilliamist@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            No, this is not a humanity problem. This is a capitalism problem. Companies are not beholding to their customers, they are beholden to stock owners. It is no longer in their best interest to make customers happy, it’s in their best interest to provide ROI for their investors. Every software product hits a point of diminishing returns. There are no new amazing features to woo new customers, it is a mature product that only has incremental features. When this happens, you either flip to a subscription model and parasitize your user base, or sell to another vendor, management group, or some other entity who does it after you’ve been paid out. If we had better controls on mergers and buyouts there would be active competition to foster diversity and keep prices down, but when companies buy all their competition and all of the small companies who make products and enhancements for their base, it’s a lose lose situation for the end users. This is my jaded two cents after a quarter century of being in the IT/AEC field in the direct line of this enshittification process from multiple companies across the spectrum.

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              Companies are not beholding to their customers, they are beholden to stock owners.

              I don’t think you realize how much of an improvement this is over other really existent options.

              One can be a serf, or a slave, or a city dweller in a privilege-based society, or a peasant in some despotic kingdom. The list of options is long, none are good.

              • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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                3 hours ago

                That’s a very eurocentric view. Most of the world outside of Europe and imperial Asia was communist or socialist tribes until Europe went and colonized everything. And they were doing pretty damn good at colonizing.

                Remember the reason colonists conquered lands so easily was largely because they out-armed them. The tribes had no need for such advanced weapons until colonists arrived with them.

                • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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                  2 hours ago

                  Most of the world outside of Europe and imperial Asia was communist or socialist tribes

                  Name one for this wild statement.

                  And they were doing pretty damn good at colonizing

                  That’s another aspect - building something and not getting overrun by those more considerate.

        • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
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          23 hours ago

          Summary for the curious:

          The dilemma: Two prisoners are interrogated in separate rooms. Each is asked to snitch in exchange for a reduced sentence. Because they’re separated, the prisoners can’t coordinate, but each knows the other is offered the same deal and the interrogator will only offer bargains that increase the combined years of their imprisonment. For example, snitch gets -2 years but snitchee gets +3 years, netting the interrogator +1 year for a successful bargain. So, what will they do?

          Result: Of course the better outcome overall is for neither to snitch and the worst is for both to snitch, but the Nobel-Prize-winning observation was that any prisoner faced with this dilemma (once) will always net a lesser sentence if they snitch than if they don’t, no matter what the other decides. This principle is called the Nash equilibrium. It caused quite a stir.

          Application: The result above sounds bleak because it is, but real-world analogs of this game are rarely one-offs. For example, if the prisoners expect to play this game an indeterminate number of times, the result above no longer applies. The study of such logic problems and the strategies to solve them is called game theory.

          Edit: fixed typo, added headings

      • Rogue@feddit.uk
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        2 days ago

        You should take a look at Canonical’s LXD. They’ve been investing in it pretty heavily and can definitely rival proxmox.

        The web based UI is superb and I’ve never had issues with the CLI which is quite a contrast to my experience with proxmox

        https://canonical.com/lxd

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          2 days ago

          Openshift is a kubernetes platform isn’t it?

          There’s still a need for real VMs, and I didn’t think openshift filled that.

          • caffinatedone@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            There’s Openshift Virtualization included, which is based on the upstream kubevirt project. You’re essentially running VMs in containers and managing them (mostly) like the other container workloads in the environment.

            • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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              1 day ago

              Interesting…I’m using proxmox at home but running my containers in a VM. Looks like there’s an openshift community edition…I may have to check this out.

              I’m not a sys admin by trade (networking), but my opinions at least have some weight where I work.

              I imagine being redhat based, I could run FRR at the hypervisor level. For that matter being kubernetes I can use calico. Holy shit this could be awesome. I need to play.

          • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
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            2 days ago

            Yeah, it’s a distro of kubernetes.

            Most apps run best as a container, but for appliances and legacy apps they have Openshift virtualization which runs VMs in the cluster by running KVM inside of docker.

            The open source tech there is called Kubevirt. All VMs are 1st class citizens in the kubernetes API, so it is actually easier to run than VMware/Proxmox if you already have a Kubernetes cluster and you’re not doing complex stuff with qcow images or VM migrations.

            I use both containers and VMs a lot with Kubernetes at work.