In the past 10-15 years there has been an increasingly disturbing trend devolving the IT industry back to the hideous 1970s:

• An intentional (fear-response-drive) push by developers to custom code everything from scratch.
• Falling back into severe vendor lock-in on all fronts.
• Regression to main-frame style approaches to infrastructure, applications & data, "dolling out the bits & bytes at the vendors whim" (aka the cloud).
• A lack of knowledge or following any standard standards
• Broader licensing lock-ins.
• The list goes on ad naseum.

I have repeatedly helped save companies literally millions of dollars with well-established methodologies, empirically-supported results, and innovative scalable production-proven approaches, that replace inefficient development "teams" (departments) of up to 50 developers with just 5-8 (fits within Tuckman's theories on small-groups) top-notch people:

1. 1 cross-functional Architect (software, infrastructure, data, AI, & enterprise) with strong R&D and prototyping background.
2. 1 cross-functional Systems Administrator (SysOps, DevOps, MLOps, AIOps, etc.)
3. 1 UI/UX & Accessibility design specialist
4. 1 Front-end cross-platform engineer (using in the past Java, now more likely Flutter or similar)
5. 1 very strong cross-functional back-end or "full-stack" Engineer that is also a strong AI Engineer
6. 1 cross-functional Information Security engineer (InfoSec, CyberSecurity, etc.)
7. 1 DBA (or other type of Data Specialist, Data Scientist, etc.)
8. 1 Project or Product Manager who is also a very strong Technical writer (this role can usually be shared across 3-5 other teams)

This might initially come across as just "an old man rant", but please don't TLDR, I am laying the foundation of information and history to elaborate my points and back up my claims.

NOTE THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS, I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF TRYING TO FINISH MULTIPLE BOOK DEADLINES, SO I MAY HAVE TO GET BACK TO THIS LATER, BUT WILL TRY TO FILL IN THE GAPS WHEN I HAVE MOMENTS AVAILABLE.

A Very Brief (Subjective) Historical Overview of IT, Sciences, and Open Source

I started coding around 1977-1979 (around 7-9 years old), and had my first paid programming gig in 1982 (around 11/12 years old) writing a Point of Sale (PoS) and Inventory software platform for a small video rental store that after a few minor tweaks in the first few weeks in "production" on their PC, ran flawlessly for many years without a need to change. I only made about $600-$800 for about 2 weeks worth of work (about $2,823.23 in 2023 dollars), but for an 11/12 year old that was a small fortune, and for my first paid gig, not too shabby.

These were primitive times by today's interface standards of computing. I had played a bit with a decommissioned PDP (I forget the exact version) mainframe at the University of Utah in 1979 (thanks to some family there letting me have hands-on access to various systems there), and I have been "online" since 1979 over 300 baud connection to what would become the Internet later, and many BBSes around the world.

Everything was custom coded, there were no open source platforms or framework options. The closest you would get was source code shared in magazine that you had to hand code, or very small BBS/Online communities with very limited resources. And unless you purchased I highly license restricted product, there weren't any off the shelf options that didn't automatically lead to closed source vendor lock in.

Main Frame Computing, Vendor Lock-in and the PC Revolution

Prior to the "PC Revolution" we were all at the mercy of main frames and their vendors: IBM, Digital, AT&T, etc. We had to pay for every second of use, and in many cases we weren't allowed to submit our code directly, it had to go through gatekeepers in lab coats to review our data and feed it into the system to get our result (after being on a waiting list for long times some times). The experience was almost identical to what is now touted as "The Cloud", just on a much larger scale. I am so fed up with how many times I have had to beg permission from AWS gatekeepers to increase our allocations of resources and approved or declined at their whim, and then having to go through the appeals process (I always get what we need eventually, but it is a ridiculous throwback to the 1970s).

No Standards, and "Hackers" Were Not Computer Criminals They Were Coding Gurus

While there were amazing coders, especially the "hackers" (not computer criminals) who were amazing code gurus to write the leanest, meanest, most powerful, and most stable code, but meanwhile the PC revolution brought in a bunch of us with no discipline, education, methodologies, or standards to follow. In some ways that was great for innovation, but it also meant a long period of really crappy code as we all had to build communities to start to support each other through magazines, BBSes, and the Internet to try to figure out best standards of practice.

This was a threat to the vendors who had the lock in so they tried to really clamp down with increasingly restrictive licensing, especially the UNIX world.The late 80s and early 90s were brutally locked down into commercial licenses only, and mostly bad code with no best practices to follow globally (every company, or group, or individual had their own "standards of practice") and very few were sharing except those of us in these little BBSes and other online small communities.

Open Source Begins to Get Traction in the 1990s and Adoption Grows in 2000s

It took the philosophical revolution of Open Source approaches proposed by the idealist (to the extreme) Richard Stallman, and then the much more practical engineer, Linus Torvalds with Linux, that slowly lead to people (and even the large corporations after a lot of fighting back, lawsuits, etc. running all the way into the 2010s) to slowly adopt these philosophies as the overwhelming evidence built about the advantages of open source communities, methodologies, philosophies, etc.

I apologies to all those wonderful people that were all part of this critically beneficial revolution, with this very short abbreviated history of transformation of the entire IT industry.

IT Open Source Begins To Help All of "The Sciences" As Illustrated in 2018

The open source movement is a precursor to what would start to also bleed into all of "The Sciences", as illustrated in the 2018 "Open Science by Design" from the National Academies for Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in response to all of the academic Ivory Towers, silos, journal vendor lock-in, research gatekeeping, etc.

And Yet The IT Industry Is Now Going Backwards to the 1980s and 1970s

It is very sad to see how much the IT industry has degraded in quality in the past 10-15 years.

Instead of raising people up, it has been a race to the bottom by lowering standards and going completely backwards (devolving) to the 1970s with the increasing lock-in dependency on custom-coders, vendor lock-in, and mainframe style platforms (aka the cloud) and billing practices.

"The Cloud" Is Legacy Devolution, Strongly Consider Hybrid Models Over Pure Cloud To Save Millions of Dollars in TCO

The Cloud approach is a total throwback to the 1950s through early 1980s of "big iron" main frames, albeit on a larger scale and better UI, but just as "evil" as the consequences of the main frame days if you are foolish enough to go 100% cloud.

The cloud has its place in many use-cases, just as mainframes have. But you should not try to use the same hammer for every task, instead intelligently consider which tool is the best for your needs, don't just go with the herd and buzzword bingo.

I have helped companies (and my own endeavors) save thousands, and in some cases millions, of dollars by taking a more hybrid model, where much of what we do is in our own self-hosted infrastructure either as dedicated "bare metal" servers or desktops, or our own open source built cloud computing infrastructure across our multiple locations in my home and our other offices, utilizing used hardware at a fraction of the cost of new, and achieving amazing things with far less expense (see more details on this in the RPG Research example).

The cloud charges you in many cases per second or bit of data traversal or storage. There are reduced functionality "free" options ta Atlassian, Github, Gitlab, etc., and if you are just a team of fewer than 5 (or at most 10) those cloud options are a great way to go without having to invest in your own infrastructure.  However, that is the trap, the moment you add critical staff member 6 (for gitlab, github, etc.), or number 11 for Atlassian and similar offerings, your costs begin to shoot through the roof, and I have seen many a very small pre-VC/revenue startup go under within months because they had no idea just how much it would add up to one they tried to go live.

Even more bare bones offerings like AWS, GCP, and Azure work great for early learning and basic development, but once you try to go to real production and start getting traction, or your internal staffing grows, the vast array of expenses, and the many deeply buried (not quite hidden though close) micro charges these services tack on here and there and don't reveal clearly in their billing consoles often leads companies large and small alike to pay thousands of dollar more per month for services they don't actually use (or use any more) or ever wanted. It takes almost monthly auditing to try to track these down and remove them from your services so you can bring your costs down (this can be almost a full time job in some larger environments I've worked on).

I have helped companies save thousands, and in some cases millions, of dollars per month or per year with this bit of effort.

But don't be afraid of having some of your own hardware once you get to the point where the free cloud offerings no longer meet your needs.

Every use-case is different, so your mileage may vary, but always consider if the cloud is your best TCO, or if perhaps self-hosting something might not be a better way to go. You might be surprised.

This is another area I have helped companies save millions per year (or for small companies thousands) with not a lot of capital investment.

MORE DETAILS HERE COMING SOON...

See my post on "Critical Thinking About Microservices vs. Bandwagoneering - The Latest Buzzword Bingo: Microservices, Containerization, etc. " for another example of what to watch out for during the hype periods of supposed new technologies (these are again very much a legacy regurgitation of the main frame era): https://www2.techtalkhawke.com/news/critical-thinking-about-microservices-vs-bandwagoneering-the-latest-buzzword-bingo-microservices-containerization-etc

Average Accepted Coding Practices and Quality The Worst I've Seen in Over 30 Years

Coding practices and quality is the worst I have seen since the 1980s as explained here in more detail: https://www2.techtalkhawke.com/news/dont-get-all-your-code-thrown-in-the-dumpster-fire

Some Specific Examples As Illustration Of These Issues, And How To Fix Things

Example 1: Franklin Covey: Altvista Firewall vs. Linux Floppy Disk

Example 2: MightyWords, Scient versus (mostly) OpenSource, Fatbrain, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Barnes & Noble

12+ million (Scient) custom-coded and 40+ developers versus 2 million and a small handful of staff (mostly hardware, then some custom coding, and then mostly off the shelf opensource), the latter ended up being far superior in every way, a fraction of the cost, more secure, more scalable, much faster for implementing features, etc.

Example 3: Rural Wifi and MaladNet WISP Inventions

Small WISP versus Telcos, opensource and sharing saved the day.

Example __: RPG Research 100% Open Source, 100% Volunteer-Run, 100% Open Research: Huge Global Impact On Very Little Money

Example __: The Fantasy Network (mostly) Opensource versus Hollywood

$20-30 million custom coded and scores of developers over 3+ years and a complete flop, versus 3 people, opensource, and some computers in a living room, in a couple of months and just a few thousand dollars.

Example __: WorldCon, GenCon, ZoeCon, & More Open Source Versus Zoom: Saving Global Conventions from Cancellation During COVID19

Example __: JItsi's Approach Embracing Both Capitalism and Open Source In A Mutually Beneficial, Not Harmful, Way

Example __: LearningMate, Closed Source Disaster, Open Source Saves the Day: Jitsi, Matrix, ASR, NLP, ML, AI, Bots, DNN, and Much More

Online learning solutions for 20k+ concurrent students, teachers, and parents. Teams of 20-30 developers and millions of dollars resulting in crap code, versus Open Source and a small handful of staff delivering far superior product for a fraction of the costs.

Recent Example In the Works: ManufacturingPower and iNSUPPli

We launched 1.2 in September 2023, and now working on some 1.2.4 tweaks, while we have R&D underway for the upcoming 1.3 (mid-October release) and early Platform 2.0 R&D for January beta release. I've been working in this industry for over 40 years, started as a coder, and have been very disturbed at the low quality standards of all of the developers with less than 15 years experience. I have helped many companies break the chains of their dependencies on this degradation of the IT industry (and their reversion to 1970s thinking), while avoiding vendor lock in with my methodologies. With the 2.0 Platform we're migrating away from custom-coded dependencies toward integrations of a variety of open source products that provide a far more scalable, secure, and manageable platform than the custom-coded built from scratch approach that was done with the MVPs prior to my coming on board. I generally am able to replace the teams of up to 40 developers with a single SysOps or DevOps person and one mobile app developer with this approach, while delivering much more rapidly new features, higher security, and meeting business scope with far more quality and alacrity.

This Highly Successful Model Is In Jeopardy by Newly Ignorant Developers and Business Founders Alike

Unfortunately this highly successful model, that has lead to greater and faster true innovation instead of just (at best) incrementation or reversion, is in jeopardy because of the ignorance of a new generation of developers and business owners who really don't know (or willfully ignoring) the harm they are causing with the de-evolution philosophies and approaches.

However, fortunately, these are often bright people, and ignorance can be addressed in many cased through education, but they have to be willing to learn from the past, "learn from their elders", so they can build upon our advances and mistakes, to actually evolve to the next phase of technology revolutions. Unfortunately many are willfully rejecting even considering this approach, and throughout all of human history it is a failed model whenever you fully embrace this ageism approach.

I am not saying you need to follow in the footsteps, I of all people encourage blazing your new trail, but make sure you have the tools (of knowledge) developed so that you can forge through that wilderness most effectively for the greatest benefit, rather than just end up looping back not only to where you started, but further back generations of regression.

Please stop sabotaging the open source movement, you are sacrificing a far better and more profitable future for yourself and everyone else, for short term insignificant gains.

Willful Undermining of Open Source by Overly Mercenary Developers With Concepts of the Consequences Due To Automatic Rejection of The Past, Thus Recreating The Past

History may not repeat itself. But it rhymes" and especially for those who ignore/reject the past, they will be doomed to do so.

This has been further exacerbated by a new generation of developers in the past 10-15 years who have declared a complete rejection of learning from their predecessors or anything from "the past".

Unfortunately they have no experience (and sadly many have no clue) about what it was like before the mid-1990s when open source finally had real traction. They don't understand the sever harm they are doing in their blind rejection of "learning from your elders" and their bastardization of the open source methodologies because they don't understand the benefits of a moderated implementation of the philosophy that the rising tide of shared knowledge helps raise all boats and improve the overall human condition to the benefit of all, not just a few, while allowing for the benefits of capitalism, not communism,  to thrive and provide opportunities for others to rise up, rather than locked into a fixed hierarchy.

All of these developers and companies have immensely benefited from the many aspects of the open source movement. Unfortunately most of those with less than 15 years experience generally no longer have any appreciation for these benefits and no comprehension of the harm they are doing with their increasingly mercenary approaches and lack of true open source practices.

See my previous article on these recent overly mercenary approaches hurting everyone for more details on this issue: https://www.hawkes-haven.com/blog/increasingly-mercenary-and-unaltrustic-global-culture