Why should they be free?

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html

Ah, so the appeal to communism.

You are always free to create your own free version of what this software provides if you feel like financial compensation for the use of it is unfair.

I think along the lines that software platforms should be FOSS, hardware resources should cost, and apps (userland) can be anything. But I don't buy into the idea of vendor lock-in on hardware that can essentially run anything.

What an L take. Comparing open source software to communism is openly admitting that you don't understand either of those concepts

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I suppose these are useful for companies who don't have the skill or will to develop their own pipelines from scratch. In research we barely ever use them, though.

Yes, this is what I think OpenShift specifically is about.

Except I am not comparing anything to communism, but summarizing Stallman's manifesto as an appeal to communism, which it is.

I asked why someone would consider it necessary for such software to be free because I thought the argument would be about some functionality that already exists as free software or something that was taken from free software.

Yet OP just copy pasted an argument that is incompatible outside of an utopic setting, from a person that no longer has a place in modern society due to his wrongdoings.

Well, that is your opinion, as I said, you are free to develop and offer such software to people, as many, ex. Apache, do.

I was under the impression that your assertion had something to do with the platforms itself, not politics.

Well yes in the sense that DataBricks is from creators of Spark so one may perceive that it's just "enterprise Spark", where the product is essentially quite same, but it's just sold as a service.

Communism is when free stuff

Azure Databricks is Apache Spark-based, but it is made by Microsoft, which is obviously not Apache. Furthermore, Apache Spark does not compare to Databricks, nor is it published under a copyleft license, so this again seems like product and ideology incompatibility rather than an objective reason.

Yes everything should be free, no one should be paid to build software

Not at all, do not strawman. It is Stallman himself who notes that the free in software refers to freedom, not cost in the first place.

Platforms should be like roads are. Publicly funded. Cars/apps can be private. And at the very least there should also be the option to use public transport.

So there’s no room for privately funded monetized platforms? Platforms are apps btw

There are a few things pay for when you buy proprietary software licenses:

• Product support
• Quality control (E.g. any procedure that makes it into SAS is rigorously QC'd, whereas anyone can publish a package to PyPI and the only way to tell if it does what it says is to do the QC yourself.)
• A license to profit off what you do with the software

Proprietary software isn't for everyone, but it has its place.

Azure is not a ML platform. I am not sure where you get the idea that it’s dedicated to ML, or are we talking about complete different Azure?

As for why aren’t they free. That’s their business model. Software with the complexity of Kubernetes used to be premium software, but google figured out a way to make it completely free and yet still afford to pay the developers handsome salaries. So yea technically speaking you can make similar products that are free, as long as you can figure out a viable business model to support it in the long run

There can be, but they should not be the only options.

There are a bunch of open source platforms for pretty much anything

My question is, why do you need snowflake to be open source? It is typically only used for enterprise data warehousing and the ML tools are pretty new and most the the value from their “Snowpark” comes from utilizing snowflake compute for ML instead of another source.

When I think of ML platform I think more of Sagemaker, databricks, datarobot, H2O, etc.

Can you really not see the issue here? Are you going to now build me a copy of these platforms for free? No? Now think about why you wouldn’t want to do that for me and you will see why no such free platforms are possible or feasible.

oh my god what a load of bollocks. i work 11 hours a day so that you can take all my stuff for free? I mean how entitled to expect others to give you their hardwork for free. this link made the dumbest arguments ever.

You might want to refresh your memory if you think that’s an appeal to communism.

Hey, the appeal to relinquish company ownership and embrace public ownership needs no memory refreshing to be categorized as communism.

I think it's a business question.

We've spent 6 years and many millions developing our platform Kortical to make it much easier to build ML solutions to solve business problems and operate them to meet enterprise SLAs.

I'd like to think that some of the stuff we've done is pretty hard but it's not to say that other talented people couldn't build the same things themselves. It's more of a case of if we let people license our platform for a tiny fraction of the cost that it would take to create the equivalent, then is it worth them doing it from scratch?

Like if a big complex Web scale solution would would take a team of 8 a year to build using open source but you can just leverage something off the shelf and get the same result with 2 people in a month, then is that the best option for your team?

If yes get the ML platform, if not don't

In all of these cases you're actually running code on someone else's hardware, not just using software that they or other people have written and distributed. I think there's an argument that once software is written the ultimate cost and benefit of open sourcing it can be a net positive but in these instances you're literally asking someone else to the pay the electricity bill for you. And a lot of these platforms *do* actually offer some level of free compute resources or will give them to you if you can write a convincing grant.

I could see an argument for cloud storage and computing provided as a public service but that's also a big can of worms and I don't see the societal need yet in the same way that say, Internet should be.

Hold up... that's GNU. Nobody takes Stallman seriously.

And beer should be free.

There's a lot of buzz around, especially everything data related. Tool sellers for the AI hype surfed very successfully and of course there are valuable ones around.

I am not a big fan of ML end-to-end platforms, i think most of it is bloatware. However i would not tag Snowflake with that. Snowflake is a cloud data warehouse.