Opinion The true opponent of digital sovereignty is “enterprise IT” advertising and marketing, in line with one Crimson Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly concerning the repeated waves of bullshit the trade hype cycle emits.
Throughout a espresso break at this yr’s CentOS Join convention, The Reg FOSS desk paused for a chat with a developer who was shocked however comfortable to seek out us there. We cannot title them – we’re positive that they’d favor to maintain their job fairly than get pleasure from a second of fame – however we a lot loved their pithy abstract of how IT has confronted repeated waves of company bullshit for a minimum of 15 years now, and the way they keenly and enthusiastically anticipate a large-scale monetary collapse bursting the AI bubble.
This vulture has been working within the tech area for some 38 years now, and the Linux developer we spoke with has been within the enterprise almost as lengthy. We each agreed that the late twentieth century – broadly, the interval from the early Nineteen Nineties onward for a decade or so – had principally been certainly one of pretty regular enchancment. Then, they recommended, roughly following the 2008 credit score crunch, we have had some 15 years of bullshit in tech.
They known as out about half a dozen explicit situations of what they thought of to be bullshit expertise. We had been too busy laughing sympathetically to whip out a laptop computer to make notes, however as greatest as we are able to recall the sequence, they had been:
- Containers
- Kubernetes
- The “Cloud”
- Something in any respect “as a Service”
- The Blockchain – something, every thing, based mostly on it
- And now, arguably the largest and worst of all, “generative AI”
Including again among the fairly invective-laden commentary…
Containers: Positive, sure, they work, they’re helpful for testing. However they don’t seem to be a deployment methodology. You should not want them. Something which you could run in a container, you may simply run on the naked metallic, and for those who’re not competent sufficient to get – and preserve – that working, then you definitely most likely aren’t competent sufficient to deploy a container both.
Kubernetes: When you do not want containers, then you do not want one other vastly extra difficult instrument to deploy these containers. The probabilities are, you aren’t a huge multinational that should have the ability to stand up to ten million potential new prospects visiting your website abruptly. It will not occur, so you will not lose any of that imaginary enterprise.
(That is generally often known as the Use One Massive Server strategy, and in our humble opinion, it has nice benefit.)
The cloud: Nebulous by title and by nature. Who thought it was sensible to take all of your firm’s necessary knowledge and hand it to some web rando – most likely the bottom bidder – trusting them to retailer the crown jewels, preserve them secure, and by no means ever peek at them. If that sounds cheap to you, perhaps you need to attempt promoting homeopathy.
(This may be summarized as There Is No Cloud – There’s Simply Any individual Else’s Pc, and was being spelled out in clear language in 2015.)
Something “as a service” – it does not matter what: Infrastructure as a service – for those who want servers, purchase servers, or lease your personal non-public servers. No person else will ever care as a lot about your servers as you’ll. Platform as a Service – now you do not even get servers, simply OS situations. That is even worse. Software program as a Service? Now you do not even know what the server is, or the place it’s, or what it is operating; you do not get software program, and you do not even know what knowledge you’ve gotten or the way it’s saved – you are paying for entry to your personal stuff.
(The issues with this complete idea arguably return to Peter Deutsch’s Fallacies of Community Computing some 30 years in the past.)
The blockchain, and something constructed on the blockchain: the world’s slowest and most-distributed database. Cryptocurrencies? Hashcash on the blockchain. NFTs – URL shorteners on the blockchain, solely they’re longer fairly than shorter. Nugatory. Web3? Get ripped off, as a service.
Which brings us spherical to “generative AI” or, as we favor to time period them, giant language fashions, powered by the transformer algorithm. If The Monetary Instances can clarify the way it works to a banker in a few thousand phrases and some minutes, it may possibly’t be that difficult or exhausting to grasp, and it is not. It is predictive textual content turned as much as 11. It might probably’t even rely. As Daniel Stenberg, writer of curl, caustically noticed:
(This vulture laid out a few of his case in opposition to it when Gentoo and NetBSD banned LLM bot slop in 2024.)
Truthfully, we will not fault any of this reasoning. We have appeared into the chronological sequence of the waves of selling drivel, and it isn’t fairly how we anticipated. Though the earliest point out of Salesforce.com we are able to discover on The Reg is from 2002, after we known as it “comparatively new,” it was based in 1999. Maybe the primary mass SaaS providing to most people was Google’s Gmail in 2004.
Cloud computing within the sense of computerized creation and deployment of VMs arguably dates to Amazon taking Amazon Net Companies reside in 2002.
Whoever “Satoshi Nakamoto” is or was, their paper [PDF] introducing Bitcoin was printed in 2008, though it did not come to The Reg’s consideration till 2011.
2008 was additionally the yr that the primary model of LXC (you may nonetheless discover model 0.1.0 on the downloads web page) was launched. Docker debuted in 2013 however your humble correspondent had predicted that Linux containers could be the Subsequent Massive Factor a few years earlier, again in 2011. We reckon we known as it.
Kubernetes first appeared in 2014, though Google had been operating “Borg” internally since round 2008. We nonetheless harbor a cynical suspicion that Mountain View threw it over the wall for no different motive than to distract the Penguinisti and preserve them busy.
So in chronological order, these are:
-
1999: SaaS
-
2002: Cloud computing goes mainstream with AWS
-
2004: SaaS reaches most people
-
2008: LXC frees utility containers from FreeBSD’s Jail and brings them to Linux… and Bitcoin delivers full industrial-scale mass-production of the traditional rip-off of the pyramid scheme
-
2014: Kubernetes is loosed upon an all-too-willing tech world
-
2022: ChatGPT opens to the general public, or as The Reg calls it, one other AI to fill the world with kinda-true stuff
All proper, sure, fairly greater than 15 years. “A century of tech BS” appears a bit excessive when it is solely 2026, however it definitely feels that lengthy.
Clearly there are numerous extra potential candidates, however we thought this was a superb high six. A number of the different contenders are extra area of interest, from the eternally terrible Jira to the challenge managers’ faith of Agile. Which of your bêtes noires did we miss? ®
Opinion The true opponent of digital sovereignty is “enterprise IT” advertising and marketing, in line with one Crimson Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly concerning the repeated waves of bullshit the trade hype cycle emits.
Throughout a espresso break at this yr’s CentOS Join convention, The Reg FOSS desk paused for a chat with a developer who was shocked however comfortable to seek out us there. We cannot title them – we’re positive that they’d favor to maintain their job fairly than get pleasure from a second of fame – however we a lot loved their pithy abstract of how IT has confronted repeated waves of company bullshit for a minimum of 15 years now, and the way they keenly and enthusiastically anticipate a large-scale monetary collapse bursting the AI bubble.
This vulture has been working within the tech area for some 38 years now, and the Linux developer we spoke with has been within the enterprise almost as lengthy. We each agreed that the late twentieth century – broadly, the interval from the early Nineteen Nineties onward for a decade or so – had principally been certainly one of pretty regular enchancment. Then, they recommended, roughly following the 2008 credit score crunch, we have had some 15 years of bullshit in tech.
They known as out about half a dozen explicit situations of what they thought of to be bullshit expertise. We had been too busy laughing sympathetically to whip out a laptop computer to make notes, however as greatest as we are able to recall the sequence, they had been:
- Containers
- Kubernetes
- The “Cloud”
- Something in any respect “as a Service”
- The Blockchain – something, every thing, based mostly on it
- And now, arguably the largest and worst of all, “generative AI”
Including again among the fairly invective-laden commentary…
Containers: Positive, sure, they work, they’re helpful for testing. However they don’t seem to be a deployment methodology. You should not want them. Something which you could run in a container, you may simply run on the naked metallic, and for those who’re not competent sufficient to get – and preserve – that working, then you definitely most likely aren’t competent sufficient to deploy a container both.
Kubernetes: When you do not want containers, then you do not want one other vastly extra difficult instrument to deploy these containers. The probabilities are, you aren’t a huge multinational that should have the ability to stand up to ten million potential new prospects visiting your website abruptly. It will not occur, so you will not lose any of that imaginary enterprise.
(That is generally often known as the Use One Massive Server strategy, and in our humble opinion, it has nice benefit.)
The cloud: Nebulous by title and by nature. Who thought it was sensible to take all of your firm’s necessary knowledge and hand it to some web rando – most likely the bottom bidder – trusting them to retailer the crown jewels, preserve them secure, and by no means ever peek at them. If that sounds cheap to you, perhaps you need to attempt promoting homeopathy.
(This may be summarized as There Is No Cloud – There’s Simply Any individual Else’s Pc, and was being spelled out in clear language in 2015.)
Something “as a service” – it does not matter what: Infrastructure as a service – for those who want servers, purchase servers, or lease your personal non-public servers. No person else will ever care as a lot about your servers as you’ll. Platform as a Service – now you do not even get servers, simply OS situations. That is even worse. Software program as a Service? Now you do not even know what the server is, or the place it’s, or what it is operating; you do not get software program, and you do not even know what knowledge you’ve gotten or the way it’s saved – you are paying for entry to your personal stuff.
(The issues with this complete idea arguably return to Peter Deutsch’s Fallacies of Community Computing some 30 years in the past.)
The blockchain, and something constructed on the blockchain: the world’s slowest and most-distributed database. Cryptocurrencies? Hashcash on the blockchain. NFTs – URL shorteners on the blockchain, solely they’re longer fairly than shorter. Nugatory. Web3? Get ripped off, as a service.
Which brings us spherical to “generative AI” or, as we favor to time period them, giant language fashions, powered by the transformer algorithm. If The Monetary Instances can clarify the way it works to a banker in a few thousand phrases and some minutes, it may possibly’t be that difficult or exhausting to grasp, and it is not. It is predictive textual content turned as much as 11. It might probably’t even rely. As Daniel Stenberg, writer of curl, caustically noticed:
(This vulture laid out a few of his case in opposition to it when Gentoo and NetBSD banned LLM bot slop in 2024.)
Truthfully, we will not fault any of this reasoning. We have appeared into the chronological sequence of the waves of selling drivel, and it isn’t fairly how we anticipated. Though the earliest point out of Salesforce.com we are able to discover on The Reg is from 2002, after we known as it “comparatively new,” it was based in 1999. Maybe the primary mass SaaS providing to most people was Google’s Gmail in 2004.
Cloud computing within the sense of computerized creation and deployment of VMs arguably dates to Amazon taking Amazon Net Companies reside in 2002.
Whoever “Satoshi Nakamoto” is or was, their paper [PDF] introducing Bitcoin was printed in 2008, though it did not come to The Reg’s consideration till 2011.
2008 was additionally the yr that the primary model of LXC (you may nonetheless discover model 0.1.0 on the downloads web page) was launched. Docker debuted in 2013 however your humble correspondent had predicted that Linux containers could be the Subsequent Massive Factor a few years earlier, again in 2011. We reckon we known as it.
Kubernetes first appeared in 2014, though Google had been operating “Borg” internally since round 2008. We nonetheless harbor a cynical suspicion that Mountain View threw it over the wall for no different motive than to distract the Penguinisti and preserve them busy.
So in chronological order, these are:
-
1999: SaaS
-
2002: Cloud computing goes mainstream with AWS
-
2004: SaaS reaches most people
-
2008: LXC frees utility containers from FreeBSD’s Jail and brings them to Linux… and Bitcoin delivers full industrial-scale mass-production of the traditional rip-off of the pyramid scheme
-
2014: Kubernetes is loosed upon an all-too-willing tech world
-
2022: ChatGPT opens to the general public, or as The Reg calls it, one other AI to fill the world with kinda-true stuff
All proper, sure, fairly greater than 15 years. “A century of tech BS” appears a bit excessive when it is solely 2026, however it definitely feels that lengthy.
Clearly there are numerous extra potential candidates, however we thought this was a superb high six. A number of the different contenders are extra area of interest, from the eternally terrible Jira to the challenge managers’ faith of Agile. Which of your bêtes noires did we miss? ®
