Comment by throwaway787544
4 years ago
K8s is a great example of what murders open source: monolithic platforms that exist unto themselves, but have some seemingly benign model allowing arbitrary "plugins" to pretend it's not really a monolith in sheep's clothing. It looks like open source and has the right license, but it ends up just mirroring corporate interests rather than those of the Commons that the open source movement was created to support.
If you're going to have monolithic platforms anyway (and you will, because designing for modularity is hard, whereas hacking together some random monolithic code is easier) they should at least be open source rather than proprietary.
Actually I disagree. Any time there's an Open Source tool that does everything for free, it's extremely hard to justify paying for a proprietary product that does it much better, because companies are cheap. There's many open source projects like this that are just terrible but a company will always use them first because they're free.
The answer isn't modularity, it's composeability, which is a significant difference. A modular program requires "integration" (tight coupling of APIs/ABIs) whereas a composeable program has loose interfaces which require virtually no "integration".
Drone.io is one example; you can implement any "plugin" purely by creating a container with an initial CMD entry that reads environment variables, and that program can interface back with Drone a number of ways (STDIN/STDOUT, REST API, database). Another is any application that just reads in or spits out simple line-by-line instructions or a JSON blob. Unix pipe based programs are the penultimate example. The dumber the interface, the easier it is to compose.