The real opponent of digital sovereignty is "enterprise IT" marketing, according to one Red Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly about the repeated waves of bullshit the industry hype cycle emits.During a coffee break at this year's CentOS Connect conference, The Reg FOSS desk paused for a chat with a developer who was surprised but happy to find us there. We won't name them – we're sure that they'd prefer to keep their job rather than enjoy a moment of fame – but we much enjoyed their pithy summary of how IT has faced repeated waves of corporate bullshit for at least 15 years now, and how they keenly and enthusiastically anticipate a large-scale financial collapse bursting the AI bubble.
This vulture has been working in the tech field for some 38 years now, and the Linux developer we spoke with has been in the business nearly as long. We both agreed that the late 20th century – broadly, the period from the early 1990s onward for a decade or so – had mostly been one of fairly steady improvement. Then, they suggested, roughly following the 2008 credit crunch, we've had some 15 years of bullshit in tech.
CanadaPlus
in reply to Powderhorn • • •Ah yes, a famously bubble-free period. /s
Talking to old-timers, and reading history, it sounds more like revolving hype cycles have been around for the whole industrial age. TBF they do touch on that timeline later and correct themselves a bit.
Some were dumber than others. Foo-as-a-service wasn't even a new concept, that's just called renting shit out!
witness_me
in reply to Powderhorn • • •t3rmit3
in reply to Powderhorn • • •Everyone forgets that "Information Technology" was just a rebrand from the more accurate "Information Systems", which was itself the less accurate rebranding of "Data Processing", which is what computers actually do. There was also the failed push by IBM for Information Communication Technology (ICT).
It's been hype cycles since the beginning.
klangcola
in reply to t3rmit3 • • •Scrath
in reply to Powderhorn • • •Honestly, I really like containers for self-hosting stuff on my server. Just write a single text file describing the setup and you can always recreate it, even after nuking the server.
No dependencies suddenly going missing or different versions of the same program being required by two services.
I guess my main takeaway from this article is that many of those things (definitely not all of them) are good ideas within moderation. Then along comes the marketing department and rips the moderation apart.