How hard is open source winning? So hard that apparently it can be taken for granted now in contexts where formerly it would have gotten explicit mention.

A moment ago I happened to read this article at TechCrunch: CoreOS Calls Docker “Fundamentally Flawed,” Launches Its Own Container Runtime.

Now, I don’t know anything about the technical merits of the issue here — is Docker the greatest thing since sliced bread? Maybe; beats me. Or is CoreOS justified in saying that Docker has lost its way and that’s why CoreOS needed to launch their back-to-basics replacement project “Rocket”? Could be­! Who knows? You’d have to be pretty deep in to have an informed opinion here.

But what is remarkable is that at no point did the article’s author, Frederic Lardinois, feel it necessary to mention that Rocket is open source. He just took it for granted that you would take it for granted. Obviously, it would be insane for someone to try to replace Docker with anything that wasn’t open source. But in the past, it might not be obvious that this would be obvious. Now it is. Lardinois doesn’t have to say that Rocket is open source any more than he has to say that Rocket is software, or that it can run on the Linux kernel, because any reader would so expect it to be open source as to find explicit mention of that more distracting than informative. The very last thing in the article is a link to Rocket’s source code on GitHub, but Lardinois never actually bothers to say that it’s open source, because he doesn’t have to.

That’s winning pretty hard. When open source has faded into being a background assumption, then it’s no longer just technical infrastructure, it’s cultural infrastructure.