In order to enjoy full freedom, you should also have the legal
permission to mess with the data and produce an inconsistent result.
Free software is not (only) about reasonable modifications.
Unreasonable ones should also be allowed.
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Software defined storage would be where you are using the cocktail straws with coke bottles but you have spread them around the building. Each time coke gets put on one, a hose spreads that coke around so each block of systems is equivalent. In this case the costs per system have gone down, but there needs to be a larger investment in the networking technology tying the servers together. [A 1 gbit backbone network is like a cocktail straw between systems, A 10 gbit backbone is like a regular straw and the 40G/100G are the hoses.]
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We live in a golden age of open source, and it can sometimes be easy to forget the privileges that this affords us. I’m writing this article with vim, in a terminal emulator called urxvt, listening to music with mpv, in a Sway desktop session, on the Linux kernel. Supporting this are libraries like glibc or musl, harfbuzz, and mesa. I also have the support of the AMDGPU video driver, libinput and udev, alsa and pulseaudio.
All of this is open source. I can be reading the code for any of these tools within 30 seconds, and for many of these tools I already have their code checked out somewhere on my filesystem. It gets even better, though: these projects don’t just make their code available - they accept patches, too! Why wouldn’t we take advantage of this tremendous opportunity?
I often meet people who are willing to contribute to one project, but not another. Some people will shut down when they’re faced with a problem that requires them to dig into territory that they’re unfamiliar with. In Sway, for example, it’s often places like libinput or mesa. These tools might seem foreign and scary - but to these people, at some point, so did Sway. In reality these codebases are quite accessible.
