It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way!
Stay skeptical of all of them. No need to be fan of one of the big techs. In the end they are all greedy organizations that want to dominate. None of them should be trusted.
"Trust but verify" and all that.
Consider these different hiring schemes:
1. Hire whoever applies, and keep them forever, no matter what. ("Trust, don't verify.")
2. Hire whoever applies, and fire them later if they don't seem to be working out. ("Trust, but verify.")
3. Full background check and extensive additional vetting before an offer is made. ("Don't trust, do verify.")
4. Never hire anyone. ("Don't trust, don't verify.")
Aside from the obvious pacing differences, note that what's verified (or not) in options 1/2 is different from what is verified in option 3. That's not a coincidence -- before you start working with someone, you can't assess whether they're doing a good job. You have to rely on more general (and therefore less reliable) markers of trustworthiness.
(You may think option 4 sounds ridiculous. It isn't -- that is the historical norm for cooperation outside of very well-defined groups like your family or your tribe.)
This definition of "trust but verify" would be better reduced to "verify", since it essentially claims that trust is, if not impossible, not practically applicable in any situation.
Don't trust: I will not even engage with you and will not do Y. Example: the belief by some that US should not engage in high-level diplomatic talks with North Korea on disarmament because North Korea has no incentive to follow through on its promises.
I agree that this nuance is lost within the turn-of-phrase, but omitting the trust part doesn't seem to me like a good way to build a collaborative society. Companies are just people.
Consider it like this: For me, trust is feelings/thoughts. I might trust you a little, a lot, etc. But for you, my trust can only be demonstrated by my actions, because you can't peer inside my head and tell whether I'm genuinely trust you, or I'm only claiming to.
"Trust but verify" recommends adopting a mindset of trust but a pattern of behaviour externally indistinguishable from distrust. If I'm verifying everything you do, that does't signal trust, whatever the reasons I might give for it.
> In the case of "trust but verify", how does this trust manifest in a provable way?
Good point. "provable" is the problem here since we don't know eachother, and frankly I can't prove you're trustworthy initially; that's why the question this addresses (namely "trust-or-misstrust?") arises in the first place. Assuming we don't have dossiers on everyone we're going to meet and work with, we have to decide on an initial point on the trust-scale you mentioned with which to begin interaction.
"Trust but verify" is about having faith that people are generally good, and treating strangers that way while protecting yourself. It indicates balance between treating strangers like data-points and getting walked all over is important, and it provides a suggestion about how to approach the situation.
There isn't a depth limit.
Well looks like you're right, but the nonetheless the reply button wasn't there.
Did I sufficiently address your question?
What question are you referring to?
Regardless, I suggest that it is better to reply to the comment you're replying to than to reply to some other comment, whether you see a reply link or not. You don't need the reply link to reply to a comment.
The term became well known in the US during the cold war, in the context of arms treaties. The US and Russia were making agreements that relied on at least the appearance of, and some degree of actual, trust. Meanwhile they were undertaking extensive efforts to check if the other party was actually following their obligations.
A simpler oxymoron is "to make haste slowly". In that phrase, the "make haste" part describes velocity, while "slowly" describes acceleration. Anyone who has taken Calculus knows that velocity and acceleration can be independent variables. Thus "to make haste slowly" is an oxymoron but not self-contradictory.
Similarly, "trust but verify" describes two possibly independent variables: your attitude about the future and your behavior regarding the past. You can choose to trust people to make good decisions for the future, while simultaneously verifying they made good decisions in the past. Alternatives to "trust but verify" include "always trust", which has obvious bad consequences; "never trust", which has different but also bad consequences; "trust sometimes", which is ambiguous; and "verify always", which is unrealistic. The phrase "trust but verify" describes a healthy attitude and behavior.
It's just that "trust, but verify" is shorter and more memorable.
Something along the lines of: "Q: Can we trust these guys to uphold their side of the deal? A: Sure, trust but verify."
Edit: here it is, it's actually a funny Russian proverb that Reagan was repeating.
I work in the information security assurance field, I swear that 90% of the issues I see at companies with external service providers comes back to the fact that their contract does not have anywhere enough ability to hold the service provider to task...
Get everything you need in the contract / agreement, then hope you never have to use it.
In the end you need to pick suppliers you can work with productively no matter what the correct details are.
Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000.
Counterpoint: 3.5mm jacks are perfectly fine and were never a "dead end".
OpenGL's indeed pretty crusty, but Vulkan is not. Apple would be better off participating in that ecosystem instead of letting NIH syndrome take hold.
> Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000.
Counterpoint: an x86 Linux executable statically compiled/linked any time after the a.out → ELF migration (so... predating Windows 2000) can be expected to run without issue on a bleeding-edge x86 kernel today (and if it's not able to do so, then that's a bug, and Linus will personally descend upon and eviscerate the one unfortunate enough to have introduced that bug).
You should be pro-neither. Microsoft used to be against FOSS because they thought it would make them more money; Microsoft is currently friendlier to FOSS because they think it will make them more money. Does that make them bad people? No because all businesses are that way, even the vaunted "don't be evil" Google.
However, placing all companies in the same bucket is committing a similar mistake.
There is definitely a “gradient of morality” amongst companies, despite all of them doing things because they think it is what will make them the most money in the long run.
A company building products that end up aiding the carrying out of genocides, for instance, is clearly on a more extreme end of the spectrum than a company making money selling music streaming subscriptions.
Couldn't that describe just about any company or open source project?
A database and office software end up helping you manage and track your genocide.
A camera company's products and photo/video editing software end up helping people create beheading videos and child porn.
When we create a general purpose product and release it to the world, we lose control of who uses it and for what purposes. In fact, that is a specific requirement for free and open source software licenses.
But perhaps you'd agree with me that there's a line between a company making products like cameras - which can certainly be used to cruel ends, but typically easily replaced by any of your competitor's products, and not pivotal to such efforts - and a company building a product that has no real replacement, is central to anti-human practices, and routinely ignores the criticisms and suggestions of human rights groups around the world.
I said that if I worked for a camera company, of course I would know that our products would be used for all sorts of different purposes beyond our control, but if the camera company was doing special partnerships with porn companies I would probably quit.
(For anyone who is thinking "what's wrong with adult porn?" I'm just sharing my feeling from that time. Substitute "child porn traffickers" or "genocidal maniacs" to get an idea of where I was coming from.)
I wasn't comparing videos of consenting adults with genocidal maniacs.
I was sharing a real life example of a situation where I had no problem building a general purpose product that anyone could use, while at the same I might object to special deals or promotions with an industry I was uncomfortable with at the time.
The only reason I even mentioned porn and genocide in the same sentence was to say "you may not relate to my porn example, but there is probably some other situation - like a custom feature for genocidal maniacs - that you would personally object to." And I didn't bring up genocide out of the blue, it was the very topic of the thread I was replying to.
Yesterday I decided to write some C# code on Linux. That's easy, I thought: VSCode and .NET Core can both be found in Arch's repos these days. I just have to set an environment variable and edit VSCode's settings to disable telemetry... But alas! It turns out that I need to install Microsoft's proprietary release of Visual Studio Code because the C# debugger is only licensed to work with Visual Studio Code
Here's the Github issue about it, providing a bit of context and a lot of useless discussion: https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/505
The actual binary releases of Visual Studio Code
https://code.visualstudio.com/license
And here's the license for VSCode itself
"This license applies to the Visual Studio Code product. Source Code for Visual Studio Code is available at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode under the MIT license agreement..."
Source code and final product have different licenses but VSCode and Visual Studio Code refer to the same thing. If you're using the official release channel then you should have the final product that is licensed to use the debugger.
[1] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/labels/os-freebsd
The only explanation I found plausible, is that people like David and not Goliath. They always prefer the underdogs to win, and the titans to lose.
As for why some of us defended Google there was a long time where they - IMO - were very nice.
Big contributors to a number of good causes.
Fired sysadmin who looked into data of someone he knew, even of he had a good reason, because trust came first.
Old AdWords/AdSense with somewhat relevant text only ads wasn't too shady IMO.
... at a time when Microsoft had a CEO that said Open Source was like cancer. Etc.
Looking back my guess is it went wrong somewhere around the doubleclick acquisition.
It almost makes me want to give Windows a try again (ha not really). But I'd try a "Microsoft Linux" desktop (which no longer sounds like a ridiculous concept), before I would try Chrome OS.
IBM has free OSS labor and outsources to India. Choosing Nadella as CEO makes a lot of sense for that plan.
Satya became CEO during the beginning of 2014. And, the book was published on September 26, 2017. So, you read it when the puck was in transit.
But it was interesting to know the foundations of the transition being laid from day 1 with Nadella as CEO. The book is more like a little bit of a background of Nadella (his life in India and early days in US) and a little bit about his career in microsoft before becoming CEO and the rest of it is about the transition from pre-CEO to CEO and the initial months.
TBH, I was a bit skeptical that culture change that he focussed on would end up having such a huge impact. But I was sure that his work in terms of focus on cloud, AI, ML and also considering the challenges of such computing power, certainly was the right direction for MS to move.
Or 15 years before that, pro-MS and anti-IBM. IBM is still huge, but they've found a steady revenue stream doing enterprise stuff, so they're not creating (much) fresh evil. MS could have made steady profits writing decent desktop software (I'm not so sure now). They're both powerful but comfortable. Google is huge, and still thinks it can rule the world.
Companies are a bit like religions. When they're small, they can't have much impact. When they're big and young, they can wreak havoc. If they make it to comfortable old age, they're peaceful and stable. The Catholic Church is huge, benign, and stable now, but 1000 years ago they were a bit more conquest-focused and violent, and 2000 years ago they were just a few harmless militants.
That's a really bad analogy and detracts a lot from your point. Big religions that reach old age are merely stable, but that doesn't necessarily make them peaceful or benign. My guess is that you're probably looking at it through the lens of living in United States.
> My guess is that you're probably looking at it through the lens of living in United States.
Well, that is where I live, so that's the lens I have... My experience is that religions tend to settle down as they age. Catholics, while they may have firm belief, tend to keep it to themselves, and not to proselytize. It's more of a culture and ritual than a fervent cause. Protestants, especially Evangelicals, tend to be a bit more vocal. Mormons were killing people not so long ago[1] (though my Mormon friends never tried to convert me). Scientologists are just insane. Our older religions are, on average, more peaceful and benign.
I don't know where you live or grew up, so I can't guess at your experience with religion.