Comment by naringas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naringas | Hacker News Reader

nice constructive counterpoint to https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

a key point (IMO) innovation happened online becuase being a new space enabled by novel technology, it wasn't regulated yet. But now it's mainstream, so inovation will decrease.

also, this quote from an intervier questioning Marc Andreessen

> a “primary technology” would need to involve, you know, some fundamental new insight in code, some proprietary set of algorithms.

tells me that so many people just don't get it. software due to being immaterial just doesn't play by the same rules as other mechanical machines.

I know I cannot explain it properly; but why is open source such a superior way to develop infrastructure software?

finally

> Human progress in this view is solely online.

IMO, we don't need a new cleverer algorithm. I believe that Amazon's success is not some really sophisitcated piece of code, but the way in which they integrated computer technology into the very core of the organization.

Infrastructure software, by its nature, is designed to power hundreds or thousands or millions of different needs. That suits an open source model.

We tend to inflate problems that touch us directly and deflate problems that we don't see very often. Consider if I am the government official responsible for making sure roads are paved. The roads that I use every day (to commute, to go to the grocery, etc.) are likely to be pristine. I will make sure of it. The roads I rarely see will be dealt with on their regular schedule, and maybe not at all if time runs out.

However, if paving decisions were made by a large group of citizens, each of whom had the ability to just go out and pave the road themselves if they felt like it, the city would be much more paved.

The same allegory works for closed versus open source. Consider if LinkedIn had left Kafka as closed source. If we looked at the code base, we would likely still find a pretty good message bus, but it would be optimized for the nuances of LinkedIn's system architecture and proclivities in passing messages. Once it became open source, developers from Facebook and Google and Startup #1 and Manufacturing Firm #2 and so on all jumped in to solve problems. They achieved consensus on how those problems should be solved and pushed forward.

Two points on this allegory that are relevant to Andreessen's argument: everyone in the infrastructure committee had skin in the game (they wanted problems solved) and they had the capacity to go deal with the problems themselves. Andreessen argues we have a lot of the first already but we don't have nearly as much of the second as we need.

Although I mostly agree with you about amzn, they do in fact have some really sophisticated pieces of code. The core aspects of why the company succeeded are not related directly to that code, but without it, it seems quite unlikely to me that they would have succeeded in the way that they have.

But in the end, isn't all that sophistication subject to diminishing returns??

> I know I cannot explain it properly; but why is open source such a superior way to develop infrastructure software?

Isn't it just cost? As you say software is immaterial and so the only real cost is in the labor to create it which open source neatly does away with.

Well, there's still the operational cost of setting up and running the hardware (again, skilled labor), but at least the software is free.

Absolutely but the OP was talking about development of the software.

yes, but at least until everything went back into the (mainframe) cloud, the opreational cost of running the software was coverd by the user.

My pc's hardware is mine, and the electricity bill is also mine.

So 'licensing' software is very much a form of rent.

Quite frankly this is an open problem. e.g. the debate about AWS suddenly providing, redis, elastcisearch, etc as a service and making the original developers redundant.

let's not forget about the (often overlooked) cost of maintenance

but yes, software does have marginal cost, this is a brutal game changer we (as a civilization) are just not dealing with appropriately

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