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Comment by asdkhadsj | Hacker News Reader

It bothers me that they even tried, honestly.

Keybase seems like something that should be small, isolated, FOSS, supported by a foundation, etc. They could have built a business _around_ Keybase I'd imagine, but all they managed to do with this is invalidate Keybase and make people like myself, who feared their business motivations, feel vindicated for being paranoid.

I'll never blame anyone for wanting to make money, to make a business, etc. But if you make a product that walks talks and acts like a FOSS project, but keep it to center your business around... I'll always be longing for a real, true FOSS replacement.

In this case a good looking FOSS alternative came out a few months ago iirc. Though for the life of me I can't remember the name.

edit: https://keys.pub/ - though I will still miss KBFS

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As someone who works at an open-source-focused business, I respectfully disagree. Unlike proprietary software, open source software doesn't depend on the broken window fallacy. As a result, it's really hard to make open source profitable. There's lots of different avenues to get there, and I don't like to fault someone for their efforts if the bulk of their work goes towards improving open source software, as I think Keybase did.

I didn't follow your reasoning about proprietary software depending on the broken window fallacy.

I don't see how Google's proprietary search engine or Facebook's proprietary interface to our social network rely on the broken window fallacy.

Would you mind elaborating?

Sure! The idea is that each proprietary project is wasting effort implementing their own clones of everyone else's software. To use your example, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Yandex etc etc are all developing their own search engines. Instead they could all be contributing to one search engine to push the state of search engine software forward, instead of all spinning their wheels re-doing what everyone else is doing. How many devs are employed doing what someone else in some other company has already done? That's the broken window: someone else has already done the work, but it must be wastefully re-done because of the license. There's a lot of room for profit in all that extra waste.

Aside from whether this matches the typical meaning of "broken window fallacy," I think the substance of what you're saying doesn't match reality.

Open source is famous for fostering a bunch of different approaches to the same problem, and slightly different forks of the same concept. That's the "bazaar" in the famous metaphor, as opposed to the "cathedral" of monolithic, hierarchical, linear proprietary development within a closed-source company.

"Everyone working on the same thing" only works well when there is broad agreement on what that thing should be, and strong governance to resolve disputes. National highway systems, militaries, and power grids are good examples.

I don't think search engines are a good example of where this would work; it's not clear in advance what will make a given search engine better. Thus we benefit from a variety of competing approaches, essentially to expand the space in which we're searching for the optimum.

That's not what the broken window fallacy is though. It references the idea that breaking a window generates economic activity which is good for everyone.

Open source software is (I would argue) even more driven to fragmentation by political, ideological, and personality conflict driven squabbles than proprietary software, as there is no profit motive to also satisfy.

Also, the broken window thing asserts that small amounts of criminal activity lead to larger amounts of criminal activity via signaling that being bad or neglectful is OK, which is both not proven and irrelevant to software writers being prone to reinvent the wheel for whatever reasons they have.

You're describing the broken windows theory. The broken window fallacy is the claim that destruction or waste is good for the economy because the cleanup generates economic activity (with the attendant multipliers). It's a fallacy because it leaves out that the original spender (by the owner of the broken window), on average, displaced other economic activity.

While I'm no fan of these companies, I'm not convinced by that particular argument for FOSS either. Imagine the world where we would be always iterating on one lineage/model of refrigerator, each automobile type etc. instead of many companies rebuilding basic stuff. I don't believe we would be better off. Not all progress can be driven by consensus and iteration, some needs to be done by competition, divergence and outright discontinuing old approaches.

Thanks for the elaboration.

I think you would be right about the greater good being served by everyone being aligned on the same search engine ONLY IF we understood search engines so well that we knew there to be only one mathematically optimal way to build search engines.

Since we don't understand search engines that well, there is a LOT of value in the exploration over the space of search engines that these different companies represent.

The broken window fallacy argument is that those speaking of the benefits of the broken window are mistaking maintenance cost for generated value. That doesn't seem to be the case here. This is society implicitly investing in exploration over exploitation.

Well, in reality there wouldn't be one optimal product, there would be many, for the reason that you said -and for human reasons.

However they would still be able to borrow good bits from each other and gain insight on how things could be done differently, so arguably the end result would be a win. From a technical standpoint that is -I think where it gets messy is when we try to factor in the business implications.

Possibly, but in this case I didn't expect them to make Keybase profitable, if anything I expect the opposite. I expect Keybase to be a FOSS, foundation for profitable extensions that the company builds and sells.

Arguably I think they agree with me, about the extensions at least. As seen by their seemingly random directions of feature extensions that Keybase was prone to. My issue is not that they chose random features to try to make profitable, but rather that the core premise, a public keystore, was tied so closely to a for profit company.

It would be like losing Git because Github went under. (Though, terrible example because Git works without a centralized repo, but it's just the first company <-> FOSS relationship that came to mind lol.)

It's actually a pretty good example to be honest.

Keybase was a centralized key storage with value-add services such as file storage and chat.

That was absolutely comparable to github, as you could've just gone back to manually syncing pubkeys and encrypting msgs. If github went away, you'd be without a lot of value-add services as well such as wiki, issues user management etc

Realistically speaking, nobody is going to do that... And tbh, it was already dead in the water when they added crypto currencies... Just took a while for their money to run out.

The actual difference is that there are enough competing products for github, not for keybase however, as that is just too niche

Maybe "losing Ubuntu if Canonical went under" is a better analogy then?

I mean, there's a fatal flaw in the broken window fallacy anyway:

> It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.[1]

Capitalism is about acquiring capital, i.e. money. There's no such evidence that people with money actually spend it in ways other than investment, and the sole purpose of that isn't to donate to companies that need it, it's to profit off it and essentially hoard more capital. Sure, poor people with either very little or no capital spend that capital on necessities, and thus drive the economy, but there's no evidence that people with large amounts of capital spend that on anything at all, there's more evidence that they hoard it and seek only to acquire more capital. The entire system is built to favour those people.

I think you're reading too much into it.

If you have to pay to replace a window that should have lasted, say, ten more years, that's money you now cannot spend on improving your factory somehow.

It is still economic activity (and the glazier doesn't mind the work) but it's remedial rather than generative. (The glazier that repairs the window could have been installing a new one in a new factory, eh?)

We're getting way off topic here, but you have a horribly misguided premise here. A typical shopkeeper is not in the .1% 'cash hoarding' class. Small businesses are mostly run by people with average resources, and their capital is typically spent on their business and personal needs.

That feels like strict oposit of the falacy claim, which would hold in case of perfectly stable and suppied currency is employed. Still would be rational to invest research, diversify against theft etc.

How was their product ever marketed that way? They have open source clients because that security table stakes. They’re a solution to crypto anarchy because they help link your crypto identities to your social ones. None of that has changed. You talk like all valid software is free of corporate ownership/sponsorship. Why is zoom’s money somehow worse than e.g. softbank’s.

Oh I didn't mean to imply it was, maybe my "walks talks" bit was unfair. Rather I merely meant that Keybase, like Keys.pub, seems like a great isolated tool for the internet. Something exceptionally well suited for a foundation.

keys.pub doesn't have the single most useful feature Keybase has: The ability to verifiably establish a secure channel with anyone given their Twitter/Github/whatever username.

Their homepage advertises 'keys pull username@github' as an example. Is the missing piece you describe here simply the command 'keys chat username@github'?

No, it's the cryptographic attestation so you know you are getting the right key.

They don't support it? That's weird (maybe a missing feature) given that it's quite easy to add to anything that has signed metadata, see e.g. this for OpenPGP: https://github.com/wiktor-k/openpgp-proofs#openpgp-proofs

I'm not very familiar with the service, but AFAIK they don't. It would be great if they added it.

EDIT: It looks like it might, from the front page, I will try it out to make sure. If it does, that'll be great!

EDIT 2: It sort of does, but it's on a per-key basis, not an entire identity. You can publish proof on Twitter/Github/whatever, but it's only for one specific key, and it's one key per service, which means you can't only have one identity and multiple services.

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