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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

Why does this exist? I don't mean what do you use it for, the many uses are obvious, but why has a company (Microsoft) made it and released it for free.

Reading the license I assume it may change at some future version to require money to use it, and that a new version will install and then say please pay us to continue using? Or probably just this product is no longer available? Note these are not things I am thinking will happen but rather my theoretical assumptions to try to answer the question of why has Microsoft, a for profit company, made this closed source, free tool that I think might be pretty useful for a lot of people.

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Our driving force is to make this technology as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. We believe that machine learning will be a huge new way that people interact with computers going forward to better their lives.

Lobe will always let you train custom machine learning for free on your computer. We hope this becomes a vibrant ecosystem, and the business model around the edges can come later for value-add services.

>Lobe will always let you train custom machine learning for free on your computer.

ah ok, fine, just the legalese was making me wonder. And of course that we are in a capitalist system so not sure I follow the value for Microsoft in this scenario, but I guess you find making machine learning more available to apps somehow drives value.

So thanks for what looks like a pretty nice tool.

for example in the license where it says:

You agree to receive these automatic updates without any additional notice. Updates may not include or support all existing software features, services, or peripheral devices.

This is the part that causes me to assume it will stop working at some point in the future? And when would that be:

a) Term.

The term of this agreement will continue until the commercial release of the software. We also may not release a commercial version.

But honestly unsure if I am just paranoid. Or even if paranoia is the right term for my feeling about it, it's something Microsoft is letting me use and at some point it won't be usable anymore - such is life - might be the more reasonable response to it.

Reason for being it free and most probably free for next couple of years coz Company needs as much data as possible.

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