Hacker News Reader

Comment by syrusakbary | Hacker News Reader

I'll not enter on the technical comparisons but more on the philosophical view of your comment.

Somehow you are not wary of an organization that is 90% directed by one entity. It might be useful to know that 95%+ of the code changes in wasmtime are by people working in Fastly.

Google is the main pusher to Chrome, the fact that Google is a commercial entity doesn't make good or bad on how they move the ecosystem forward. It makes it more effective.

I'm usually wary and careful when people advise for software and commercial value to be separated.

View on HN

> Somehow you are not wary of an organization that is 90% directed by one entity. It might be useful to know that 95%+ of the code changes in wasmtime are by people working in Fastly.

I'm not overly worried about some companies investing more in communities than others, that's true, as long as there's some level of oversight (those 5% you mention).

I also suspect that a lot of those Fastly employees you mention came after the Mozilla layoffs we heard about a year ago, which I think invalidates a bit your point as the responsibilities were then shared before being unfortunately moved in to Fastly in short notice. It makes sense it would take time to address that perfectly, considering the context.

> Google is the main pusher to Chrome, the fact that Google is a commercial entity doesn't make good or bad on how they move the ecosystem forward. It makes it more effective.

That's not a great example - Chrome famously pushes changes without any oversight, which leads to useless APIs in the best cases to downright harm to their users in the worsts.

It's funny because the oversight in a startup is usually much bigger than in a big organization (the 5% mentioned is usually much, much bigger).

Their success depends so much on community that if fails to deliver, it dies. Thus it usually listens much more carefully. While other big organizations don't have that issue (in fact, they can go on much bigger losses just to capture markets).

What I wanted to showcase is that at the end, power (which usually means a stronger monetary input, which translates to how many people can work and experiment on new stuff) is what leads most of the changes, even if those changes are masked as organizations pushes or what not.

And to reinforce, its great to see Fastly pushing forward and doubling down on WebAssembly. Same as is great seeing Google pushing forward on the W3C standards. The advancements doesn't make it good or bad per se just because it's lead by one organization or another. It's what is delivered what matters.

> Somehow you are not wary of an organization that is 90% directed by one entity.

I'm wary about building on a project from a company whose CEO doesn't disclose they have a pre-existing grievance with the Bytecode Alliance related to:

1) Attempting to trademark "WebAssembly";

2) Inappropriate behaviour.

And who has previously:

3) Used sock-puppet accounts on HN in an attempt to Boost their project.

All of which I learned as a result of reading this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186

Being wary about one thing should not make you less wary about another, imho.

In any case, context matters. I will be very happy the day that we no longer need gaslighting as a way to push certain projects or ideas forward :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com