Instead of building on all of this work we keep blowing it up and reinventing things because VCs only want unicorn outcomes. As an example, YC startup graveyard could be full of flowers if these projects were open source and we had a better user driven funding model to keep them going after the business folds.
A lot.
We are raising generations that hail hashes representing urls to some origin server hosting a picture of a stylized horse (till the origin server doesn't shut down or changes the resource) over real estate, traditional stocks or even just luxury or anything you can touch or use.
We hail as heroes few dozens of crazy dudes putting all their life savings into meme stocks and picture them as heroes fighting against "the system".
We hail as heroes controversial entrepeneurs, generally sociopaths full of themselves, rather than hard working common people.
We are creating generations of ever more connected but lonely individuals desperately trying to find their place in the world, and somehow, we tell them that money is the answer for finding that place and purpose.
There is no shortage of people desperate for "making it" with ease and willing to take huge risks.
Go on reddits or boards related to personal finance, risky crypto speculation and meme stocks are discussed more than taxes, education investments or simple funds.
I think VC craziness is going to increase a lot and spread to places and countries where it wasn't the norm, that's up to you to decide whether it's good or not.
The bigger risk however isn't just that a company goes poof, but that the IP gets purchased for pennies on the dollar by some other company. This is an escape hatch that I don't think many investors would give up willingly.
Since it's a core feature but not a differentiator for their businesses I'd love to just make all of it open source and charge all of them to keep maintaining it but there's not an easy way to do that currently without devaluating it.
It's one if the reasons I avoid working for bootstrapped startups or startups with no-name VCs.
Only in recent times did pumping and dumping yet another B2B SaaS app become in vogue and usually by not tier-one funds. There is a reason the big, famous funds are oversubscribed and limited to big, famous institutional investors.**
** The same applies to other funds e.g. Hedge Funds. Only the very top consistently perform anywhere near their promises and the rest are ways for groups to try to get their foot in the door.
Top tier firms are actually the ones most guilty of it these days. They raise huge funds (thanks to Softbank) and attempt to buy their way into monopoly positions by selling dollars for 50 cents, manufacturing growth and then dumping the companies on the public market (these days through SPACs). Public markets are no different than private, it's the same group of individuals just further down the chain, with the same incentives to push up valuations knowing that stonks can only go up and when things go bad we'll be on the hook to rescue them, or if things are not catastrophic they'll just write off the losses or let main street investors on robinhood catch the falling knife.
I don't understand how that follows from the first statement. Can you explain?
Consumer apps can often get away with scaling ARR and slow incremental growth, but many of these are only feasible due to the existence of VC backed SaaS.
I do not have the excess capital to throw at working on problems at the scale that I want to or in the segments that I'm interested in. Any money that I spent to work on these companies would be gambling with the future financial stability I can provide for my son. Providing him with the safety net necessary to pursue atypical career paths or interests is one of my top priorities.
VC funding is the only way that starting a company is possible for me. The existence of VC funding is the only reason I'm even ideating about these large problems. It's an equalizer that puts those of us without the same set of options at a level playing field.
There's really no reason why all of this software needs to be cloud based, other than vendor lock in. For collaboration software we should have a way to self host or pay for managed hosts.
As long as you are not "distributing" it is absolutely fine to mix GPLv2, Apache License and proprietary code you got from some vendor all together. But as soon as you distribute this, it becomes messy.
And then come all the question on technical integrations, ego ("ugly code!!"), ...
Aside from the code getting a license and legal audit, finding a trademark sponsor was important to them too so that someone doesn’t come along and re-commercialize their free and open work under the old brand.
On the flip side, this process is a lot of extra work to do in a very busy and risky time for a buisness. Efforts to open source may fail and I understand when people in charge choose to spend their time prioritizing their employee’s needs first, technology second. I can understand why the open source priority isn’t practical if the company doesn’t plan for this possibility ahead of time.
People generally don't want to pay for things / fund things themselves.
For now on the internet this is the way, and IMO we as the users of the internet are somewhat the cause too.