Build Unix, Not Uber
thesephist.com
thesephist.com
Dee Hock, an executive of a minor bank, set this up. The big banks wanted someone relatively neutral in charge of the Visa system. (He died just two weeks ago, I just found out.) His optimistic book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age", is still available.
There used to be a "chaord" article on Wikipedia, but it was merged into Dee Hock's article after Visa became an ordinary corporation.
Chaordic entities are a good choice for government administration of public services without being too heavy-handed with state intervention.
The company itself was created by their customers to ensure support and development of the product that they used.
Most cooperatives have a large number of members with roughly equal economic power. So, ideas like one-member-one-vote and equal income distribution make sense.
However, in the case of companies requiring FOSS services, I imagine the most valuable customers would be large corporations working in highly risk averse industries like telecommunications and banking that feel the 'need' for a support contract to go along with their linux distribution.
But there would likely be a mix of large blue-chip companies, smaller service suppliers to the aforementioned companies, and other companies that want to leverage services beyond consulting like Red Hat's managed OpenShift offerings.
So our FOSS cooperative membership distribution would probably be heavily weighted towards smaller companies, but most of the revenue would come from the long tail.
I don't see how the small cadre contributing the majority of the revenue would be satisfied having effectively zero voting power. So you might have to mix up the model a bit to assign voting power on the basis of revenue contributed or some proxy like the number of contracts signed.
Uber would not exist without GPS. I wonder how many other of the unicorns:
* Twitter without Rails
* Facebook without PHP (I think this is fair but maybe not)
* Reddit without Python
* Tesla and Solar City without huge government subsidies
Crazy to think how many Lake Tahoe vacation homes were transferred thanks to these projects.
GPS and GLONASS use different frequencies and redundant signaling systems is common in aviation.
And Garmin actually works with both for a more accurate location:
https://www.getaway.co.za/gear-reviews/news/garmin-russian-s...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/invas...
Don’t think Facebook would have succeeded with Perl.
:P
- Twitter without iTunes Podcast Directory (because it killed Odeo, the parent business)
- Facebook without MySpace / Friendster
- Reddit without Digg / Slashdot
Take away GPS and Uber is a fundamentally different product.
I’d say Reddit is literally just a technically inferior version of Usenet.
Reddit was originally written in lisp. It was later rewritten in Python with a trivial amount of effort. And it could have be trivially rewritten in any other language as well. The languages are not that important. Having access to high level languages in general is important, but they are a dime a dozen.
so instead of the languages, maybe open it up to Linux/FOSS in general
Well, I am. I find it too cumbersome otherwise. If I wanted to have a desktop workstation, I would have a desktop PC - with a laptop, I'm working on its keyboard and touchpad, so I can move with it anywhere I want and still be as comfortable using it as usual.
I don't know how does the situation look like with larger laptops as I wasn't interested in them when I was looking around for a new computer the last time.
Now, I'm an old dog not interested in learning new tricks unless it will absolutely postively without a doubt be money making for me. Doing for the sake of doing is no longer something I'm passionate about. I have other things to spend my time that is much more deserving of my passion. That's what the young kids are for, and then brag about their accomplisments on a Show HN. Then I can decide if it is worthy for me.
so, yeah, it's nice that the rider can see the route the driver is taking to feel like they are not being "taken for a ride", but I've been in rides where the drive did not take the same route my app was showing.
however, is this the only thing that makes moder ride share apps a thing?
Things like GPS and the internet would’ve been deployed much faster by a private corporation but then they would be dumb monopolies as opposed to the public good they are now.
Also we need a space to work on big dumb ideas and toys[1] and neither Unix, Uber or GPS fit in that category. What is that sweet spot?
1) at least in the USA, access to the internet is not a public good, it is provided by an oligopoly (and in many circumstances a functional monopoly, where service at a given address is only available from a single ISP)
2) why do you believe that either GPS or the internet would have been deployed faster by a private corporation?
While of course, Starlink relied on government know-how, given away for free, the speed of deployment was 2-3x.
In the end we’re left with a monopoly service which sucks. But, it came together quick. Why can’t we have both? Fast deploying public goods.
If you’re going to compare the two you need to control for confounding factors.
More generally, I don’t think “Government works slower then private corporations” is that controversial a conclusion. If we’re gonna try to improve it, we have to admit the problem first.
Lol, this is worse than the infamous Dropbox comment. There are no LEO providers except for Starlink for a reason. Starlink required novel launch techniques, novel antennas, novel network management, and that’s just what we know about publicly.
Social purpose corporation with crowdfunding and transparency seems like it would accomplish much of what you want.
Of course, these days the idea that TCP/IP somehow implements a purely conceptual OSI is so ingrained that people get angry when you tell them the accurate history. So it goes.
IP on the other hand was neither, like much of successful technology.
As a side note, the OSI layers are useful as a mental model, but trying to maintain that separation in actual implementation is a poor idea; that’s one of the things IP got right: it doesn’t really match OSI layering, and does cut through layers when it makes sense.
It doesn't implement the OSI layering model, in other words, even if you can almost make that model fit if you ignore the top couple layers and handwave vigorously the rest of the time.
If you look, you can find a four-layer or five-layer TCP/IP model, but RFC 3439 has a section titled "Layering Considered Harmful" and it's clear that the IETF doesn't always think in terms of layers.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3439
Of course, none of that stops the Seven-Layer Model (blessed be its name) from being perpetuated as if it were an absolute.
It is an expectation that we get good services based the taxes we pay.
That’s like saying the English language and calculus are a subsidy. They are definitely shoulders we all stand on, but not a subsidy.
The individual corporations are ideas, and then of course there's the idea of the corporation itself. As the post notes, corporations only work because of other ideas about property rights and scarcity. But more fundamentally they only work because they're an idea quite a few people already believe in.
I'm a little fuzzy on the level at which the post means "autonomous ideas" will steer society--do they mean autonomous ideas like Unix? Or autonomous ideas like governments and corporations and pope-less religions?
I think the post helps draw a latent curiosity out of me that I probably wouldn't have put quite like this, but: can we better identify and allocate resources towards good ideas that don't make market sense?
I think this is incorrect framing. You have to shape the market, not the idea.
Capitalism’s fault is not accounting for externalized costs, like climate change.
The market allocates resources very effectively, but the costs the market uses to allocate resources are lies. They omit costs that producers can ignore or otherwise avoid paying for.
If these externalities were captured and embedded into the price of the good/service, the market could actually account these issues.
Not much of an expert in any of this, just openly postulating to invite conversation
Markets optimize for products. If something can’t be made into a product wherein the full value and cost to society is express captured within the transaction itself, you generally end up with less than ideal outcomes.
Capitalism is the best system for optimizing for productive efficiency, but creating an abundance of material wealth isn’t quite the same thing as making society as a whole the best that is can be.
That said, I don't really mean products that don't make sense to the market as it exists--I mean that all good ideas are not necessarily products. There are good ideas that don't fit the logic of the market (regardless of what it thinks it is a good idea at the moment).
>can we better identify and allocate resources towards good ideas that don't make market sense?
no, but we shall die trying
The author neglects to mention that before POSIX[0], the "core ideas of UNIX-style operating systems" were very much proprietary. For example, there was no easy way to get arbitrary System V[1] or BSD source to easily compile on the other, let alone lesser known Unix variants.
So I posit that the ideas spread not due to the merit of each version of *nix, but instead because a standard which allowed (reasonable) portability was agreed upon and largely supported.
If anything it was the antithesis of Unix, namely GNU with its specific license that protects the users freedom, that was really the revolutionary idea, thank you RMS. Of course Unix, the work by Thompson, Ritchie etc brought extensibility and endless creativity to the development/app space. Ie write programs that do one thing well and able to connect those through pipes and ultimately through networks. The cli interface is ancient, but its here to stay for a very long time indeed.
Not sure of the point that my comment is making. Meh. Happy Friday.
Excuse the narcissism, but MBAs disagree (shareholders) and Wall Street disagrees (profits) and activist employees disagrees
When a mega-yacht doesn’t stand out in your social/sexual set? Build a fucking rocket ship that we all know damned well isn’t going to colonize Mars.
One does not have to capture "most of the value" to be profitable.
In fact, aiming to capture _most_ of the value is what creates customer ill will because _some_ of the value has to go to the customers.
System V appeared shortly after, as well as a set of legal disputes known as "the Unix Wars" beginning around 1988, most especially against BSDi (1-800-ITS-UNIX).
On January 14, 1949, the government filed an action in the District Court for the District of New Jersey against the Western Electric Company, Inc.[3] and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Inc. (Civil Action No. 17-49).[4] The complaint alleged that the defendants had monopolized and conspired to restrain trade in the manufacture, distribution, sale, and installation of telephones, telephone apparatus, equipment, materials, and supplies, in violation 136136 of sections 1, 2, and 3 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1, 2, and 3.[5] The relief sought included the divestiture by AT & T of its stock ownership in Western Electric; termination of exclusive relationships between AT & T and Western Electric; divestiture by Western Electric of its fifty percent interest in Bell Telephone Laboratories;[6] separation of telephone manufacturing from the provision of telephone service; and the compulsory licensing of patents owned by AT & T on a non-discriminatory basis.*
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?q=United+States+v.+A...
*I've been hacking away on something called "Linux on the Web" for the past decade of my life... https://lotw.site/
I’d prescribe the author multiple courses of The Unix Hater’s Handbook but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a cure.
CP/M. OS/2. MS-DOS. OS/2 Warp. Windows. Windows NT. Mac OS. VMS...
(I'm neutral but I like the historic context)