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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

I agree, Meta's work in AI has been really impressive, and it's encouraging how they are open-sourcing so much.

It's funny, back in the 90s I disliked Microsoft and thought they were inherently culturally opposed to open source. But big corporations really just follow their business incentives when it comes to open source.

It's not like Meta "loves to be open". But they would hate a world where all the powerful AI development happened on one of the big clouds. Imagine if every researchers used some closed-source API from Google or Azure or AWS. Meta would try to hire some AI people, and they'd be like, ugh if we take the job we have to use this weird Facebook-specific thing. (<cough>Flow</cough>)

So, supporting PyTorch and providing open source models is just a good business strategy for Meta. I'm glad to see it.

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I’m glad Microsoft is open sourcing a lot of things.

I have never, ever seen a convincing business case for their doing so, however.

Not your opinion. A compelling business case.

The business case for open sourcing dev tooling is that more developers will use them and build on them and that brings more people to your platforms.

Sure. Any proof at all for that? I mean it's the obvious answer, but generally in business people who don't pay for things tend not to pay for things. In fact, in the enterprise having a big budget is the way you keep your corporate power. Free stuff isn't a way to keep your budget high.

Again, I would like to agree with your thinking. I just don't think the real world backs it up.

It's pretty simple, they make a lot of money off Azure, and open source software is a complement to Azure. See the classic:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

In particular, open source software prevents people from getting locked into any of the AWS, Linux, iOS, or Android ecosystems. All of those are popular software development ecosystems that Microsoft does not own or influence very much.

Not convincing or even relevant IMHO. Azure infra is largely closed source and Microsoft is making a ton of money off it.

> I agree, Meta's work in AI has been really impressive, and it's encouraging how they are open-sourcing so much.

My usual reaction to anything Facebook releases is "yawn, they released yet another model that is practically useless because it's released under a non-commercial license", but I'm pleasantly surprised that this one seems to be actually liberally licensed! Hopefully this continues into the future.

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