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Comment by ke88y | Hacker News Reader

Linux, PyTorch, TensorFlow, literally every programming language used everywhere except perhaps MATLAB and CUDA (and even there most of the libraries are OSS, and those languages aren't FAANG property anyways)

I think there's a kernel of truth to what you're saying -- namely that big tech would be fine without oss and mostly builds out their own alternatives whenever necessary or desirable -- but it's definitely not true that BigTech "doesn't use OSS", "has internal versions", or "only use it for recruiting"

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PyTorch is a meta project, I think tensorflow is from Google. Both companies maintain their own programming languages (which they later open sourced)

Meta uses its own php called hack. Nothing is shared with php oss. Google and Meta both have their forked versions of Cpp and python. Plus if they're closed source they will just buy it.

Pytorch and tensorflow are from FANG. Without OSS being a thing, they just keep using it without sharing it to the world.

Your examples are actually proving the opposite of your point :)

> Without OSS being a thing, they just keep using it without sharing it to the world.

But OSS is a thing and they did share it with the world.

> Your examples are actually proving the opposite of your point :)

How so?

Despite the fact that Big Tech doesn't need OSS, it's not true that BigTech:

1. "doesn't use OSS", or

2. "has internal versions" [of any relevant OSS], or

3. "only use it for recruiting".

Hack isn't a counter-example; it's open source. The face that TensorFlow started a google isn't relevant to my point, nor is the fact that FB took the healm of Torch from academia a while ago.

Companies engage with OSS strategically, not altruistically. In other news, grass is green :) But there are many strategic reasons for having pieces of infra that are (1) OSS, (2) not duplicated internally, and (3) have motivations other than recruiting.

I think you're misunderstanding my comment because you aren't reading it in context of the parent. Those are all points why big tech will be fine without open source software. I.E. if the entirety of the OSS community disappeared tomorrow, big tech would be minimally impacted. Many of the major OSS projects came from then to begin with and they already have massive efforts to maintain parallel versions. They open source tf, hack, and pytorch because it's good for recruiting. Not because it gets commits and reduces workloads. So if the OSS movement disappeared tomorrow, big tech would be the best positioned companies to keep chugging along.

Although even if all OSS software that we've discussed here disappeared tomorrow, I know at least Google and Facebook are fine because they don't use any of it. They have their own internal versions that are better and aren't shared with the world.

Lol at thinking that pytorch and tensorflow are oss. I mean they're definitely free but have you ever tried submitting a patch for something that doesn't matter to FB/Google? Those projects function as free bug finding programs for their respective sponsors.

They also exist so that infra/hardware is developed to support them specifically. The more people that use each, the more pressure exists for 3p infra/hw to build around them in pursuit of $$.

> Lol at thinking that pytorch and tensorflow are oss

If BSD isn't open source then I don't know what is.

> I mean they're definitely free but have you ever tried submitting a patch for something that doesn't matter to FB/Google?

Well, you can always fork.

> Those projects function as free bug finding programs for their respective sponsors.

Yes, most companies engage with OSS strategically and not purely altruistically. But also:

1. Big tech uses OSS.

2. Big tech does not have internal versions of many OSS projects.

3. Big tech uses OSS for reasons other than just recruiting.

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