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Comment by randmeerkat | Hacker News Reader

> So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).

An all knowing ever listening assistant strapped to your wrist, completely connected to all of your accounts financial, medical, social media, monitoring your vitals, measuring your acceleration, deceleration, steps, altitude, and gps position, bundling it up, and then selling it to whoever wants it for pennies on the dollar.

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This is going to be an absolutely enormous market, and it would be really good if an open source option wins it, instead of another big tech walled garden.

The good news is that it’s a software solution, not hardware. Open source can only win in software. So it has a chance.

Open source, self-hosted, all-knowing assistant connected to the Internet, that doesn’t leak data to companies, and that filters out all their ads, messaging, and CTA’s.

Tech-savvy people will be able to have one of these pretty soon even if big tech wins the broader market.

> This is going to be an absolutely enormous market, and it would be really good if an open source option wins it, instead of another big tech walled garden.

That’s a nice thought, but IBM would probably just buy it then kill it.

Open source can never "win" a consumer market because a team of engineers is never going to be able to live off of giving away software for free, nor can you sell free software to the public at large. Open source works in B2B contexts because businesses either collaborate on building infrastructure they need to sell their core product, or because you can sometimes sell support and commercial licenses to businesses.

This is precisely why Linux has overwhelmingly won the server market for at least a decade, but it is still a bit player in consumer devices (except Android, which is barely open source and is controlled by a huge corporation selling our data).

> Open source can never "win" a consumer market

Perhaps open source doesn't devalue consumers in a way that they are a thing to be won - not even in aggregate.

The network devices in my home are open source, as is most of the OS. With my customers it's a mix - but where there is open source, it pretty much just works.

Meanwhile, any complaining is typically due to the ongoing poor treatment by Microsoft, Intuit, et al.

> Perhaps open source doesn't devalue consumers in a way that they are a thing to be won - not even in aggregate.

You can win a market, that doesn't mean you're winning the participants. You could at best be winning them over, which is a positive for anyone.

> The network devices in my home are open source, as is most of the OS.

The software on those devices is open source, or in other words, the companies selling your devices are using OSS to power them (or you yourself installed software mostly created for this purpose by similar companies).

UNIX has won the server market, Linux happens to make it free beer.

Open source software is only really widely successful in areas where it’s a cost center rather than the end product, though.

> self-hosted

That seems like the sticking point with LLM’s as they exist now.

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