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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

I suppose this an attempt to try and head off the stories about "AI" killing open source

Google has poured untold millions into open source over the last couple of decades, not just by sponsorships, but also by employing contributors, etc.

I don't think that'll change with AI. They just needed to be reminded about the financials of Tailwind and I'm sure it was an easy conversation internally.

> Google has poured untold millions into open source over the last couple of decades, not just by sponsorships, but also by employing contributors, etc.

And Google has profited untold hundreds of billions of open source over the last couple of decades. They just need to be reminded of it.

Edit: Haha, getting downvoted! Never underestimate the power of tens of thousands of Googlers on HN... Look, I use Gmail, Google maps, Chrome and Android and occasionally Google search but without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist.

Google is actually kind of infamous for not using much in the way of OSS software.

The list of things I can think of is:

* Linux

* LLVM

* Webkit/Chrome (which they have done the majority of contributions to for a long time)

* Java & a little bit of Python

Oh, only Linux? /s

For Linux / ChromeOS: GPU drivers benefit heavily: - Freedreno for Qualcomm - Panthor for Arm Mali

Lots of Linux contributions for Rust drivers

So if you subtract linux and LLVM and Webkit and Java, what is left of Google? Absolutely nothing. Well, a mostly empty, dysfunctional mono repo lacking the main dependencies.

Come on.

Oh yeah, manipulating users and monetary siphoning data with their advertising schemes.

I don't think the company would be very different if these projects had never existed and everyone had to pay for proprietary tools.

The people meaningfully benefiting from open source are the people and companies on the margin, not the biggest tech companies in the world.

There's a whole lot more, check `third_party/` if you work at Google.

(disclaimer, used to work at google a long time ago)

There were directories there for sure, but I honestly never saw anything get used from there (except I think TensorFlow was in there?).

My personal experience was I never used any OSS code (that wasn't Google Open Sourcing its own code) except Linux & LLVM.

It definitely didn't feel meaningful to the company besides the ones I called out.

A lot of it also comes from acquired projects/companies, that are brought to google3, with plans to deprecate and get rid of eventually

Didn’t they open source Kubernetes (aka probably the biggest OSS project since Linux itself)

Biggest in what sense? Certainly not in terms of the size of the code base. It is an order of magnitude smaller than Chromium.

V8 (covered in Chrome), Angular, Dart, Golang, Kubernetes, Android (remember Android???)

Not surprising these days. HN community wants in on the riches too before the industry crashes.

And what's your point? When interests align, what's there to complain about?

I'm not, nor have I ever been, a googler, btw. I did apply for a job there in 2006 but didn't make it past the first round (they were asking me obscure TCP/IP questions for a Java developer).

They created V8, kickstarted the modern browser wars with Chrome. They've sponsored tons of Open Source projects via Google Summer of Code. They've done more than their fair share. Half the devops stuff like Kubernetes, probably a lot of the early work related to linux containers, who knows what else.

There is always going to be someone who thinks they can do more. But they didn't have to do _any_ of it. Yet they did a ton.

I think you are getting downvoted because your claim that “without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist” doesn’t pass the smell test. If Linux didn’t exist, maybe Google will just use one of the BSDs. If Java didn’t exist perhaps Google would just write more code in C++ instead; I’m pretty sure it still has more lines of C++ than Java. Or maybe Go would get invented a few years earlier. And if WebKit didn’t exist maybe Google would just fork KHTML themselves rather than forking a fork of KHTML. A lot of open source software appeared at the right time to be dominant, but without them other different open source software might dominate. But your argument isn’t about what if the entire OSS movement didn’t exist. It’s about what if specific OSS didn’t exist.

People probably downvoted your comment because you sound angry and bitter. Get over yourself.

Yes, but someone managed to get funding for an external sponsorship in a single day? I'm happily surprised.

Well that and the fact that LLMs love using Tailwind, which puts the vendors in an awkward spot if the Tailwind project implodes.

Makes you wonder how much ossification is going to happen because AI models are entrenched in 2023's tooling du jour.

Maybe there are also engineers at Google who saw the thread yesterday and wanted to help out? I agree that companies are self-serving, but (for now) they’re made of people who are not.

If your business can easily get destroyed by AI, then the problem is your business model.

Which business is 100% not at risk in the next 10 years?

According to Peter Thiel, taking care of children. Gotta make sure the housewife is happy in the AI uprising after all.

Very myopic thinking. Fallout New Vegas had its plutocrat of interest make sure to scan the brains of his biggest fancies before the Great War. A true visionary.

Funeral Homes

Elderly care? With an aging population in most of the western world it will become more and more important IMHO

Look up Humanoid Robots.

Farming, livestock, arms, school/nursery, medicine, construction, real estate, finance. Basically anything rooted in the physical world and elemental services.

I'd agree with medicine, school/nursery, real estate, and finance but mostly because in those industries the ability to connect with clients at a human level is often more valuable than sheer talent.

With farming/livestock, pretty much all of that can become automated. And even in the previous human-centric sectors, there are definitely roles that will be replaced by AI, even if the sector as a whole continues to employ a lot of people.

Take law, for instance. Due to the prevalence of bar associations (which will likely prevent AI from doing lawyers' jobs), AI will never be a lawyer. However, many lawyers have and continue to replace paralegals with AI.

I can’t see a good reason real estate wouldn’t go the way car dealerships are going.

Hmm, for real estate and car dealers we may see a market segmentation effect.

Past a certain price point, both for real estate and cars, a buyer is paying almost as much for the "feeling"/experience of buying the house/car as they're paying for the actual thing itself. Humans are generally better at conveying these things than machines.

Perhaps, but training AIs relies on the existence of libraries like Tailwind, sites like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, etc. If people stop using all those businesses and services and projects and they eventually disappear, we're stuck relying on asking LLMs whose knowledge is based on a dated snapshot of an internet that no longer exists.

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