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Comment by kevcampb | Hacker News Reader

Worth reminding everyone of previous discussion when Atlassian opted-in all customers by default for their data to be used for model training.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47833247

This goes live on August 17. If you haven't switched it off your company IP will be used to train their future models.

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So they will harvest trade secrets from 10000s of companies and there have been no panic mass flight about this?

How companies entrust SaaSs with their data is beyond insane to me. Especially since FOSS alternatives are readily available.

Who cares?

The employee, just looking to make rent? The CEO, all in on the dream of the AI powered future? Legal, looking forward to litigation and well-competition retainers? Atlassian itself, when it’s just one of the many companies training models on private intellectual property, and whose T&C clearly state they will be doing so? Competitors, when there will be no reasonable way to prove their code has been generated from yours?

The truth is that one gives a damn about trade secrets being used to train AI models.

The entire copyright system for software is dead and no one really seems to care or even talk about it.

The truth is that most software companies don't have any secrets worth hiding.

The saas industry is all about sales and deals. The market runs on access, not intelligence.

Knowing that our competitor is trying to poach one of our clients away by promising a new feature could be very useful to us. Likewise, knowing that a competitor is at risk of losing a customer because they won't implement a feature that we're willing to implement (or already have) is a qualified sales lead.

All of this would be illegal if discovered in this way, presumably, but it's not entirely accurate to say that information is not power.

I struggle to see the tech/data being used in that way. At a much higher level, the data is more likely anonymized (where possible) and/or not directly exposed to anybody. Think of the initial github copilot that used source code across all of the repos and how it was able to take instructions for what you wanted to build and give you essentially a consensus built piece of code that fit what you asked for, be it by auto-completion, comments, or direct requests.

"I want to build a business that does X using Y. Give me revenue predictions, spend over time, and customer demand predictions." etc

Usually customers are open about this kind of thing though. They play you off your competitors and vice versa.

I don't totally disagree, I just think the real secrets have nothing to do with features or dev. The secret is A is about to go bankrupt or B is facing legal trouble. These kinds of things aren't in JIRA.

IMHO, this is not the point. The core problem is that they're building systems that will remove competition altogether. You may still get your current systems to market ahead of your competition, but future "competitors" will be built off of your data and Atlassian will be one more company in the list of companies profiting from everybody else building systems using their data, probably destined to fail because everybody else can do it just as easily, but the money required to fund Atlassian's systems that built it for them, however large or small, will have already been sent. Those systems that Atlassian will profit from will be built from the data of "customers", who also paid Atlassian will giving up their own data.

With almost zero control over whether or not this happens (politically or individually), the only reasonable action to take is "take advantage while there's an advantage to be had".

every company is removing competition altogether. Some succeed, like Google, but most don't.

Very few companies actually have any “trade secrets”. The success of almost any business is based on marketing and distribution and reputation and partnerships, not on any “secret”.

It's one of the classic mistakes of people who are not entrepreneurs. They try to keep things too secret and they spend a lot of time and effort keeping things secret while real entrepreneurs who have actually made millions on the market know secrecy rarely matters.

In the realm of apps and stuff, it is pretty much just repacking of someone else's idea.

In the world of B2B, there are definitely companies that provide service based on direct personal experience of senior employees. While they may be using the same software available to others, it's the logic to know what to tell that same ol' software what to do that matters. Over my entire career I have dealt with multiple companies that write code but have zero knowledge about the subject matter the code is being written for so that basic mistakes are made resulting in utterly ineffective software.

Companies that have something worth protecting already don't use it and/or pay for the on-prem version.

The rest don't have anything worth stealing anyway.

I've seen their ticketing software, what on earth are they going to do with any trade secrets? There are none in ticketing software or wiki's.

Also the people making decisions on their products (or any "enterprise" SaaS for that matter) aren't the ones stuck using it.

> There are none in ticketing software or wiki's.

But there might be API keys, passwords, unlisted URLs, email addresses, etc.

I guess customer lists might be the most valuable data in most Jira setups. Sales data ...

Our company dumped Atlassian. No-one misses it, it’s universally considered a good decision.

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