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Comment by petterroea | Hacker News Reader

I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different

I'm sure it'll be fine. As long as you have the latest 90-class card you'll probably continue have nearly full functionality from the HF libraries. (Upgrade to enterprise gear for full functionality)

The fit is theoretically good (nvidia is model agnostic) but I can see then pushing the ecosystem increasingly towards cuda and some custom nvidia software packages for inference etc etc

Is huggingface profitable?

I'm not a fan of big-tech acquisition results either, but one benefit can be that a product continues to exist when it would otherwise become insolvent.

Truer words were never spoken. This is painfully true.

Apple buying Workflow (became Shortcuts). Its users have a better, faster tool and got it soon after acquisition. And it has many more users now.

Was Workflow available on every platform running on every hardware provider?

I’m not sure your point, sorry.

That specific example might be relevant to the case "I don't see any acquisition being good for the users", but not for the specific case of the HuggingFace buyout. Workflow was already operating within the bounds of the closed Apple ecosystem. Huggingface is providing models not only for Nvidia chips but for their competitors hardware (Apple Silicon, AMD GPUs, ...).

I think that it was already iOS only, so making it free was just flipping a flag etc. I'm not sure how that helps his point tho.

I was not making a point. I was trying to clarify the example.

But after the answers, I do think his example is poor. Models available at HF have many purposes and will run on many platforms. Commenters here are suggesting this will no longer be the case.

Whereas the example Workflow (iOS only) -> Shortcuts (iOS only), there was no change in that regard.

I see; thanks.

Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.

The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.

I'm not convinced that's the case. GitHub was like that forever, they were well established and the change happened not long after Microsoft bought them. There was no global shift to gitlab instances or Atlassian as far as I am aware.

You can dislike an entity or an action and still acknowledge it also had some positive effects.

Overall GitHub still got significantly worse since the acquisition. Downtime was essentially zero before.

I only ever used GitHub for private (and a few public) repos, so for me personally it got significantly better, being able to have private repos for free.

Pretty bad tradeoff of course, improving the situation for non paying people while making it bad for paying customers.

Usage was 5% of what it is now before.

It was unreliable post acq. and before the slop-tsunami, the latter has just multiplied the underlying issue of their ipv4 only half assed azure migration.

... Which gitlab already had before github. And still does.

Yeah I'm afraid they will only keep cuda support for their software. Good thing it's all Open source

Nokia buying Qt in 2008 brought an LGPL option.

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