262 karma · joined November 11, 2017
As with any organisation where the CTO is not technical, there will be someone who the 'CTO' has to ask to understand technical situations. In my opinion, that person being asked is the real CTO, for any given situation.
For example, I might want to host my code privately on GitHub and not have Microsoft use it to train their LLMs. That doesn't seem to be possible:
I'd like to see some recognition from this crowd of the "free-ride competition" problem as this author puts it. What Herman is doing is a service to us all, and we should find a term (better than 'source-available', which is cold and doesn't capture community projects accurately) that people can promote themselves under without much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
EDIT from a comment in a thread way down, that summarises my point:
I argue that the natural winner-take-all dynamics of the marketplace are not beneficial to the the mission of free and open source software. In fact, having no safeguard against large organisations making money this way is actually hugely detrimental to the mission by enabling these companies to ensnare unsuspecting users in a web of both their own proprietary software as well as all that free and open source software has to offer.
I think the difference is urgency. They probably do know that the golden eggs will stop coming at some point, but they don't believe it'll happen for a long while. Perhaps as a consequence of this, they very rarely commit to projects in a life-or-death way. At this point it's a HN trope to state this, but I do believe the reputational damage done by this lack of commitment to any of its fledgling projects is doing massive harm to Google's ability to find new revenue streams.
>PS3
performed extremely well, beating Xbox 360 by a fairly thin margin.
>Gaikai
sold for $380M USD to Sony (most people consider this a success, even if you think it should have been more.)
>Xbox One
lost to the PS4 by a factor of two but was still successful (50 million est. lifetime sales)
Even if every single thing he was in charge of failed catastrophically, anyone who isn't looking closely is going to see someone with a huge amount of industry expertise working on some of the largest and most successful products to ever exist full stop (not just in gaming.)
In an ideal world we would all have the mental fortitude to dismiss such things but who hasn't had a moment where they felt inferior to others, especially at a young age?
Without a commitment to screening advertisements and paid partnerships (which are arguably more damaging) for selling ridiculous psuedo-science like 'detox tea' to young women and girls this rings empty. While social media companies remain in the business of selling advertisement space, they can't be trusted to not tell anyone of any age that they aren't good enough in some way; there's simply too much money in it.
Additionally, journalists are just journalists. Sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly, the things they publish work in favour of fascists and fascism.