kweingar

The aggregate demands of the administration are confusing and contradictory. They seem to be simultaneously asking for:

- an end to diversity initiatives

- a new diversity initiative for diverse points of view

- a new policy of not admitting international students with certain points of view

- ending speech-control policies

- auditing the speech of certain departments and programs

- ending discipline of students who violate policies related to inclusion

- disciplining particular students who violated policies related to inclusion

That would make sense if OAI were the leader.

Let me know how many people contact you and give you their information because you wrote this.

> Combined with the prestige of Google on his resume he'll land back on his feet in no time.

I wouldn't count on that. The job market is really bad.

BYD cars are much more affordable than Teslas. It's not all about politics.

If you read the complaint, the allegation is that controlling for performance evaluations, members of certain groups were preferred over others for promotion.

If you read the title of this submission, this was not about getting a job at Google but rather treatment of Google employees.

If you want private sector work ethic, you gotta pay private sector salaries.

(Many federal employees have a better work ethic than the average private sector worker. But you can't make that an expectation if you're paying less than they could make elsewhere.)

The CLA just gives Google a license to use the code your contribute (and a license to any associated patents). You still own the copyright, and Google cannot sell the rights to your code.

https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual

I've brought this up before, but I never got a response and I'm really interested what people think the business case is here. I keep wondering what a buyer would actually value beyond Chrome's userbase. Chrome is just Chromium with Google integrations, similar to how Edge is Chromium with Microsoft integrations.

If a company acquires Chrome, they don't have many choices: re-establish Google integration deals (so the divestiture would be pointless), replace Google integrations with their own (becoming just another Chromium distro in a sea of Chromium distros), or just monetize the existing userbase.

A Chrome acquisition doesn't include unlimited control over Chromium. Chromium is open source, with contributions from many organizations (who retain the copyright to their contributed code). Google can only sell what it exclusively owns: the brand, infrastructure, signing keys, etc. The real force behind Chromium is having a critical mass of engineers all pushing in generally the same direction. You can't necessarily just buy that, especially when you wouldn't own exclusive rights. Any other company is free to poach engineers and fork the project.

Edited to add: if Microsoft sold VS Code to, say, Oracle... don't you think that another company would leap at the opportunity to fork the project? Would the userbase and the thin layer of closed-source Microsoft customizations really be worth that much?

If the government was a dynamic work environment, it would burn just as much money. But instead of saying "the project went over budget", they'd say "we executed a strategic pivot."

Instead of employees "stagnating", employees would launch all sorts of initiatives and then abandon them after getting promoted.

Instead of maintaining legacy systems for decades, teams would turn down systems so that employees can work on shinier greenfield projects, leaving users in the lurch.

I do not oppose government efficiency. I support reforms to identify and eliminate waste in government. Unfortunately that's not what DOGE is doing.

> The most creative part of internet ignores copyright royalties. From open source, to wikipedia, open scientific publication and even social networks, if everyone demanded royalties none of them would be possible.

Notably, in all of these cases the people involved consent to participating.

~98% of people employed by the federal government work in the executive branch (if we count military, postal service, etc.)

Coalition building is not a problem, but it is still very difficult to govern in the US. In order to enact meaningful legislation aside from a budget, you need a majority of the House of Representatives, 60 Senators (in practice, because of the filibuster), the President, and the Supreme Court to all align.

How should free webmail work?

I wonder who would buy "Chromium with a Google skin." You'd get a massive user base, but what would you do with the product? The only thing that distinguishes it from other Chromium-based browsers is integration with Google account features, which doesn't seem useful for a non-Google company.

Buying Chromium is a more interesting proposition, but you can't really "buy" it (aside from the trademark, infrastructure, domains) because the codebase isn't Google's to sell. Would the web coalesce around the new owners just because they inherit the CI and the repo?

Yeah, Chrome is "Google-flavored Chromium", just as Edge is "Microsoft-flavored Chromium."

If (say) Meta bought Edge, then they'd get the userbase and the trademark, but the product seems pointless. Why would Meta want a browser whose killer features are integrations with Bing and Office 365? If Meta wanted a browser, they'd make a "Meta-flavored Chromium."

What does it mean to sell Chromium? Chromium code is Copyright The Chromium Authors. It contains a substantial amount of code not written by Google, which isn't Google's to sell.

I suppose Google could sell the rights to their parts of the codebase, possibly the rights to future Googler contributions, admin rights to the repo, domains, trademarks, CI, hardware labs, and maybe some other things I'm forgetting... but in terms of the tech being developed and shipped, there isn't really anything substantive to sell.

That's a very good point. Mobile OS vendors should allow for user-defined search engines the way that desktop browsers do.

Here's something I don't understand.

If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage.

If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer, run the installer, open Chrome, and set it as the default browser. So many users do this that people conclude Chrome has an unfair advantage.

It is frustrating that the conversation around DOGE becomes "well we can all at least agree that efficiency is needed, right?"

The government is openly lying about nearly every aspect of its efficiency efforts, and this is not debatable. The only debate is whether they are lying to the courts or to the American public.

They tell the public that Elon Musk, the leader of DOGE, is conducting mass firings, canceling contracts and programs, canceling building leases, etc. Then they go to court and say that Elon Musk is not in charge of DOGE (and not even a part of DOGE at all), that DOGE and OPM do not make any directives about firings in other agencies, that federal agencies are independently determining which contracts to cancel, etc.

Republican Senators have been talking about needing better communication with Musk as he cuts programs, but the government tells federal judges that it's outrageous to suggest that Musk is cutting programs.

Anyone is free to believe that this is good or acceptable, but then they should say that. Say that reducing the deficit is a valid rationale for lying to the courts, lying to the public, obscuring the chain of command, violating duly enacted laws, and violating lawful court orders. It's dishonest to look at criticism and say "what, do people have a problem with efficiency?"

For some of the cuts there could be a profit angle. You can fire government employees and replace their functions with favored contractors.

On one hand, you have a a group that is working very quickly to make irreversible changes (likely in violation of many laws) before the judiciary catches up and enjoins them.

On the other hand you have an internet user calling them a bozo.

De-escalating the conflict and lowering the temperature of discourse, as you suggest, massively favors the group trying to ram through these changes. If we take a deep breath and calmly work it out, it will already be over and nothing can be done.

Elected officials take notice of these urgent issues when there is significant public outcry. Now I'm not saying that one person calling them bozos meaningfully moves the needle, but as a principle if a regular person wants to do their best to stop what is happening, they must use strong language.

If you're a maintainer and reciprocity is an important value to you, and you think that people who don't give back are freeloading, then why did you specifically choose not to use a GPL license for your project?

Your point about the gap between the words of a license and an ethical expectation is well taken. But why put that gap there at all? It's going out of your way to make sure that people have the choice to screw you.

The thing about the tragedy of the commons is that you are actively hurting everyone else by depleting a non-rivalrous good.

When I accept a friend's hospitality and don't reciprocate, I am taking their time and resources. When I take five free samples at the store, I ruin it for others who come later.

When I download an open source GitHub repo, I am burning 1¢ of Microsoft's money.

I see this mindset more and more, and to me it seems against the ethos of open-source software. There's something philosophically odd about saying "you are free to use, change, redistribute, or sell this with basically no restrictions" while simultaneously maintaining that users incur unstated ethical debts by accepting. It could even be seen as a kind of bait-and-switch.

Contributions and reciprocity are praiseworthy of course, and we should all aspire to this. But that doesn't mean someone is ethically wrong for choosing to accept a gift freely given without giving one in return.

I'm not sure what this has to do with Elon breaking most of his promises and being constantly wrong about the government he claims to be fixing

I'm confused, I thought we were talking about laying off federal employees. Now we're talking about contracts?

Elon breaks almost every promise he makes and has constantly been proven wrong on the claims he's made in the past month. It astounds me that someone not connected to him would trust him at all

Without the backing of government, the only way unions would be effective is through violence or destruction of property.

I don't think enough business people understand that having a well-defined legal framework for labor disputes is beneficial for their own safety and security, unless their expectation is that government ought to intervene on behalf of business but never on behalf of labor.