throw8932894

I remember Altavista.

Adsense controls like 80% of ad market. Biggest thread to Google are walled gardens like Facebook or Amazon. Search engines like Bing and Duck are not even on their map.

> dominance ... which is based on the quality of the search results

Any source for that? Google search already provides inferior results in many areas, but it is still dominant. Google also pays billions to Apple and Mozilla to be default search engine.

And if threat emerges and gets like 30% of search market share, Google just dials down ads and make their search experience a bit less crappy.

> Their core product got notably worse over time.

> Google’s search results are dominated by ads

Googles core product are ads, not search engine!

I distribute output from code generator. It is fully readable with comments. I also receive some patches on generated code, which I port back to generator.

I agree it does not fit strict definition of OS, but it fits Apache 2 license.

I am not sacrificing much. Project was fully open for a while, bot no coauthor emerged. I only get minor patches. Contributions are happening outside core project, some people build pretty awesome stuff on my library, I also get connectors etc...

I would say this approach fits great for one-men projects.

I run Apache licensed storage library. It is not big, but consulting fees cover my living.

Some time ago I changed development model. Public facing version is still Apache 2 licensed. But now there are no unit tests and no integration tests, those are proprietary now. And I extensively use code generator which is also not public.

It is still possible to fork/modify code. Merging pull request is bit more difficult for me (backport stuff to code generator). But it works great and nobody noticed anything.

Practically any serious use of my library has to go through me now. And I am the hero because my code is virtually without bugs. Magic!!! :)

I become disillusioned long time ago. Also people told me several times unit tests do not matter... but in reality they are most valuable part of know how.