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> " popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technol

• elliotec 11y ago
  Seriously. Sam Altman has an interesting view of the world, which goes exactly as far as the boundaries of the SV bubble (bubble as in insularity as well as market inflation). He seems to be increasingly against anyone not exactly like him.
• throw129381 11y ago
  Yeah, I've contributed a lot to OSS (has Sam Altman done so?), and he comes across as a taker. IMO OSS licences should exclude Silicon Valley parasites until they show a modicum of gratitude.
  • bobby_9x 11y ago
    Gratitude? OSS is supposed to be about donating your time, without asking for anything in return. Othetwise, you are just as bad as your perception of silicon valley.
  • crpatino 11y ago
    Let me take the opportunity to repeat myself. We need a "professional-courtesy" license. Something like a GPL on steroids that can only ever be distributed as tarballs. The minute to pass a binary around, the minute you try to deploy with any sort of devops, etc, you have just opted-in for a commercial license, which requires a (modest) yearly fee. This way, your generosity will gain jobs for a fellow hackers somewhere. Takers still can pay for the benefit of convenience, though.
    • kordless 11y ago
      I've never heard you say it, but I have a model that will do what you are describing here.
• argonaut 11y ago
  Not really. Read the other top comments on this thread. Quite a few of them are basically along the lines of "Sam, don't kid yourself, Silicon Valley mostly works on trivial apps."
  • p4wnc6 11y ago
    Those comments have merit. Brushing comments off because you look down your nose at the choices or priorities of others ought to be called out. Besides, the bit about "people not building anything at all themselves" is at best a non sequitur distraction that lowers the writing quality of the post. There's no defending it.
    • Trundle 11y ago
      I don't think it's fair to say he's looking down his nose at people that don't build anything if he's responding to those people saying him and his friends aren't building things that are hard enough. It's simply using the targets own values to point out their hypocrisy. You don't insult based on the things you would personally would be offended by.
      • p4wnc6 11y ago
        > to point out their hypocrisy. What hypocrisy? Since when does someone have to build a start-up top be entitled to opinions about what important start-up priorities ought to be, or what the social impact of current start-ups is, or whether current start-ups actually pursue the creation of value for society or not? I don't see any other way of interpreting a comment like "usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves" -- something completely non-sequitur to the question of whether or not their criticism has merit -- aside from haughty superiority complex that working near the bleeding edge of what start-ups do somehow entitles you to a more valid opinion about whether or not start-ups create actual value or pursue fundamentally important work. There is no hypocrisy in an OSS developer who has no interest in start-ups pointing out how questionable it is that start-ups actually add value or pursue fundamentally important work. Similarly, there's no hypocrisy in a regular employee of a tech firm pointing that out. Or a single mother who works two retail jobs and couldn't possibly be expected to "build something". Their opinions about the social value of start-ups still matters absolutely every bit as much as Sam Altman's opinion of the social value of start-ups. Positioning one's self near the bleeding edge of start-ups might entitle you to have a more legitimate opinion about business matters, funding matters, certain technology matters ... but it absolutely does not entitle you to consider your opinions about social value to be more legitimate than someone else's just because they "don't build anything." It reminds me of John Terry's ridiculous comments earlier in the British soccer season, saying that soccer pundit Robbie Savage is not entitled to make analytical criticism of soccer performance because he (Savage) didn't play on a team that won at a high level during his playing career [0]. It's a bit of nonsense. And I definitely believe that seeing it seep into this post needlessly is at least suggestive of a passive aggressive feeling against people who, while not themselves caring about personally building a start-up, still do care about the lack of social value present in our current start-up culture. [0] http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/34753162 http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/34753162