3 ms·
Open source tends to work great for re-implementing technology that is already understood. It tends not to work for exploratory research, since that requires ri
by nwah1 8y ago
Open source tends to work great for re-implementing technology that is already understood. It tends not to work for exploratory research, since that requires risk and ingenuity, not a designed-by-committee approach.
R&D of this sort is funded best with a strong profit motive, unless the government is willing to shell out for it.
- metildaa 8y agoI'd disagree, for R&D of novel technology there is a lot to be said for casual contributions. If ML was open source, the state of the industry would almost assuredly be better than the current state of things.
- Lorkki 8y agoI'm not sure how that follows. Most big open-source projects are in practice owned and controlled by a single company/entity, and the processes don't differ much from what you'd see in-house. What you're describing sounds more like how standardisation bodies work than the realities of functioning software projects.
- nwah1 8y agoI guess the corporation, in this case, is acting as a benefactor just as the government would be in other cases. In order to work on pie in the sky ideas, you need to hire brilliant people for long periods of time, with low certainty of success. And this is expensive, and corporations will not generally do this out of the kindness of their hearts... the stars align sometimes where the private incentives and public interests are the same. Xerox PARC, Google X, Bell Labs, and so forth meet this description just as much as DARPA. But the traditional direct profit motive is an important piece of the engine of progress, and relying only on this other incentive structure would cause stagnation.
- ddoolin 8y agoI'm not disagreeing with you at all really (not sure I agree completely, either), which is why I see the need to approach cases like this (self-driving software sharing, not the specific theft of IP case at hand) a bit more specially. I don't have the solution, I just know that lives could potentially be at risk and if the only reason is profit motive, it kinda sucks. I know this happens in other places, too, but it's my opinion that the best safety should be the standard, not a premium. EDIT: Lorkki's comment explains part of my thoughts on it well. Other companies subsidize open source project that exist at the core of their business. Is there a difference here other than scale? If so, what, and how would it change the situation?
- cortesoft 8y ago> since that requires risk and ingenuity That is great for many things, but for something like self-driving tech, it is already being used in cars on the road. This is not just experimental, it already has people's lives on the line. That is a lot of trust in something that is not available to be audited.
- jeltz 8y agoI would not describe many open source projects as designed-by-committee, and while open source might be less suited for exploratory research there have been quite many novel things first implemented in open source projects. Look at the various video codecs or the innovations in compiler technology gcc has contributed to, or the plenty of innovations made in various open source databases.
- Xorlev 8y agoMuch of the Apache foundation projects come to mind when thinking about the GP's assertion, though certainly it doesn't hold for all projects: many are fairly novel and exploratory.
- nwah1 8y agoThere are a number of them like git and bitcoin which start out with one guy building a novel algorithm and then releasing the source to the world afterwards. The definition of open source might include such a thing, but a project that originates from a lone genius rather than a community is not what is usually meant when people speak of open source.