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What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not

What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's really a tragedy of the commons. Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money. People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly.

fossuser 8y ago
I wish they offered that option. I'd sign up for ad free FB for $2-$3 a month if it made it easy to set retention periods on my data and opt out of the collection.
- askafriend 8y ago
  Facebook made $118 per user in North America in 2018. So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now.
  - onion2k 8y ago
    That's the average. They definitely didn't make that much from my account that I log in to 5 or 6 times a year.
    - askafriend 8y ago
      You don't have to log in to the blue Facebook app for them to make money. https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/ https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/
  - munk-a 8y ago
    That sounds fine by me - in compensation for the lost revenue they would gain a bunch of public good will and lose some risk for a repeat of cambridge analytica. Also that seems way way up since in 2017 they made only 6.18$ in Q4[1]... so who's suddenly paying so much money for our user data? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
    - jay_kyburz 8y ago
      That is for a quarter, so $2 a month or $24 on the annual plan. One day I'm going to build this premium Facebook clone that respects user privacy! Come on Hacker News, make it so I don't have to!
      - GoblinSlayer 8y ago
        dreamwidth.org
    - askafriend 8y ago
      The number you're referencing is for 1 quarter and is looking at a blended global average which is brought down by extremely long term investments in places like Africa. I cited a number that is annual and is looking at North American revenue which is an indicator of mature market potential.
  - matthewmacleod 8y ago
    So I assume that's across all properties. Would I pay $10/month for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram? Probably.
  - mjevans 8y ago
    Also, the users that COULD pay (any price) are likely the PRECISE ones that are most lucrative to target.
  - Marsymars 8y ago
    "So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now." I block ads on Facebook web and don't have any of their mobile apps installed, so I can't imagine they're making more money from me than if I paid them to not have any ads.
    - dspillett 8y ago
      They don't just make money from you by directly showing your ads, so don't make zero $ if you as an individual manage to block all their ads. They make money by being able to target ads, not just from simply showing them, so all the data they have about you, and your links to other people, and correlations that can be derived from all that, and so forth, all feed in to that earning potential. You might not be seeing the resulting adverts, but can you say that about all your direct contacts, and all the people in groups you are linked to, and all the other people who interact with posts & events you comment on or otherwise interact with, and all the people that...? You are still very much part of their income model by being part of the data graph - you are not breaking the system remotely as much as you think by arranging not to see adverts. Letting people pay to not see ads would require both initial and on-going development & testing effort so you have to include that in any cost/benefit analysis of the situation too. And that design & development could be pretty complex: by making a legitimate ad skipping option available they risk creating a hacking opportunity that makes it easier for people to skip them without paying. It might also send a bad signal to the advertisers: people with more disposable income are more likely to pay to skip the adverts, because the cost will feel less to them, and people with more disposable income are usually those that the advertisers usually most want to reach.
      - Marsymars 8y ago
        I expect any model where fb allowed payment for an ad-free experience would still involve them doing all that targeting for others with my data anyway. That advertisers might want to reach me isn't especially relevant, because there's no situation under which that is a possible outcome for fb.
        8y ago
  - GoblinSlayer 8y ago
    They will still monetize network effect and monopoly status, which paying users will still contribute to.
- return1 8y ago
  would most of your family & friends also do that? Because it doesnt matter if you opt out from targeting , if they can infer everything about you from your friends.
- musicale 8y ago
  It's amazing that it has come to this, but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking. Even if it just applied to the worst offenders (Facebook, Google, Amazon...) it might be worth it. Such a system could be easily abused, however, without some kind of bulletproof third-party auditing in place. If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services (maps, gmail, search, docs, youtube, etc.) I might even consider using it.
  - fooker 8y ago
    >If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services Gsuite?
  - dontblink 8y ago
    Spoiler alert: they do for many of their services. GSuite, YouTube premium, etc
  - rchaud 8y ago
    > but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking. It's too late for that, I'm afraid. Google and the others have invested billions in their ad products and made back many more billions. It wouldn't make any sense for them to offer any kind of paid opt-out. And even if you didn't use any Google services, they already have reams of data on you based on your correspondence with anyone with a Gmail account, plus whatever data they can buy off your carrier network and your credit card provider.
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      Why not? Their per-human revenue is in the single-digit dollars. If I pay $10, they're ahead of the game. Netflix etc do it with premium services etc
ravenstine 8y ago
> people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. I always kept quiet about this, but I've felt that way for a long time about anything that comes from Google and especially Facebook. Should I not feel a little icky about using React.js?
- james-anthony 8y ago
  You shouldn't, because there is nothing wrong with React, or the premise behind the team doing it. People are imperfect, and organizations made of people are inherently imperfect. If you didn't allow yourself to use anything made by anyone who acted immorally, you wouldn't be allowed to use anything. Should I not use Comcast for my internet if it's the only provider in my area? At a certain point the 'karma' associated with taking a hard-line on a company's ethics is no longer worth the inconvenience.
  - ravenstine 8y ago
    You might be right about that if Facebook wasn't an exceptionally terrible company with rotten leaders. I don't think there's anything wrong with the team behind it. The reason I might choose not to use a technology owned by Facebook is that my use would be promoting it; the more popular React becomes, the more encouraged people are to contribute code to it, which helps Facebook in a minuscule way. Nonetheless, the popularity of React does contribute to Facebook's success in some way. Comcast is a different story, as I'm not aware of people helping them for free by using and developing their own tools. I get what you are saying by generally objecting to Comcast and facing the dilemma of paying them when you have no other options. I guess it depends on how much you dislike Comcast and if you are willing to replace them with free public WiFi and Netflix. At least with Facebook, there are plenty of alternatives(as well as ripoffs of React).
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      > which helps Facebook in a minuscule way. Contributing to firefox, openssh, wikipedia and the linux kernel also helps Facebook in various ways. Should we stop doing that? React is an open source project. Facebook did right by it (unlike other open source projects coming out of FB such as Flow). I find this hardline stance kinda ridiculous when it's one of the rare good things to come out of Facebook. It should be encouraged if anything. But even if not, it is a standalone project and a very good model example of how companies should release stuff as open source, so not contributing to it "because it helps Facebook" is completely missing the point of what open source is.
webmobdev 8y ago
> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them! The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company. The fact that a public for-profit corporate made a product open source doesn't mean that they have suddenly become altruistic - it just means that it made business sense for them to make it so. The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.
- tracer4201 8y ago
  >It's a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them! I don't think that's what op wrote. It doesn't make sense that folks use open source code from these companies but then there's shock and outrage that these companies are also using open source code written by others. >because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product It's hard to take you seriously when you blanketly dismiss companies as being "evil" (whatever that means). By what metric are these companies "evil"? Wow.
  - chc 8y ago
    The "evil" characterization is from the comment you're defending. The comment you're replying to just appears to be using the same terminology to discuss the same concept.
  - webmobdev 8y ago
    I addressed that: The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ... The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.
webmobdev 8y ago
> Users on average refuse to pay for software / web apps Yes. And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. This "free to use for your personal data" model ensures that any potential competitor has a very high bar to entry, and it ensures that their product will always be inferior because of the lack of data that can make it better.
- umvi 8y ago
  > And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. You sure it's not the same cheap consumers that cause race-to-the-bottom business models in a lot of other industries too (airlines)?
  - 4ntonius8lock 8y ago
    You are right. Consumers bear some of the blame. At the same time, many options are outright unattainable due to legislative capture in the financial industry. Right now the only way to charge the average consumer is through their debit or credit card. This makes micro transactions through the web infeasible. Imagine a world where there weren't such massive legislative moats and selective enforcement in favor of big financial players and against the small. Personally I believe if setting up the competetion to MasterCard/Visa weren't made virtually impossible via legislation, we'd see many card with transactions fees of $0.000X instead of $0.xx/transaction + Y%/transaction + minimums. I think consumers would be much more ok with paying for reading a news article at $0.01/read. But alas, such options aren't on the table. I do concede it's hard to prove the reason for current transaction fees is what I attributed in my post, but there is evidence for it. I also think that the way money is created an placed into the system could be done in a way that created more smaller competitors instead of such large pools of capital, which can more easily try and engage in anti competitive behavior.
    - ibeckermayer 8y ago
      Great point re: the oftentimes unseen injustice of financial tyranny. Have you heard of Stellar (https://www.stellar.org https://www.stellar.org)? I don't have any experience actually using them and not sure if the blockchain is the correct way to go, but in principle their idea of a federated network for exchanging any unit the parties agree upon is a good one.
potta_coffee 8y ago
I wouldn't pay for Facebook and I don't use their free product either. I've used the React library so I suppose I'm benefiting from Facebook. If React weren't available, I'd use Vue.
sbov 8y ago
Google also contributes to Linux. Am I allowed to criticize Google if I use Linux? At what point am I not allowed to criticize a company based upon their contributions to open source projects I make use of?
musicale 8y ago
> People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly. Facebook tracks you regardless of whether you have a Facebook account.
return1 8y ago
that is not a tragedy of the commons
door5 8y ago
> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. Developers made these products. I'm sure they would be just as happy getting paid the same wage and making awesome products without working for a morally bankrupt company, but those opportunities don't exist. FAANG are the only institutions on the planet that have the resources to fund large-scale open source projects.
bartimus 8y ago
> yet happily use their Open Source code It's not their code. Linux didn't come from a company for example. The list goes on. The amount of code they give back is peanuts compared to the amount of code they benefitted from to build their businesses. No need to feel guilty whatsoever to use it. Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.
- hnmullany 8y ago
  If memory serves, IBM had a lot of good engineers on Linux back in the day & I think they were responsible for doing a lot of the hard perf. work on multi-CPU scheduling.
  - fooker 8y ago
    Also Oracle, iirc Linux was a toy os before IBM and Oracle funded posix compatibility.
- tracer4201 8y ago
  Many of the folks who wrote the systems or languages you use every day work at these big companies. Didn't James Gosling work for Amazon at some point? >Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players. Who are the parasites? These bad-faith posts that are really just unconstructive rants are turning this site into Reddit.
  - _msw_ 8y ago
    > Didn't James Gosling work for Amazon at some point? He currently does.
  - bartimus 8y ago
    > Who are the parasites? There can exist a mutual beneficial symbiosis between companies and the open source community. But at some point the symbiotic behavior can become parasitic, causing harm. I think it's super important when such behaviors get pointed out (here at HN).
balls187 8y ago
I think you're conflating two different things. The people at Google who contribute too, and champion open source are probably not the ones who are making the decisions that we see as "evil." Google is competing for top talent engineering, and Googles commitment to open source boils down to a company perk meant to attract and retain top engineers. Google is a advertising company. Everything else they do is in service of that.
- eitally 8y ago
  your first two sentences are spot-on. The third was really iffy (and not true). The last line is completely false.
  - disgruntledphd2 8y ago
    From a business-model perspective, Google are definitely an advertising company, and so are Facebook. From a consumer perspective, this is not particularly true, but it's definitely a factor in their behaviour. For instance, if Google made all its money by indexing data for big companies and selling the index, do you think they would own YouTube or have created Gmail?
    - eitally 8y ago
      Google is a large and complex company with many competing interests internally. Yes, I absolutely believe they would have created Gmail absent any advertising incentive. You have to remember how many seemingly random consumer services were created during the first decade of Google (say, 2000-2010), most of which were engineering experiments and had nothing to do with advertising. The Ads org within Google is large but fairly compartmentalized and runs like an absolute machine -- there is no questioning that. What most outsiders don't see, though, is how much independence all the other orgs have. For example, the fastest growing collection of stuff are the Hardware & Cloud areas, which account for probably 35000-40000 employees and are almost completely autonomous. If Ads show up on Google hardware products (let's use Google Home as an example), that's because the Home team exposed a service that allowed the Ads team to do it, not because the Home team was necessarily thinking about display/search ads during product design. In fact, there are many services Google provides where it's well understood that users will not tolerate ads at all (like Google Assistant surfaces). The reason I responded to the parent was because they made a blanket statement, which, while true if you only look at the fiscal reports, is untrue in practice. One could certainly argue strongly that Google's inability to strike it rich with anything besides Ads is 1) the reason the stock has been in the [relative] doldrums for the past year+, and 2) why Google continues to invest in all sorts of things (like Wing, or Chronicle, or Stadia, or ...) that are pretty far afield, not to mention the pure & applied research happening inside the RMI/Brain org that's often much more academic than practical. Besides search & mobile (admob) advertising, the only two major product areas inside Google that take a strong stance supporting the advertising mission are Youtube & Maps, but even then Maps tries to ensure it's surfacing useful, actionable, timely, and local information, which generally place it in a different category. Maps also have strong potential via partnerships for things like ride services, appointment bookings, travel, food delivery, and the like... some of which might technically be considered advertising but which manifests more like functional partnerships.
scarejunba 8y ago
It's a view of the world that's different from yours. Loads of people would and do use Topographische Anatomie des Menschen (Pernkopf's Anatomy) despite it being drawn and edited by actual true believer Nazis who used concentration camp inmates as the input.
throwaway66666 8y ago
> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. "We had horrible gravel roads and the dictator came and built good roads we use even today". Is my late-grandparents argument as to why dictatorship is by far the best way to rule a country. And I 'd happily drive on those roads to tell them they are dead wrong.
- vood 8y ago
  Can you elaborate? I'm being from a socialist country would love to deliver the same message to my parents
  - CloudNetworking 8y ago
    If you can't identify bad things your "socialist" regime has done / is doing then I would start by trying to list those.
pathseeker 8y ago
> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. Pablo Escobar donated tons of money to the Medellín community. Doesn't make any criticisms against him hold less water.
TheTruth1234 8y ago
Keep kissing corporate @rse. Some people don't use FB. Some people would say FU to the thought of paying $2-3 to FB for anything.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mammalutte 8y ago
If users aren't willing to pay $2-3 per month it simply means that they don't value it that much. They can sell ad space, that's fine, but this does not justify all the data abuse simply because they need to turn a profit. Facebook can close doors right now for what I care; other services such as search engines I would pay a monthly fee if I were sure they didn't try to track me to death.
- z3t4 8y ago
  The market decide the prices. The value of something has very little to do with the price. You can not charge for something if a free alternative exist. The crux is that Google and Facebook are still profitable, even if it's free, so if they used their huge market share in an attempt to increase the price, competitors would pop up and bring the price down. Something being free also lowers the friction to use. A paywall is a barrier to entry.
GoblinSlayer 8y ago
>you must shut up because it's a monopoly okay.jpg
mlindner 8y ago
> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. There's no logical contradiction in attacking a company for doing bad things with the open source software they wrote and instead praise company who use that software for good. Software is not good or evil, it's how the company/people that use it that determines good vs evil.

fossuser 8y ago

I wish they offered that option. I'd sign up for ad free FB for $2-$3 a month if it made it easy to set retention periods on my data and opt out of the collection.

askafriend 8y ago
Facebook made $118 per user in North America in 2018. So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now.
- onion2k 8y ago
  That's the average. They definitely didn't make that much from my account that I log in to 5 or 6 times a year.
  - askafriend 8y ago
    You don't have to log in to the blue Facebook app for them to make money. https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/ https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/
- munk-a 8y ago
  That sounds fine by me - in compensation for the lost revenue they would gain a bunch of public good will and lose some risk for a repeat of cambridge analytica. Also that seems way way up since in 2017 they made only 6.18$ in Q4[1]... so who's suddenly paying so much money for our user data? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
  - jay_kyburz 8y ago
    That is for a quarter, so $2 a month or $24 on the annual plan. One day I'm going to build this premium Facebook clone that respects user privacy! Come on Hacker News, make it so I don't have to!
    - GoblinSlayer 8y ago
      dreamwidth.org
  - askafriend 8y ago
    The number you're referencing is for 1 quarter and is looking at a blended global average which is brought down by extremely long term investments in places like Africa. I cited a number that is annual and is looking at North American revenue which is an indicator of mature market potential.
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  So I assume that's across all properties. Would I pay $10/month for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram? Probably.
- mjevans 8y ago
  Also, the users that COULD pay (any price) are likely the PRECISE ones that are most lucrative to target.
- Marsymars 8y ago
  "So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now." I block ads on Facebook web and don't have any of their mobile apps installed, so I can't imagine they're making more money from me than if I paid them to not have any ads.
  - dspillett 8y ago
    They don't just make money from you by directly showing your ads, so don't make zero $ if you as an individual manage to block all their ads. They make money by being able to target ads, not just from simply showing them, so all the data they have about you, and your links to other people, and correlations that can be derived from all that, and so forth, all feed in to that earning potential. You might not be seeing the resulting adverts, but can you say that about all your direct contacts, and all the people in groups you are linked to, and all the other people who interact with posts & events you comment on or otherwise interact with, and all the people that...? You are still very much part of their income model by being part of the data graph - you are not breaking the system remotely as much as you think by arranging not to see adverts. Letting people pay to not see ads would require both initial and on-going development & testing effort so you have to include that in any cost/benefit analysis of the situation too. And that design & development could be pretty complex: by making a legitimate ad skipping option available they risk creating a hacking opportunity that makes it easier for people to skip them without paying. It might also send a bad signal to the advertisers: people with more disposable income are more likely to pay to skip the adverts, because the cost will feel less to them, and people with more disposable income are usually those that the advertisers usually most want to reach.
    - Marsymars 8y ago
      I expect any model where fb allowed payment for an ad-free experience would still involve them doing all that targeting for others with my data anyway. That advertisers might want to reach me isn't especially relevant, because there's no situation under which that is a possible outcome for fb.
      - 8y ago
- GoblinSlayer 8y ago
  They will still monetize network effect and monopoly status, which paying users will still contribute to.
return1 8y ago
would most of your family & friends also do that? Because it doesnt matter if you opt out from targeting , if they can infer everything about you from your friends.
musicale 8y ago
It's amazing that it has come to this, but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking. Even if it just applied to the worst offenders (Facebook, Google, Amazon...) it might be worth it. Such a system could be easily abused, however, without some kind of bulletproof third-party auditing in place. If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services (maps, gmail, search, docs, youtube, etc.) I might even consider using it.
- fooker 8y ago
  >If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services Gsuite?
- dontblink 8y ago
  Spoiler alert: they do for many of their services. GSuite, YouTube premium, etc
- rchaud 8y ago
  > but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking. It's too late for that, I'm afraid. Google and the others have invested billions in their ad products and made back many more billions. It wouldn't make any sense for them to offer any kind of paid opt-out. And even if you didn't use any Google services, they already have reams of data on you based on your correspondence with anyone with a Gmail account, plus whatever data they can buy off your carrier network and your credit card provider.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Why not? Their per-human revenue is in the single-digit dollars. If I pay $10, they're ahead of the game. Netflix etc do it with premium services etc

ravenstine 8y ago

> people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. I always kept quiet about this, but I've felt that way for a long time about anything that comes from Google and especially Facebook. Should I not feel a little icky about using React.js?

james-anthony 8y ago
You shouldn't, because there is nothing wrong with React, or the premise behind the team doing it. People are imperfect, and organizations made of people are inherently imperfect. If you didn't allow yourself to use anything made by anyone who acted immorally, you wouldn't be allowed to use anything. Should I not use Comcast for my internet if it's the only provider in my area? At a certain point the 'karma' associated with taking a hard-line on a company's ethics is no longer worth the inconvenience.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  You might be right about that if Facebook wasn't an exceptionally terrible company with rotten leaders. I don't think there's anything wrong with the team behind it. The reason I might choose not to use a technology owned by Facebook is that my use would be promoting it; the more popular React becomes, the more encouraged people are to contribute code to it, which helps Facebook in a minuscule way. Nonetheless, the popularity of React does contribute to Facebook's success in some way. Comcast is a different story, as I'm not aware of people helping them for free by using and developing their own tools. I get what you are saying by generally objecting to Comcast and facing the dilemma of paying them when you have no other options. I guess it depends on how much you dislike Comcast and if you are willing to replace them with free public WiFi and Netflix. At least with Facebook, there are plenty of alternatives(as well as ripoffs of React).
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    > which helps Facebook in a minuscule way. Contributing to firefox, openssh, wikipedia and the linux kernel also helps Facebook in various ways. Should we stop doing that? React is an open source project. Facebook did right by it (unlike other open source projects coming out of FB such as Flow). I find this hardline stance kinda ridiculous when it's one of the rare good things to come out of Facebook. It should be encouraged if anything. But even if not, it is a standalone project and a very good model example of how companies should release stuff as open source, so not contributing to it "because it helps Facebook" is completely missing the point of what open source is.

webmobdev 8y ago

> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. It's a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them! The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company. The fact that a public for-profit corporate made a product open source doesn't mean that they have suddenly become altruistic - it just means that it made business sense for them to make it so. The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.

tracer4201 8y ago
>It's a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them! I don't think that's what op wrote. It doesn't make sense that folks use open source code from these companies but then there's shock and outrage that these companies are also using open source code written by others. >because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product It's hard to take you seriously when you blanketly dismiss companies as being "evil" (whatever that means). By what metric are these companies "evil"? Wow.
- chc 8y ago
  The "evil" characterization is from the comment you're defending. The comment you're replying to just appears to be using the same terminology to discuss the same concept.
- webmobdev 8y ago
  I addressed that: The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ... The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.

webmobdev 8y ago

> Users on average refuse to pay for software / web apps Yes. And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. This "free to use for your personal data" model ensures that any potential competitor has a very high bar to entry, and it ensures that their product will always be inferior because of the lack of data that can make it better.

umvi 8y ago
> And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. You sure it's not the same cheap consumers that cause race-to-the-bottom business models in a lot of other industries too (airlines)?
- 4ntonius8lock 8y ago
  You are right. Consumers bear some of the blame. At the same time, many options are outright unattainable due to legislative capture in the financial industry. Right now the only way to charge the average consumer is through their debit or credit card. This makes micro transactions through the web infeasible. Imagine a world where there weren't such massive legislative moats and selective enforcement in favor of big financial players and against the small. Personally I believe if setting up the competetion to MasterCard/Visa weren't made virtually impossible via legislation, we'd see many card with transactions fees of $0.000X instead of $0.xx/transaction + Y%/transaction + minimums. I think consumers would be much more ok with paying for reading a news article at $0.01/read. But alas, such options aren't on the table. I do concede it's hard to prove the reason for current transaction fees is what I attributed in my post, but there is evidence for it. I also think that the way money is created an placed into the system could be done in a way that created more smaller competitors instead of such large pools of capital, which can more easily try and engage in anti competitive behavior.
  - ibeckermayer 8y ago
    Great point re: the oftentimes unseen injustice of financial tyranny. Have you heard of Stellar (https://www.stellar.org https://www.stellar.org)? I don't have any experience actually using them and not sure if the blockchain is the correct way to go, but in principle their idea of a federated network for exchanging any unit the parties agree upon is a good one.

potta_coffee 8y ago

I wouldn't pay for Facebook and I don't use their free product either. I've used the React library so I suppose I'm benefiting from Facebook. If React weren't available, I'd use Vue.

sbov 8y ago

Google also contributes to Linux. Am I allowed to criticize Google if I use Linux? At what point am I not allowed to criticize a company based upon their contributions to open source projects I make use of?

musicale 8y ago

> People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly. Facebook tracks you regardless of whether you have a Facebook account.

return1 8y ago

that is not a tragedy of the commons

door5 8y ago

> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. Developers made these products. I'm sure they would be just as happy getting paid the same wage and making awesome products without working for a morally bankrupt company, but those opportunities don't exist. FAANG are the only institutions on the planet that have the resources to fund large-scale open source projects.

bartimus 8y ago

> yet happily use their Open Source code It's not their code. Linux didn't come from a company for example. The list goes on. The amount of code they give back is peanuts compared to the amount of code they benefitted from to build their businesses. No need to feel guilty whatsoever to use it. Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.

hnmullany 8y ago
If memory serves, IBM had a lot of good engineers on Linux back in the day & I think they were responsible for doing a lot of the hard perf. work on multi-CPU scheduling.
- fooker 8y ago
  Also Oracle, iirc Linux was a toy os before IBM and Oracle funded posix compatibility.
tracer4201 8y ago
Many of the folks who wrote the systems or languages you use every day work at these big companies. Didn't James Gosling work for Amazon at some point? >Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players. Who are the parasites? These bad-faith posts that are really just unconstructive rants are turning this site into Reddit.
- _msw_ 8y ago
  > Didn't James Gosling work for Amazon at some point? He currently does.
- bartimus 8y ago
  > Who are the parasites? There can exist a mutual beneficial symbiosis between companies and the open source community. But at some point the symbiotic behavior can become parasitic, causing harm. I think it's super important when such behaviors get pointed out (here at HN).

balls187 8y ago

I think you're conflating two different things. The people at Google who contribute too, and champion open source are probably not the ones who are making the decisions that we see as "evil." Google is competing for top talent engineering, and Googles commitment to open source boils down to a company perk meant to attract and retain top engineers. Google is a advertising company. Everything else they do is in service of that.

eitally 8y ago
your first two sentences are spot-on. The third was really iffy (and not true). The last line is completely false.
- disgruntledphd2 8y ago
  From a business-model perspective, Google are definitely an advertising company, and so are Facebook. From a consumer perspective, this is not particularly true, but it's definitely a factor in their behaviour. For instance, if Google made all its money by indexing data for big companies and selling the index, do you think they would own YouTube or have created Gmail?
  - eitally 8y ago
    Google is a large and complex company with many competing interests internally. Yes, I absolutely believe they would have created Gmail absent any advertising incentive. You have to remember how many seemingly random consumer services were created during the first decade of Google (say, 2000-2010), most of which were engineering experiments and had nothing to do with advertising. The Ads org within Google is large but fairly compartmentalized and runs like an absolute machine -- there is no questioning that. What most outsiders don't see, though, is how much independence all the other orgs have. For example, the fastest growing collection of stuff are the Hardware & Cloud areas, which account for probably 35000-40000 employees and are almost completely autonomous. If Ads show up on Google hardware products (let's use Google Home as an example), that's because the Home team exposed a service that allowed the Ads team to do it, not because the Home team was necessarily thinking about display/search ads during product design. In fact, there are many services Google provides where it's well understood that users will not tolerate ads at all (like Google Assistant surfaces). The reason I responded to the parent was because they made a blanket statement, which, while true if you only look at the fiscal reports, is untrue in practice. One could certainly argue strongly that Google's inability to strike it rich with anything besides Ads is 1) the reason the stock has been in the [relative] doldrums for the past year+, and 2) why Google continues to invest in all sorts of things (like Wing, or Chronicle, or Stadia, or ...) that are pretty far afield, not to mention the pure & applied research happening inside the RMI/Brain org that's often much more academic than practical. Besides search & mobile (admob) advertising, the only two major product areas inside Google that take a strong stance supporting the advertising mission are Youtube & Maps, but even then Maps tries to ensure it's surfacing useful, actionable, timely, and local information, which generally place it in a different category. Maps also have strong potential via partnerships for things like ride services, appointment bookings, travel, food delivery, and the like... some of which might technically be considered advertising but which manifests more like functional partnerships.

scarejunba 8y ago

It's a view of the world that's different from yours. Loads of people would and do use Topographische Anatomie des Menschen (Pernkopf's Anatomy) despite it being drawn and edited by actual true believer Nazis who used concentration camp inmates as the input.

throwaway66666 8y ago

> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. "We had horrible gravel roads and the dictator came and built good roads we use even today". Is my late-grandparents argument as to why dictatorship is by far the best way to rule a country. And I 'd happily drive on those roads to tell them they are dead wrong.

vood 8y ago
Can you elaborate? I'm being from a socialist country would love to deliver the same message to my parents
- CloudNetworking 8y ago
  If you can't identify bad things your "socialist" regime has done / is doing then I would start by trying to list those.

pathseeker 8y ago

> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. Pablo Escobar donated tons of money to the Medellín community. Doesn't make any criticisms against him hold less water.

TheTruth1234 8y ago

Keep kissing corporate @rse. Some people don't use FB. Some people would say FU to the thought of paying $2-3 to FB for anything.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

mammalutte 8y ago

If users aren't willing to pay $2-3 per month it simply means that they don't value it that much. They can sell ad space, that's fine, but this does not justify all the data abuse simply because they need to turn a profit. Facebook can close doors right now for what I care; other services such as search engines I would pay a monthly fee if I were sure they didn't try to track me to death.

z3t4 8y ago
The market decide the prices. The value of something has very little to do with the price. You can not charge for something if a free alternative exist. The crux is that Google and Facebook are still profitable, even if it's free, so if they used their huge market share in an attempt to increase the price, competitors would pop up and bring the price down. Something being free also lowers the friction to use. A paywall is a barrier to entry.

GoblinSlayer 8y ago

>you must shut up because it's a monopoly okay.jpg

mlindner 8y ago

> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise. There's no logical contradiction in attacking a company for doing bad things with the open source software they wrote and instead praise company who use that software for good. Software is not good or evil, it's how the company/people that use it that determines good vs evil.