4 ms·

Never before has a company stood on such a mountain of open source code, achieved so much money with it and contributed so little No really. Microsoft? BSD TCP

by harry8 7y ago

Never before has a company stood on such a mountain of open source code, achieved so much money with it and contributed so little No really. Microsoft? BSD TCP/IP stack for win95 maybe saved them but there was trumpet winsock and probably would have survived to writing their own on the next release. Google doesn't get off the ground and has literally no products and no services without the GPL code that they fork, provide remote access to a process running their fork and contribute nothing back. Good end run around the spirit of the GPL there and that has made them a fortune (they have many fortunes, that's just one of them). New projects from google? They're only open source if google really need them to be, like Go which would get nowhere if it wasn't and be very expensive for google to have to train all their engineers rather than pushing that cost back on their employees. At least they don't go in for software patents, right? Oh, wait... At least they have a motto of "Don't be evil" Which we pretty much all have personally but it's great a corporation backs it. Corporate restructurings happen, sure, oh wait, the motto is now gone. "Do the right thing" Well this is fine and google do it, for all values of right that equal "profitable to google and career enhancing for senior execs". But this is great a robots.txt parser that's open source. Someone other than google could do something useful for the web with that like writing a validator, because google won't. Seemingly because it's not their definition of "do the right thing." "Better than facebook, better than facebook, any criticism of google is by people who don't like google so invalid." Only with more words. Or none just one button. Go.

steren 7y ago
Google does not contribute to OSS? https://opensource.google.com/ https://opensource.google.com/
- harry8 7y ago
  Who said they "don't contribute"? Not me, so given you're replying to me that's a straw man argument. Oh and your link? That's a propaganda site heavy on aesthetic design and basically devoid of fact. Apart from that it's a really strong response. Do you love google? Work for them? Reflexively stick up for big business?
supernomad 7y ago
So you aren't wrong that google is built on the shoulders of giants, but I will point out that every single company today running their SaaS offering on top of linux/BSD is doing the exact same thing. The only reason Linux is as mainstream as it is today, is exactly because of this freedom to leverage the code. You even point out that the cause for Golang's success is for precisely the same reason. Overall opensource isn't about making money, it has never been about making money. Its been about making an impact, and bettering the world around us all by giving a piece of technology to be freely used by everyone. There are a variety of opensource licenses that can/will protect your code from any/all closed source uses, for example AGPL explicitly states if your application so much as interacts with the code over a TCP connection or furthermore a single UDP packet it must be opensource as well. However you will rarely see libraries/applications using this license. Why you might ask? The answer is simple, it reduces the impact that code can have. Really at the end of the day, it comes down to a choice of the developer(s), do you want to make money? i.e. go the Microsoft/Apple route? or do you want to make an impact? i.e. go the Linux/BSD route? Let me ask one final question, which of the above operating systems do you think are more widely used, or have changed the world in a more dramatic manner?
- harry8 7y ago
  I could care less about other companies that have existed for 5 minutes in the SaaS space in my comment that nobody has ever derived more value and given that, contributed less back. Google is built on an end run around the spirit and intent of the GPL. "Don't distribute software, distribute thin client access to it! No GPL! Hurrah! Money!" Decide for yourself what you think of that but it happened. Without it, no google. But hey, list anyone you think derived more value and contributed less back. It's a reasonable thing to do. Doesn't affect criticism of google.

by harry8 7y ago

steren 7y ago

Google does not contribute to OSS? https://opensource.google.com/ https://opensource.google.com/

harry8 7y ago
Who said they "don't contribute"? Not me, so given you're replying to me that's a straw man argument. Oh and your link? That's a propaganda site heavy on aesthetic design and basically devoid of fact. Apart from that it's a really strong response. Do you love google? Work for them? Reflexively stick up for big business?

supernomad 7y ago

So you aren't wrong that google is built on the shoulders of giants, but I will point out that every single company today running their SaaS offering on top of linux/BSD is doing the exact same thing. The only reason Linux is as mainstream as it is today, is exactly because of this freedom to leverage the code. You even point out that the cause for Golang's success is for precisely the same reason. Overall opensource isn't about making money, it has never been about making money. Its been about making an impact, and bettering the world around us all by giving a piece of technology to be freely used by everyone. There are a variety of opensource licenses that can/will protect your code from any/all closed source uses, for example AGPL explicitly states if your application so much as interacts with the code over a TCP connection or furthermore a single UDP packet it must be opensource as well. However you will rarely see libraries/applications using this license. Why you might ask? The answer is simple, it reduces the impact that code can have. Really at the end of the day, it comes down to a choice of the developer(s), do you want to make money? i.e. go the Microsoft/Apple route? or do you want to make an impact? i.e. go the Linux/BSD route? Let me ask one final question, which of the above operating systems do you think are more widely used, or have changed the world in a more dramatic manner?

harry8 7y ago
I could care less about other companies that have existed for 5 minutes in the SaaS space in my comment that nobody has ever derived more value and given that, contributed less back. Google is built on an end run around the spirit and intent of the GPL. "Don't distribute software, distribute thin client access to it! No GPL! Hurrah! Money!" Decide for yourself what you think of that but it happened. Without it, no google. But hey, list anyone you think derived more value and contributed less back. It's a reasonable thing to do. Doesn't affect criticism of google.