4 ms·

One of the points of Signal is that the app is owned by a non profit and not a company. I highly do pressume that it means that it can't be sold to the highest

by jbj 6y ago

One of the points of Signal is that the app is owned by a non profit and not a company. I highly do pressume that it means that it can't be sold to the highest bidder.

input_sh 6y ago
Their answer on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_private_messenger_team_here_we_support_an/gikrk2p https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_p...
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
A for-profit FAANG cannot own a nonprofit like Signal, yes. I don’t know if it’s a 501c or a 501c3, but I think that’s irrelevannt. But a for-profit company can select all of the nonprofit’s board members and thereby largely control the nonprofit. This happens all the time w/conservation groups and environmental non profits and their unholy alliance with real estate mafia.
- jbj 6y ago
  Now I don't know how these legal structures work. For what it is worth, it looks to me as if Singularity University transitioned from being a non-profit to being a "for benefit corporation". I also have no idea what that means, other than it looks like some kind of fluidity is allowed? - https://su.org/about/how-we-do-business/ https://su.org/about/how-we-do-business/
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    Also OpenAI. Here is an interesting read (HN thread/comments mentioned in the article too) [..] By March of 2017, 15 months in, the leadership realized it was time for more focus. So Brockman and a few other core members began drafting an internal document to lay out a path to AGI. But the process quickly revealed a fatal flaw. As the team studied trends within the field, they realized staying a nonprofit was financially untenable. The computational resources that others in the field were using to achieve breakthrough results were doubling every 3.4 months. It became clear that “in order to stay relevant,” Brockman says, they would need enough capital to match or exceed this exponential ramp-up. That required a new organizational model that could rapidly amass money—while somehow also staying true to the mission.[..] [..] That structure change happened in March 2019. OpenAI shed its purely nonprofit status by setting up a “capped profit” arm—a for-profit with a 100-fold limit on investors’ returns, albeit overseen by a board that’s part of a nonprofit entity. Shortly after, it announced Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment (though it didn’t reveal that this was split between cash and credits to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform). Predictably, the move set off a wave of accusations that OpenAI was going back on its mission. In a post on Hacker News soon after the announcement, a user asked how a 100-fold limit would be limiting at all: “Early investors in Google have received a roughly 20x return on their capital,” they wrote. “Your bet is that you’ll have a corporate structure which returns orders of magnitude more than Google … but you don’t want to ‘unduly concentrate power’? How will this work? What exactly is power, if not the concentration of resources?”[..] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...

by jbj 6y ago

One of the points of Signal is that the app is owned by a non profit and not a company. I highly do pressume that it means that it can't be sold to the highest bidder.

input_sh 6y ago

Their answer on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_private_messenger_team_here_we_support_an/gikrk2p https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_p...

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

A for-profit FAANG cannot own a nonprofit like Signal, yes. I don’t know if it’s a 501c or a 501c3, but I think that’s irrelevannt. But a for-profit company can select all of the nonprofit’s board members and thereby largely control the nonprofit. This happens all the time w/conservation groups and environmental non profits and their unholy alliance with real estate mafia.

jbj 6y ago
Now I don't know how these legal structures work. For what it is worth, it looks to me as if Singularity University transitioned from being a non-profit to being a "for benefit corporation". I also have no idea what that means, other than it looks like some kind of fluidity is allowed? - https://su.org/about/how-we-do-business/ https://su.org/about/how-we-do-business/
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  Also OpenAI. Here is an interesting read (HN thread/comments mentioned in the article too) [..] By March of 2017, 15 months in, the leadership realized it was time for more focus. So Brockman and a few other core members began drafting an internal document to lay out a path to AGI. But the process quickly revealed a fatal flaw. As the team studied trends within the field, they realized staying a nonprofit was financially untenable. The computational resources that others in the field were using to achieve breakthrough results were doubling every 3.4 months. It became clear that “in order to stay relevant,” Brockman says, they would need enough capital to match or exceed this exponential ramp-up. That required a new organizational model that could rapidly amass money—while somehow also staying true to the mission.[..] [..] That structure change happened in March 2019. OpenAI shed its purely nonprofit status by setting up a “capped profit” arm—a for-profit with a 100-fold limit on investors’ returns, albeit overseen by a board that’s part of a nonprofit entity. Shortly after, it announced Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment (though it didn’t reveal that this was split between cash and credits to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform). Predictably, the move set off a wave of accusations that OpenAI was going back on its mission. In a post on Hacker News soon after the announcement, a user asked how a 100-fold limit would be limiting at all: “Early investors in Google have received a roughly 20x return on their capital,” they wrote. “Your bet is that you’ll have a corporate structure which returns orders of magnitude more than Google … but you don’t want to ‘unduly concentrate power’? How will this work? What exactly is power, if not the concentration of resources?”[..] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...