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Maybe the facts will bear out that there’s a case here, but my default position is one of skepticism. I guess one takeaway for me is if you don’t want your com
by ncallaway 3y ago
Maybe the facts will bear out that there’s a case here, but my default position is one of skepticism.
I guess one takeaway for me is if you don’t want your competitor to hire a bunch of your former employees, don’t make a bunch of your employees former employees.
- sergiotapia 3y ago[flagged]
- makestuff 3y agoDidn't Twitter open source a large portion of the code base? Seems like that isn't going to help their case.
- nicolas_17 3y agoNo, I would definitely not call that a "large portion".
- smolder 3y agoIt also doesn't help that the basic functionality of Twitter can be duplicated in a weekend by a junior dev, and has been many times. What novel idea can be stolen from Twitter? Everyone already lifted the hashtag idea ~15 years ago.
- mrguyorama 3y agoNah, they released a bunch of the piping that goes around an ML model, but that's very boilerplate stuff to anyone with python data science experience. It's like if you made calculators and "open sourced" one by releasing the code that reads keypresses and does CPU scheduling. Like yeah, those are things a calculator does but not only is it code everyone else in the business could expect to write themselves in a couple sprints but it's also exactly NOT the magic sauce.
- ksaj 3y agoI don't know the specifics, but the license included with that code will specify what can and can't be done with it. ~~Not all open source is free to use in your own code base. Sometimes it is open sourced for review purposes.~~ Edited: the last line is incorrect.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Sometimes it is open sourced for review purposes. Huh? I'm not aware that it's possible to open source something without, you know, making it OSS. Am I mistaken, or are we talking about two different meanings for "open source"?
- ksaj 3y agoSorry, you are right. The issue I was thinking about is that there are different OSS licenses, and they have different requirements for use. Attribution and open sourcing any changes you make to the original code base are an examples. The agreements for opening code up for review purposes only is indeed not OSS, despite the word 'open' often being used there. I started off sound, then diverged. The part of Twitter that was open sourced will have a license spelling out what you need to do (if anything) in order to use the code. The review part is a different thing.
- brasic 3y agoI assume OP was referring to “source available” schemes where the source is published or sometimes selectively disclosed but not licensed for anything other than review, ie you lack the right to run or copy it. Needless to say, it’s not accurate to call that “open source”.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoTwitter doesn't have a single trade secret or important technology worth stealing. Replicating it is a social problem, not a technical one.
- boo-ga-ga 3y agoEspecially for Meta that runs far more popular apps
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sergiotapia 3y agoI agree with you. I wonder what they'll bring out during the lawsuit.
- nubinetwork 3y agoI've written a twitter clone in PHP once, it's not hard. Throw in some Ajax to auto refresh, and you'd have something similar to what they have been using this whole time.
- fomine3 3y agoIt's easy to handle 100 users. It's difficult to make it (timeline, search, and other stuff) work for 10e7 users (though Meta already do).
- nubinetwork 3y agoMoney and hardware. It's not like every other website doesn't have growing pains.
- misterpigs 3y agoFACT CHECK: They are usually _not_ bullshit.
- smoldesu 3y ago> It also claims stolen secrets, codebases and digital assets. Wouldn't put it past The Zucc. You wouldn't put it past Zuck? Friendly reminder to everyone that Tesla knowledgeably violated GPL for years until they were forced into compliance: https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/21/tesla_inches_toward_gpl_compliance https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/21/tesla_inches_toward_g... I don't trust for a second that Elon's team knows what they're talking about here.
- sergiotapia 3y agoThe Zucc's shinanigans and backstabbing is so famous they made an award winning, and fan-favorite movie about it!
- smoldesu 3y agoHim and Jobs both. The way things are headed now, I suspect the Elon biopic will give them all a run for their money.
- jimmygrapes 3y agoPlease cast Kevin Durant for the role
- Timon3 3y agoMy money is still on character actress Margo Martindale.
- JohnFen 3y agoBoth Zuck and Musk are unreliable people who can't be taken at face value. I wouldn't put any level of shenanigans past either of them.
- 28304283409234 3y agoWhat has that fact about Tesla have to do with the opinion about Zuck? Nothing. Diversion is what-about-ism.
- danpalmer 3y agoAs an engineer this doesn’t pass even a cursory look. Entirely different brands, tech stacks, and the products just work differently. What can they possibly have taken. I dislike Musk/Zuck as much as anyone, but I do believe that Meta can build a Twitter clone in 6 months on their infrastructure, and with their product folks.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoYou have to wonder about Elon Musk's "first principle" thinking if he lashes out in such basic ways that defy basic engineering intuition. Twitter's source code is valuable to Twitter, much like Twitter's engineers and their institutional knowhow were valuable to Twitter (before Musk fired them by the thousands). But outside Twitter, taking their code and assets and trying to awkwardly graft them onto Meta/Instagram's stacks would not only not help, but actually slow them down and cause the product's functionality and stability to suffer. Twitter's layoffs represent pure loss to Twitter, and much less gain to anyone else. Trying to spin it as if the nature of Twitter's operation is some big valuable secret is such cringe coming from leadership that supposedly prides itself on being technical and hands-on.
- danpalmer 3y agoMusk doesn't value people – this is apparent from all of his businesses, he doesn't care about work life balance, inclusive hiring, etc. From this, it does follow that if you've got some secret-sauce at your company, and it's NOT your employees and their experience, then it must be something else. If you're Twitter, then it's probably The Algorithm, or code printed out onto reams of paper. After all, that's what makes the money right? Except as is obvious to most companies, it's not. The people, the shared understanding, the experience, the company culture, and even the context of the world that the product is a part of – these are all far more important than the actual code, and where any long-term successful company focuses their efforts. To put it in terms Musk might understand, product and engineering teams are "stage 0" for a software company, they are the machine that builds the machine.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoThe likelihood of "stolen codebases and assets" is zero. Meta has an existing infrastructure that can handle 10x the traffic that Twitter has, and which is completely different than Twitter's stack. As for the Threads app, that's a job any average web dev can have a rough prototype of in a day. The rest is iteration and refinement. The entire mail is 100% BS. Also, there's no suit. There's a threat of a suit, which will likely not materialize as there's no chance of winning it.
- drumhead 3y agoIt gives people a choice, if they want the more moderated experience they can go with threads, if they want a more free for all then Twitter. Competition is a good thing.
- barrysteve 3y agoStolen secrets is a weird one as Elon has said patents are for cowards and kept SpaceX tech out of patents for fear of nation-state actors stealing secrets. He knows how to keep a secret from another countries' spies and then wants to also play legal hardball in murkey waters between Meta and Twitter? His character is consistently inconsistent.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoIt's the same attitude Steve Jobs had about former employees going to Google to make Chrome. What makes Jobs and Musk such effective CEOs is they're very possessive and vindicative.
- sanderjd 3y agoDon't mistake correlation with causality.
- bandyaboot 3y agoMusk was an effective CEO for Tesla and SpaceX because he didn’t care that people thought he couldn’t succeed in doing what he was trying to do. Based on his personality, I suspect his success is in no small part due to those people saying he would fail. He’s a total failure as Twitter’s pretend not-CEO because he’s allowed his mind to be infected with culture war politics.
- mikeyouse 3y agoIf Musk were a little less obnoxious when talking about the people he fired, he might engender a little more goodwill on this type of suit.. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F0YH3xBaQAAjs3L?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F0YH3xBaQAAjs3L?format=jpg&name=...
- molave 3y agoMakes sense. However, I hope no one takes this the wrong way and hire too many people to starve competitors of talent.
- itsdrewmiller 3y agoThis idea floats around but is not practical. Here's a comment thread about it with some numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32413948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32413948
- eptcyka 3y agoPretty sure that was FAANG's approach, until the interest rates returned to normal.
- robocat 3y agoAn analysis using some reasonable assumptions suggests that is not a profitable idea for major tech companies. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487744
- inerte 3y agoIn fact the opposite has happened, and major Silicon Valley companies have agreed not to hire from each other, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- tehbeard 3y agoOr, you know, handle their termination with some care to honouring their contracts if you expect them to honour anything NDA / no compete for a while after...
- quitit 3y agoMeta have already stated that no former twitter employees worked on Threads. That's not all that surprising though, Meta could obviously build such a product from their own learnings and IP.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mandeepj 3y ago> That's not all that surprising though, Meta could obviously build such a product from their own learnings and IP. Twitter is a public app. How hard it’s to keep the app open on one monitor and write a spec doc on another?
- yowzadave 3y agoThe lawsuit claims that Meta hired ex-Twitter employees to build Threads, which seems to be both factually untrue and not illegal even if it were true. Are you shifting the goalposts to a different claim?
- fennecfoxy 3y agoDepends on what constitutes IP. Is an artist with references open in another pane breaking copyright? If we stoop to the rounded-corners Apple level then there's not really much point anyone making anything new anymore.
- LocalH 3y agoI mean, isn't the post you replied to essentially the clean room approach? One person/group does the actual reverse engineering and writes up the spec doc, and then a totally separate person/group takes that spec doc and produces code to implement it.