Can't comment specifically on this or that "dying company", but it is a bit disappointing that after, how many, four decades of open source? and the obvious utility of that paradigm, it still seems a major challenge to build sustainable open source ecosystems. This means we can't really move on and imagine grander things that might build on top of each other.
Its not clear if that is due to:
i) competition from proprietary business models
ii) more specifically the excessive concentration of said proprietary business models ("big tech")
iii) confusion from conflicting objectives and monetisation incentives (the various types of licenses etc)
iv) ill-adapted funding models (venture capital)
v) intrinsic to the concept and there is no solution
vi) just not having matured yet enough
What I am driving at is that building more complex structures requires some solid foundations and those typically require building blocks following some proven blueprint. Somehow much around open source is still precarious and made up. Ideally you'd want to walk into the chamber of commerce (or maybe the chamber of open source entities), pick a name, a legal entity type, a sector and get going. You focus on your solutions, not on how to survive in a world that doesn't quite know what to make of you.
Now, corporate structures and capital markets etc took hundreds of years to settle (and are still flawed in many ways) but we do live in accelerated times so maybe its just a matter of getting our act together?
It's still doing better than it could be. Big tech companies have played way nicer than they had to, focusing more on vague long-term presence than on immediate profits, and imo continue to do so to a lesser extent. There always comes a point when the innovation is done and they lock things down again, but even then they have to fight their own employees.
With lots of open source licenses, there is no copyleft. Without copyleft, for profit companies can simply take the hard work, add a little on top, make it proprietary, and sell it. Customer mentality is to use the most comfortable thing, without paying attention on whom they depend, often choosing the proprietary offer, because of feature X.
There are healthy ecosystems, even some partially replacing docker, some with more daily updates than I can process, but they have copyleft licenses in place and are free software, to ensure contributions flow back. Companies can still make profit, but not from adding a minimalistic thing and making it proprietary. They need to find other ways.
Honestly the current content is not doing the platform any favors. Who wants another social media option that ranges from the inane to the toxic?
Reddit like forums, open source self-hosting, federation, these are all good points but people need to see how they make a difference in practice.
Mastodon somehow managed to be seen as a less toxic version of twitter, though it might be mostly peoples wish than anything intrinsic to the platform.
But all new entrants in the fediverse party will have to think how to convince people that social media are actually worth the hassle
It's probably as much to do with the people as anything about the software. I have the impression Gargron set out to create a less toxic version of twitter and the early users he attracted were people who wanted a less toxic version of twitter. Many of the later users were people who liked interacting with those early users.
It appears Lemmy may have been created by people who wanted a version of reddit for militant communists, which might tend to discourage anyone who doesn't want to talk to militant communists from adopting it.
I don't think Zuck particularly cares about the next big thing. As the debacle with Apple shows, there are existential risks here and now, not in some sort of FOMO
Despite appearances, if the metaverse gambit in the current episode made any sense it was mostly as a defensive move: To obtain control over a device so that you can datamine at will and perpetuate your business model irrespective of what other major actors might come up with.
Think about it. If stars (you have little control over) align, device owners can flip a privacy switch here, introduce a policy there and annihilate your business.
its quite depressing but it applies to much of corporate structure and incentives.
how much more performance can you squeeze from an individual that:
i) is not intrinsic to who they are (hence visible when you hire them - if its not the right profile just don't hire them)
ii) is not tied to your own bloated structure, toxic culture and messed up processes and hence none of their fault
is that 10%, 20% extra performance? is that sufficient to satisfy the "markets"? when its your vision and business model is what is really the problem.
He more than did his job. But who is the Doug Engelbart of today?
Where are the people that can articulate an actually desirable digital future and rally everybody (including those exclusively focused on pecuniary matters) around a human-centric vision?
I don't think anyone gets funded to do this kind of out of the box research anymore. Companies expect immediate results and a strict following of agile processes. If you're not tightly iterating a granular week by week towards a very specific task they don't want you around.
I find the erights/Agoric crowds'/Mark S. Miller's ideas interesting and desirable. While they have a very market/techno-centric perspective, their vision puts secure decentralized cooperation at the forefront, an approach that gets easily overlooked in today's centralized internet.
It's a libertarian perspective promoting individual sovereignty and bottom-up emergent organisation. It highlights flaws in the (security) architectures of our currently popular operating systems and programming languages, which were not built around a network-centric model because they originated from the pre-internet age.
Their paradigm reifies access and resource rights as manageable capabilities, and so allows for new forms of (self-) supervision, control and cooperation. An extension of concepts found in the real (legal) world into the digital realm.
SVB didn't have a chief risk officer. Why have somebody bang theoretically about risks when the business is best placed to assess the real risk /sarcasm
People telling that we shouldn't worry about such topic, because companies are aware of them. Because companies never did bad things just to earn more, right?
Why is it that in a forum skewed libertarian techbros, there's this nigh-religious faith that corporations will not only get AI right, but get its impacts on society right? You know, with their stellar track record and all.
To me this is just another of countless demonstrations of silicon valley ego/hubris.
Wait? you think you know better than thousands of other people who dedicate their lives to the topic, assume ideology and attack them with slurs and you think /they/ are the ones with too much ego and hubris? Dunning-Kruger effect much?
> thousands of other people who dedicate their lives to the topic
to make it plain to you, there were thousands of slave traders who dedicated their lives to the topic, including e.g. how to optimally fill-up the ship with bodies. what does this prove?
the idea that meticulous pursuit of a domain somehow gives it its experts the moral high ground or ensures that they will keep it safe for society is so bizarre and alarming it only reinforces the notion that a bunch of people have become completely unhinged
AI practitioners have already proved themselves untrustworthy by putting themselves in the service of entities that invaded privacy and engaged in large scale algorithmic manipulation of e.g. voting. This is not an assumption. Its a dire fact.
More broadly, corporate structures have repeatedly proved themselves untrustworthy, both in the small, with scandals and fraud and at-large, with regulatory capture that ensured their negative impacts on society could go unhindered for decades
Did I hit a nerve of yours? Maybe you see a little too much of yourself in my comment? If you think that the risk of getting technology catastrophically wrong is more than a passing philosophical diversion to your "thousands", when we've all heard "move fast and break things" ad nauseum, maybe you should be examining your DK blind spots instead of accusing someone else of the same.
Also, is "libertarian techbro" a slur now? Or are you just resentful that I compared faith in progress to faith in a deity?
Would be interesting to every once in a while test "Using Linux without a network connection" (as in: install everything from usb/media and check all your workflows)
I yard out the drive, attach it to another machine and toss a copy of, e.g., slackware64-current (+ sources) and a bootloader on the drive, put the drive back in its original machine and boot/install without a network.
After that, it may or may not ever see a network depending on what it is slated to do.
I don't know about now, but when Ubuntu came on CD images intended for burning to actual CDs and offline installation, those images included most of the packages you'd ever need. Or at least that was my impression.
Well said. While its good to surface the challenges diverse people face and hopefully think about patterns that will solve them in efficient, systemic ways, the availability of Signal at the moment of time is of vital importance.
Same, e.g. with Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. It something working, that normal people can migrate to and break the stanglehold of the true oppressive platforms. No harm to keep expectations high for those "alternatives", but lets keep a sense of proportion.
Its not clear if that is due to:
i) competition from proprietary business models
ii) more specifically the excessive concentration of said proprietary business models ("big tech")
iii) confusion from conflicting objectives and monetisation incentives (the various types of licenses etc)
iv) ill-adapted funding models (venture capital)
v) intrinsic to the concept and there is no solution
vi) just not having matured yet enough
What I am driving at is that building more complex structures requires some solid foundations and those typically require building blocks following some proven blueprint. Somehow much around open source is still precarious and made up. Ideally you'd want to walk into the chamber of commerce (or maybe the chamber of open source entities), pick a name, a legal entity type, a sector and get going. You focus on your solutions, not on how to survive in a world that doesn't quite know what to make of you.
Now, corporate structures and capital markets etc took hundreds of years to settle (and are still flawed in many ways) but we do live in accelerated times so maybe its just a matter of getting our act together?