It's possible that "Open Source" here is the OSI definition, which FSF has some objections to. If "Closed Source" just means "not Open Source as OSI defines it", then it is true that some non-OSI software is "free" software. Free software still requires source to be available and that you're allowed to modify and distribute it.
I disagree. If just expecting good outcomes worked, why would we have any laws at all?
Before we had laws on child labor, we had children working and falling into heavy machinery. Before we had laws on food quality, you had to guess which milk provider was going to give you the least amount of formaldehyde poison. Before we had laws enforcing civil rights, over half the adult population in the US was disenfranchised. Was Western society exhausted at enforcing religious/ethical norms back then or is it just a recent thing?
Using the "social contract" theory for why governments and countries exist, you could say that we don't need laws until we do. Once an undocumented part of the social contract (e.g. ethical or religious norm) is no longer sufficient to maintain the integrity of the contract, it must be written down and enforced via government as a last measure. I do expect my car manufacturer to sell me a car which is relatively secure. If they are failing to meet that expectation from society, then it falls to that last measure to enforce compliance with that norm. Laws are also often used to add clarify where there is ambiguity. Different cultures and religions have different norms. If those norms conflict (does the gender of my partner matter in a marriage?), it falls to law to clarify.
It's a fair debate about how much guardrails should we put in. There's likely value in allow kids to hurt themselves as long as they aren't at risk of being permanently maimed or dying. It's a fair debate to discuss the root causes of criminal behavior, be it the issues with modern religion or systemic issues which prevent people from successfully participating in mainstream society and the economic opportunity therein. However, there is no value in allowing easily stolen vehicles (a good which has been regulated for almost a century) to be sold, where they can then be used to enable other crimes.
Governments are formed by single cultures with a shared value set, and a set of ethics that they believe in. Your statement that laws aren't needed until they are is accurate.
As those shared values are lost, the ethics built upon them erode, more laws are constructed. However, there comes a point where this system of check and balance can no longer function properly, and eventually, the system either becomes too unwieldy to function, or else the system is destroyed due to rebellion or anarchy.
Why? Because law is an attempt to encode ethics based on shared values. No culture which does not share values can long endure when attempting to solve the problem through increasingly complex rules with no underlying theme.
+1 for Brother. Had the same one (MFC-L3750CDW) for years now. Just works. No weird subscription push. No weird apps to manage it. Actually integrates with 3rd party software easily. Everything I need and nothing I don't.
That seems like an odd way to frame it, imo. "Holding the bag" usually implies something negative, as in someone will be "caught" with something bad. As in the employees are looking to dupe someone into buying what they are selling. But employees, outside of company officers, do not control what information investors get about what they are buying. They can't trick anyone into buying something, although they could theoretically benefit if someone else did trick buyers.
But it's a weird take, because employees are already the ones "holding the bag". Office space, cloud compute, etc. are all sold as COGS. VCs usually have some ability to sell their shares on the private market since they can negotiate to get their capital. Employees are often the only ones which are taking an IOU for their time and effort compared to what they could get elsewhere in the market. Employees are often the lowest class of shares which get paid out last and often reliant on the board to be able to sell on the private market. Yes, the employees decided to take this offer, on good faith, that their management would look after them. They are adults who made a, theoretically, informed decision. But structurally, they are set up to be the ones "holding the bag" if things were to go wrong with an exit.
So of course they want an exit. They literally have no other choice to get a return on their time/effort than for that to happen. (or some odd third thing like private dividends, but again, they have practically no control over that happening)
Sure they have (had) another choice: they could have taken employment at a more stable (possibly public) company, where compensation would have been more predictable.
But they chose to work at a smaller, private company, and accepted private-company equity as part of their compensation, which 9 times out of 10 ends up being worth zero dollars. This idea that they're somehow entitled to a payout is ridiculous.
The situation that the VCs and founders are in is often enviable, but isn't really relevant here. Regular employees need to be financially responsible about accepting jobs with private-company equity comp, and not expect miracles. That's the bottom line.
(I agree that "holding the bag" is a weird way to frame this, though.)
> The situation that the VCs and founders are in is often enviable, but isn't really relevant here.
Respectfully disagree. It's relevant to the extent the parent comment was talking about employees wanting to have someone else "hold the bag".
> Regular employees need to be financially responsible about accepting jobs with private-company equity comp, and not expect miracles.
Agree that it's their responsibility and no one should be starting a kickstarter for them or anything. But that doesn't mean you can't sympathize with them. They are often fairly young people who aren't experts on contract law. It's not unreasonable to say that at least some of them have been exploited with excessive promises. The industry would be a better place if rather than say "they should have known better", we instead said "employers shouldn't exploit people". A precedent of bad behavior shouldn't excuse it.
Handle what, exactly? Are you actually experiencing any issues from not doing these things or are you experiencing FOMO? You've not articulated any problem you're facing.
Accusing others of being fake and producing crap may make you feel better for not being good at it, but it won't help you either way. I hope you're not a Principal Engineer I'm forced to work with - the work of those people are important for what we work on to succeed, whether you value it or not.
It is rational for governments to be defensive of practices which externalize costs onto 3rd parties, and they have to balance it with a number of factors including innovation.
It is easier to understand this with health, as compared to privacy, I think. The meat packing industry used to use substances such as formaldehyde to preserve meat longer. This wasn't transparent to the end customers and the health issues lead to lower productivity of the population as a whole. Soldiers eating this meat lead to lower fighting capabilities and higher illness. The meat packing industry fought against any transparency here knowing that it would hurt their profits. After an enormous amount of advocacy over decades, there was regulation added. There is a balance here - some substances are outright banned and some are just required to be documented on the food. This makes sense, in my opinion, because we can't expect every person to be a food chemist and know what's good and not good. Market makers have relatively large amounts of money to spend to confuse customers with misinformation, if given the option.
Applying this to privacy, the question that governments have to find out is what is fair for end users to be allowed to make a choice on and what is outright harmful such that a rational, informed person wouldn't make that choice. It is a tricky thing to get right and this bill may be overreach, but that is the nature of government and any policy - iteration. But there is always a place for a government to be in the market. Otherwise the market will be dictated by the powerful, not the people. Without perfect information transparency and the ability to interpret that information, there is no such thing as a free market.
(Disclosure: Work at Microsoft, but I work in Azure and some open source stuff, not on or directly with Fluid/Office/etc.)
That's just a trademark clause for Microsoft logos and brands. The Fluid Framework itself is MIT licensed [0] and doesn't require exposing any of those logos/brands when you use it, so the framework itself is fairly open for usage.
I think the main thing that would slow down adoption for Fluid is that the only "production" backend is an Azure service, which isn't part of the open source Fluid Framework. Other open source backends[1] aren't recommended for productions. Until there are some open source ones, I'd assume adoption will be limited to folks in the Azure ecosystem.
No one things FB is evil because they aren't transparent. It is because of the observable harm on society and their perceived reluctance to mitigate that harm. Internally, they also suffer with retention because employees don't want to work at an evil or perceived to be evil place.
Thus, FB decides to have more transparency, gets a little credit that they want to fix the problem. All good.
Now, FB then revokes that after it leads to criticism (which is the point of being transparent...), so they revert to the previous state, only now there is even more evidence and the problem is worse.
It's the height of irony that a company that profits from selling information about you would ever try to defend itself with a right to privacy. Not only is that not the issue at hand but it speaks to the lack of self-awareness that I can only hope will doom FB to irrelevance or legal destruction.
> It's the height of irony that a company that profits from selling information about you would ever try to defend itself with a right to privacy.
Everyone deserves a robust defense - even the guilty. It is not for their justice - it is to protect the integrity of the system.
Everyone also deserves the right to privacy because bad actors (competitors, disgruntled employees, political activists, etc...) are always happy to twist facts leaked to make a biased case. This happens all the time - there is no shortage of talking heads on spin alley.
You're right in that FB should have probably never tried to be more transparent - and doing so was naive and destined for failure. In the court of public opinion / social media (and eventually probably ACTUAL court someday), you simply cannot successfully voice your innocence. Even apologizing when you're wrong makes things worse.
My advice to clients is always...
#1. Shut up. Do not make public statements. Do not engage anyone publicly. Anything you say can and will be used against you - both in and out of court.
#2. See point above.
In my opinion, the correct strategy for a social media company these days is to be as ethical as possible, and to say as little as possible publicly about ethics or internal policies.
For me, I never really made friends in the office, but I did make friends from the office and my profession from outside of the office activities. Conferences, education, meetups, big morale events. These things have stopped, for me, since the pandemic, so I've not made any new friends this way. I'm full-time remote now, and moved away from the west coast, but I expect I'll still do conferences and the big morale events. I've not explored the meetup scene here, but I am hoping to also make some friends doing non-tech activities finally, since my new area is less tech focused.
