I don't see how it's a conflict of interest. The primary benefit of open source is that you can run and modify it yourself if you need to. This benefit is still there if there is a single vendor behind the project.
The risk of a single vendor project is that it's less likely to be supported in the long run. This isn't a conflict of interest though.
I've worked in streaming before and something many don't realize is there are 10-15 different app platforms you need to build for (web, ios, android, roku, android tv, tvos, fire tv, xbox, playstation, etc, etc). So 10 app teams only get you ONE app across all of the platforms.
The problem with this argument is that you never mention the costs or trade-offs of a statically typed language. You presume that you get the benefits for free and I'm certain that is not the case. The worst systems I've ever worked on were ones with complex and poor types and type hierarchies.
What are the costs of a Ruby incompatibility just waiting to be discovered in production ? You can't assume you wrote tests to exercise every possible branch in every method in every object ?
The costs of static typing are reasonable as long as you're not using a fancy dependently typed language. Ask companies that are maintaining long running software -- types help. The investment is there in the beginning, the payoff is over the lifetime of the project.
If types are complex and poorly defined, you can change them ! The compiler will help you evolve your system through type errors. If you have a poorly structured program in a dynamically type language like Ruby then it becomes more difficult to evolve your system fast and with confidence. You're always asking -- have I missed something out ?
I've been writing software for a long time in many different types of languages. I've led many software teams for a long time that use different languages and tech stacks. I have not seen any measurable difference in productivity or defect rate across different languages. I have also looked at all of the research on this and it is inconclusive at best.
Ultimately, I think that choice of language is one of the least significant predictors of outcomes, yet it's one of the most debated and obsessed over.
Edit: I thought it would be helpful to give examples of what I think is more important. Good CI/CD practives, good observability, robust test and staging environments, etc have been far more important in my experience than static vs dynamic language choice.
The solution is paying for content, but it's been shown over and over again that the vast majority of people won't pay for most of the content they consume.
It's been shown that when companies will run products at a massive loss for years in order to capture a monopoly that most customers will make the individually rational choice of taking the free service offered.
Youtube only got to where it is now by Google plowing billions of dollars from a different monopoly into it. Most of the other major "free" consumer tech products gained their market share by burning way more money than most competitors could afford.
I'm not so sure, people pay for Netflix and Spotify and other content services. Maybe most of the content on YouTube is not worth paying for?
There are YouTube channels i watch, but it's just a fun distraction. If they went away I'm not sure I would care that much. The educational stuff is handy, but that is all out there in different forms on the web anyway.
YouTube has a lot of content that is the highest quality of any platform. It also has a ton of crap content, because they simply have an enormous amount of content. It's like a supermarket in that sense. You could refuse to go there and buy the highest quality beef because you don't like that they also sell soft drinks and processed candy bars in the front.
Youtube has a wealth of highly valuable content that is very niche. I'd love for someone to figure out how to pay the creators of that content via a paid platform like netflix or spotify, many have tried, and no one has succeeded yet.
I'd like to be wrong, but so far the ad model is the best business model for such content.
Seems like the content market is due for a correction, then. If people are sick of toxic ads, and toxic ads pay for content, but nobody else wants to pay for the content, the content can just die and we'll figure something else out I'm sure.
I think you're on the right track. Unfortunately, the toxic "free" model with ads has trained everybody to expect all content for free. This is completely unsustainable; there will be a correction of some sort, and it's my opinion that we've already entered that stage. It's going to be painful, but I'm hopeful that the end state is that people consider ad-laden "free" content to be not worth their time. I'm already there.
I signed up for Kagi search recently (I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a satisfied customer), and aside from searching reddit, I consider their results to be superior to Google's. One of their main signals for downranking is how heavily ad/tracker-laden a page is.
I'm also a Kagi user! I'm leaning towards using products that I pay for that promise me a dignified experience. I worry though, that we're heading to future where there's a class of people that do not see ads and have some degree of privacy and a class of people that do see ads and have no privacy and I fear for their minds and that culture, as I do not think that system lends itself to narrowing any inequality gaps. I worry for increasingly ad supported hardware. I worry. ;)
Paying for it has added consideration "costs" of commitment and calls for more checking out before watching it if it would be worth it or not. Viewers come easier when they can try before they buy and the quality threshold for "would pay money for" is much higher than "would pretend to pay attention to ads for". Not paying for content thus has less friction to it.
I think people won't pay for licenses to access to content (well they already are). But I think it comes down to the tangibility of the product in question. Digital licenses to access content can come and go at a whim. No thanks.
Not only is it a lagging indicator, it can also be skewed in hundreds of different ways, and can indicate many things other than value (e.g., degree of lock-in/monopoly, etc.).
I have no data, but I would hypothesize that the generational advantages do not disappear easily, even if a large chunk of the monetary value does.
Even just looking at from a purely monetary angle: maybe generation two manages to "lose" 70% of a $50 million inheritance. They've still got $15 million to start over with. Even if they lost 95% of the inheritance, they're still on a better financial footing than most with $2.5 million of capital laying around to rebuild themselves from. That's not enough to live like a king and never work, but if you're even remotely smart in managing that amount from somewhere in early to middle adulthood, that's still enough to at least never have a mortgage or worry about college for yourself or your kids. It's enough to start a successful small business or three as well.
But I think there's another angle on this. Even if the kids stupidly lose a lot of the cash, they're still riding on a ton of benefits from their enriched childhood: far better health thanks to a virtually limitless diet of high quality food and great medical care, the best schools and tutors, connection networks to all the other rich kids from their rich neighborhoods and schools, and learning (through osmosis if not explicitly) all about their parents and grandparents lessons of being in executive positions and how to invest wisely and preserve capital, what kinds of lawyers and insurances you should have, etc. Bottom line is they could literally set 100% of the inherited cash on fire and they'd still have a much higher chance of re-becoming wealthy than most.
I would imagine it has a lot to do with how wealthy the family was. It's easier for a single generation to waste 50 million than it will be for them to waste 50 billion.
Family sizes are also much smaller so the split of the inheritance will result in larger starting wealth for each generation.
One could blow through $50 million in a month and probably not even draw much attention. Wasting $50 billion is going to take a lot of dedication and hard work to achieve, especially if any of those assets are generating income.
I don't think that is the right way to think about google. There is virtually no friction or switching cost for a user to use a different search engine. I think the biggest thing keeping google at the top is that they are the default on mobile phones, and they pay a ton of money to apple to keep it that way.
I also think that disruption will come from something that looks different than google, maybe something like chatgpt, that doesn't appear to be a direct competitor at first but ends up taking a significant bite out of usage of google.
Why? What are the use cases? I honestly can't think of any. If you are making a web app, you can use those cores just fine. If you are doing ML you will be calling into native code which can also do it just fine. If you are trying to make a AAA game, you shouldn't use python, etc.
> If you are doing ML you will be calling into native code which can also do it just fine.
This is exactly the use case. You can only parallelize in the native code if the boundary between Python and native code is absolute. But in practice people really do want to pass callbacks into the native code, inherit from native code interfaces in Python, even something as simple as forwarding the logging in their native code back to Python logging (e.g. all of the really useful behavior possible with binding tools like pybind11). All of these are impossible to parallelize effectively today.
The per-subinterpreter GIL that shipped in 3.12 should also help with situations where native code frameworks want to have parallel callbacks to Python code. But your logging use case is a good example of the problems because the Python code would still have to solve synchronisation there even without a GIL.
The risk of a single vendor project is that it's less likely to be supported in the long run. This isn't a conflict of interest though.
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