AFAIK Google is much better at not tearing well-working teams apart in reorgs, and letting people go they have acquihired a few quarters earlier.
Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
> Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
> Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Wouldn't be possible nowadays to LLM your way out of this?
I'm actually curious too, haven't been there in a while. It's possible that the MBR pyramid has become LLM assisted on all sides but the cultural themes are surely all still there.
Honestly, the whole thing felt LLM to start with, tons of people lacking context and throwing words and summaries around.
They do, they’re TPMs and PMs. If you’re a development team at Amazon stressing over MBRs, you’ve failed to give those people the tools to pull important metrics themselves.
> (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month)
Couldn't have said it any better myself having worked at AWS for close to 8y. I was there during their peak growth years and remember very well how some of these processes that were once not as maddening, devolved.
To be fair, I suspect most of the core team is effectively rich after an acqu-hire.
If I had 5 million I’m going to retire and never code for money again.
I do want to make small video games though, make some music. Pay for a friend’s kids college.
I wouldn’t waste a single extra hour making more money. Usually the golden handcuffs fall off after a year or two. That’s why Heroku went to crap, all the core people left.
Google has such a much better reputation when it comes to contributing to and understanding open source. It’s unfair to Google to put Amazon above them.
Heck AWS is the sole reason all these projects needed to go through these license changes to prevent AWS from completely destroying their business models.
What business model do MIT licensed projects even have? If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
> If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
I can't speak to how successful it is, but Daniel/Curl have been running with this model[0][1] for years. Probably not too different from 'drh and SQLite[2][3].
RMS addressed the business model from the very beginning: it's services and consulting. He practiced what he preached.
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
RMS would probably agree with you and think that I'm apostate. But there's an open source license for the full spectrum of software authors' preferences. Depending on the circumstances some could turn out to be a poor choice.
I know some lawyers who specialize in these choices. Everyone thinks their choice doesn't smell, but there are the resources to make informed choices.
With MIT there isn't much to goan with business comptiable licensing.
There the question turns to "you may sue me, if it breaks" as reasoning. In reality sueing will rarely work, but having a business contract satisfies the company's board and insurance about using the software over an "AS IS"-license alone.
It helps just fine. The original software is still there, available for anyone to use for free. AWS et al can't take that away from us, no matter what they choose to do with their fork.
When they say "doesn't help", they're talking about the developers of the original software you want to use for free getting to eat food and have a roof over their head.
It has an extremely low ceiling. You literally cannot make consumer-targeted software if you want to survive while writing open-source code. Services and consulting is strictly B2B, and services and consulting for open-source software is capable of supporting a population of like 1% of existing software developers. Advocating for this dogmatic ideal that would cull the field by 99% is ridiculous.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.
Red Hat grew on GPL licensed projects to become a $34 billion business. Canonical does the same except it’s Ubuntu not RHEL and charges more than Red Hat.
You really underestimate the value of support contracts.
I'm not seeing how MIT licensing has anything to do with your ability to use support contacts as a business model. Yeah, nothing constrains the potential customer to purchase support, but that's just as true of GPL licensed software. I can download GPL software and never pay a dime for a support contract, just like MIT software.
..a strategy valid in the good ol' days when a complete rewrite of the currently non-licenseable non-protectable underlying desings and ideas would not cost you 200$ on tokens to reimplement in a different or even in the same language.. maybe SW patents will be a thing soon .. and inadvertently become another nail in the coffin of FOSS and SW development in general, who knows
One of the things that has hampered the adoption of Dart/Flutter has been the fear Google would abandon it. I always presumed them to be in the lead regarding this kind of shittiness, but this is based on gut feel rather than analysis.
AFAIK Google is much better at not tearing well-working teams apart in reorgs, and letting people go they have acquihired a few quarters earlier.
Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
Google is better but it's an incredibly low bar.
Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
They should be fine as long as they remember to use the new cover sheets. I'm sure they got a copy of the memo.
Ooo yeah. Mmk that’d be great.
Don't worry, I'll send them another copy just in case.
> Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
> Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Wouldn't be possible nowadays to LLM your way out of this?
Really no idea, just asking.
I'm actually curious too, haven't been there in a while. It's possible that the MBR pyramid has become LLM assisted on all sides but the cultural themes are surely all still there.
Honestly, the whole thing felt LLM to start with, tons of people lacking context and throwing words and summaries around.
LLM to write it, then all the managers just use LLM to summarise it :)
The next logical step to ensure MBR quality would be to introduce MBR reviews before filing, also done by LLMs of course.
Why don't they hire MBR specialists and embed them? Leave the development groups alone.
They do, they’re TPMs and PMs. If you’re a development team at Amazon stressing over MBRs, you’ve failed to give those people the tools to pull important metrics themselves.
> (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month)
Couldn't have said it any better myself having worked at AWS for close to 8y. I was there during their peak growth years and remember very well how some of these processes that were once not as maddening, devolved.
To be fair, I suspect most of the core team is effectively rich after an acqu-hire.
If I had 5 million I’m going to retire and never code for money again.
I do want to make small video games though, make some music. Pay for a friend’s kids college.
I wouldn’t waste a single extra hour making more money. Usually the golden handcuffs fall off after a year or two. That’s why Heroku went to crap, all the core people left.
Google Maps is also an acquisition from more than 2 decades ago, by the way.
Youtube is another famous example.
Google has such a much better reputation when it comes to contributing to and understanding open source. It’s unfair to Google to put Amazon above them.
Heck AWS is the sole reason all these projects needed to go through these license changes to prevent AWS from completely destroying their business models.
Google had a better reputation. But these days I’m really not convinced they’re significantly better than Amazon.
Weirdly I’d put Microsoft above modern-Google, and that’s still a low bar.
What business model do MIT licensed projects even have? If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
> If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
I can't speak to how successful it is, but Daniel/Curl have been running with this model[0][1] for years. Probably not too different from 'drh and SQLite[2][3].
[0] https://curl.se/support.html
[1] https://rock-solid.curl.dev/
[2] https://sqlite.org/support.html
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49272832
RMS addressed the business model from the very beginning: it's services and consulting. He practiced what he preached.
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
RMS promotes GPL, not MIT licensed software.
When a bigger entity (e.g. AWS) decides to undercut the original creator/vendor (e.g. redis,elastic search), MIT code des not help.
RMS would probably agree with you and think that I'm apostate. But there's an open source license for the full spectrum of software authors' preferences. Depending on the circumstances some could turn out to be a poor choice.
I know some lawyers who specialize in these choices. Everyone thinks their choice doesn't smell, but there are the resources to make informed choices.
Actually dual license, those that want industry friendly license can get as much as they are willing to give upstream.
With MIT there isn't much to goan with business comptiable licensing.
There the question turns to "you may sue me, if it breaks" as reasoning. In reality sueing will rarely work, but having a business contract satisfies the company's board and insurance about using the software over an "AS IS"-license alone.
It helps just fine. The original software is still there, available for anyone to use for free. AWS et al can't take that away from us, no matter what they choose to do with their fork.
When they say "doesn't help", they're talking about the developers of the original software you want to use for free getting to eat food and have a roof over their head.
It has an extremely low ceiling. You literally cannot make consumer-targeted software if you want to survive while writing open-source code. Services and consulting is strictly B2B, and services and consulting for open-source software is capable of supporting a population of like 1% of existing software developers. Advocating for this dogmatic ideal that would cull the field by 99% is ridiculous.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.
Red Hat grew on GPL licensed projects to become a $34 billion business. Canonical does the same except it’s Ubuntu not RHEL and charges more than Red Hat.
You really underestimate the value of support contracts.
GPL is not MIT. If your software is GPL, you can sell it relicensed as MIT for income.
Doesn’t matter. When companies pay for support contracts they don’t care whether the code is GPL or MIT. They care about the support they get.
You can only do this if you own the copyright for all contributions.
I'm not seeing how MIT licensing has anything to do with your ability to use support contacts as a business model. Yeah, nothing constrains the potential customer to purchase support, but that's just as true of GPL licensed software. I can download GPL software and never pay a dime for a support contract, just like MIT software.
..a strategy valid in the good ol' days when a complete rewrite of the currently non-licenseable non-protectable underlying desings and ideas would not cost you 200$ on tokens to reimplement in a different or even in the same language.. maybe SW patents will be a thing soon .. and inadvertently become another nail in the coffin of FOSS and SW development in general, who knows
One of the things that has hampered the adoption of Dart/Flutter has been the fear Google would abandon it. I always presumed them to be in the lead regarding this kind of shittiness, but this is based on gut feel rather than analysis.
I feel like google do the most innovative projects of all the big companies.
Golang is alive and kicking still :shrug:
Not to mention Angular
golang is great?