> But they won't learn that on their own
I think they're fully aware of this. They just don't care, because the goal of "get market share super high" has been reached, so now they have no need for it to continue being open.
I don't disagree about what that means we should do; I just don't think we should assume they're being naive here. It's like writing a program to play chess; you should select your move assuming the opponent is smart and will make the optimal counterplay rather than assuming weakness, and then if they end up being less smart than that, you're still in a good place.
Every time the HN crowd rediscovers that companies make business strategy choices rather than immutable principled philosophical decisions, the angst and dismay are really something.
When Android launched, making it open source (ish) was the right competitive decision. It got phone makers and carriers on board and accelerated the ecosystem’s development. Today it being open source (kinda) is a met negative for Google. So, yeah, they’re changing that.
Well-run companies aren’t zealots. They adapt to changing conditions. If a company’s actions happen to align with your personal preferences today, it doesn’t mean you’ve found a lifelong philosophical soulmate. Ditto if a company’s actions run counter to what you want today. Either can and will change, and there’s nothing morally concerning either way.
companies aren't human beings with morals.
companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.
but unfortunately a lot of people wanna see the world as they wish it to be, not the way it is.
Not every business owner is a profit obsessed psycho. Most multinational CEOs are but you can find good people at every level. The "only exist to make money" thing starts when you let in shareholders, but a company can stay ethical as long as they put up strong barriers before taking outside investment.
A lot of people get the wrong impression from reading Dodge Brothers and think companies are legally required to put profit first. What really happened is Friedman and Reagan planted the idea of shareholder supremacy, convinced schools to teach it and now generations of business majors think it's a sacred truth they have to enforce anywhere they go. Never let a MBA take over.
It’s not about the moral or ethical qualities of the CEO. It’s about the structural incentives of the organization as a whole. This is even more true in a larger organization, where any one individual has relatively little effect on the behavior of the organization as a whole.
Companies that don’t do a good job of making profits tend to go away, thus there exists natural selective pressure to put profits ahead of other concerns. Note that none of the above has anything at all to do with morals or ethics.
Yes. Emergent behaviors.
This is why a healthy, society-aligned regulatory regime is impoetant, to set incentives. If you make more money being decent than you would being abusive, companies will adapt. They are more like corals than they are like people.
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Being "a profit obsessed psycho" might help some people rise to positions of power, but I think the stronger point is that a corporation is an emergent superorganism with its own identity above the individual human level, without a psychology, that operates on its own principles of self preservation based on the incentives of the environment it operates in and that individual choices result in a gestalt of behaviors that no one person really has full control over even though they are part of it and what they do does affect the overall outcome, like a cell and organs making up an animal.
And if I asked people to name companies which retain a good public perception of being not entirely profit driven, the ones that would most likely come to mind are ones like Costco, where there's someone who is setting the tone and not leaving it to the committee of free market/investors to decide the fate of the company. I wonder if there are parallels here to other similar economic models, hmm...
companies like Costco, Patagonia etc are rare why ? because deliberate actions & care have been taken to go against the grain of what a company should do.
just like the USA at it's founding - deliberate actions were taken etc that were counter to the normal. & going against the wind takes a lot of energy.
at a certain point in time - you run out of energy or you've to keep keep reinvesting to not run out otherwise barbarians are knocking down at the gate.
I shop at Costco and don't hate it, but why would I believe it is not entirely profit-driven?
The problem with “profit driven” is that it reduces motives to a lowest common denominator. Short term profit? Long term profit? Brand value that can be leveraged later?
Costco, specifically, I have a good story about. Jim Sinegal spoke at my MBA program, and he talked about when they were starting and the challenge was a value prop of “buy bulk, lower cost” contrasted with bulk actually being more expensive than small quantities, therefore needing to target higher incomes.
Part of the solution: wider parking spaces. Make people feel like their expensive cars are safer, it’s easier to get in and out of the car (especially for older people, who have more wealth), and differentiate from typical stores.
Now, you tell me: would you be just as happy with cramped parking spaces because the larger ones are profit-driven? Does motive even matter here?
Costco has a policy to cap margins at 14% or something to that order. And it's disciplined enough that it's broken off with major brands that tried to dispute this.
It's profit driven in its own way, but against the grain of modern corporate strategy.
> companies aren't human beings with morals.
Companies are not sentient beings in themselves: they are made up of human beings with wills. If the human being(s) make moral choices the result will be companies that do moral actions.
> companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.
That is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
There are others:
* “Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.” ― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III
* “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[72] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics
Or going back a few decades:
> In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
* https://law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-history...
> American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm.
* https://repository.law.umich.edu/mbelr/vol9/iss1/2/
> That is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):
Self-reply: see also Boeing company ethos pre-McD acquisition versus post-McD acquisition ethos:
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55994102-flying-blind
thanks for the resources.
Eric Ries gives more examples and some excellent commentary on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJ1vTdHpks
Are these the same companies that claim that companies are people?
They exist to make money but not by all means.
Companies are allowed to make money because it’s a net benefit for society.
If that changes companies lose their reason of existence.
> Well-run companies aren’t zealots
They absolutely are zealots; the zealotry focuses on profit.
Why these types of stories are so jarring to some is that they serve as a reminder that your pet technology or project will get fed into the wood chipper if enough bloodless “Ex-Bain, Ex-Mercer, I Love LinkedIn” types tell the ceo it’s a profitable idea. And you and I are just as expendable.
An if you dont like to give them your work, but still do open source, there are the copy-left licenses: GPL and AGPL.
They stay away from those.
What license was KHTML again? Checked: LGPL.
Yet Chrome will still be used and installed. I hope Firefox gains numbers but I know it won’t
>the angst and dismay are really something.
Just because you know there's a chance of being punched in the face, doesn't mean it still isn't a bit painful actually being punched in the face. Even if you brace for it.
But yes, that's the beauty of open source. The ability to take your ball home if and when the maintainer breaks the social contract. It's a contingency plan for this exact scenario.
>and there’s nothing morally concerning either way.
There's many moral concerns. Whether or not the company cares does not expel the concerns itself.
I think this is a different situation than what you're describing. It's one thing when a company acts in their own interests, their communications are consistent with that, you observe that, and align with them (or don't).
It's another when they say they're going to do one thing, you align with them, and then they do another later. That's generally frowned upon morally because it's considered to be deceptive/untruthful.
It's not surprising, but that doesn't mean people should be ok with it, especially when other businesses get by fine making more ethical business choices, or at least avoid outright lying for their own benefit.
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Tbh I don't think fighting open source is Google's best play. I think it is in their own best interest to keep it fully open. It is free labor by those who are most passionate. It gives strong signals at what people want, this direction you develop. It strengthens security as more people try to test it. It means people work on forks rather than alternatives. All this is true even with a monopolistic market share.
So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.
Most successful open source projects have devs being paid by big corporations, including Linux itself, which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.
Also in the last century most software was commercial, and thanks to business friendly licenses we are back to demos, PD, Shareware and co, only with new names for a younger generation.
Google will do just fine.
I vividly remember my father coming home from Borders Books & Music one fateful day in 1998 with a boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 5.1. (This was the distro that eventually became Fedora, not RHEL). It was the first Linux distro I’d ever used, but my dad also had some older SuSE and Slackware CDs and floppies in his archives as well. I’m confident Red Hat has always paid their employees, and I’m confident SuSE GmbH did as well.
Famously IBM did eventually buy Red Hat, but not for another 20 years. The fact is, Linux was alive and well and growing as far back as the late 1990s, and devs were getting paid. You could literally buy CDs in a box of an installable Linux distribution at an ordinary retail chain bookstore in 1998.
And for whatever it’s worth, the reason Linux took off the way it did when it did was because the Dot Com Bubble helped pump smaller companies like Red Hat or SuSE up, and they were certainly selling floppies and pressed CDs at a margin like Shareware as well, since most people didn’t have the time or hardware to download and burn ISOs until the early/mid-2000s when P2P music took over the world.
(I remember. I was there. I guess I’m old now…)
I don’t get the hate for business licenses.
I’ve seen many open source contributors deflated because they wanted to share their code/solutions with other individuals and the world to learn from only to have their work sold as a service by a big cloud vendor without seeing something back for it. Or maybe even getting more work back to support the cloud vendor for free.
So I’m not surprised at all that licenses that allow commercial use up to a point and above that require seperate license or contributions back. It is still open source in a lot of ways. Can still be part of other open source distributions that themselves make no profit etc. And only companies that are more than able to pay must pay something.
It's a good idea if it actually works. Are enough commercial users paying up so that these projects get some serious funding?
If companies avoid using software governed by such licenses then the overall impact is negative in my opinion, because it will lead to competing and diverging clean room clones that just split the community and the ecosystem.
I agree it would be bad if it leads to a lot of replication and that is even easier in this age of LLMs. But has it been shown that this will happen?
which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.
Correlation is not causation.
What I lived through, was Linux taking off like a juggernaut, and IBM embracing it as a result. Large corps came along for the ride, they didn't drive it and at best paid for some gas.
DEVs being paid is simply what it is. The entire scsi/sata stack was originally re-authored by 3ware for example.
Why?
To sell stuff, and the guy was an advocate too.
It's always been this way, under the great wonder of the GPL, blessed be it.
It was so relevant that even Wikipedia discusses this, we were using Solaris, HP-UX and Aix for actual production deployments. Linux was our MP3 server.
Meanwhile every startup in SV was using Linux, Facebook was using Linux, Google, and everyone in between. This was early 2000. It had immense momentum without big boys like IBM coming in (and IBM was massive compared to Google or Facebook of that day).
FreeBSD 4 was big in early 2000s.
Yes, yet it was. There were the BSDs, some more popular than others. A lot of the time, especially back in the earlier days, stuff was more regional.
There certainly were mailing lists, usenet, forums, all of an all-encompasing scope. But there were also very local user groups, and pockets of wildly more and less usage depending upon region. The Internet was young, and many made decisions predicated upon what they saw around them.
The best way to be sure you had support, was a local healthy community of hackers around.
Really? Every single one?
You must have a good source of information for such a statement.
Do you want examples why Solaris was selling so well before the .com crash?
There are several 'early 2000s' after the .com crash. Linux growth was phenomenal, and as tends to happen with growth, starts with smaller market share.
There is no conflict in "linux was growing without the big boys' and 'it started with small market share'.
And yes, you can find exceptions to the rule, although regardless, do you see me saying "exclusively"? What does someone using Solaris, have to do with Linux only growing due to external help?
Google learned that it's exactly not in in their best interest when they lost their court case against Epic a few years ago which is why they are shifting focus away from open source and moving towards Apple's walled garden approach. If they had locked down their platform similarly as Apple did, Epic would probably have lost it's case for similar reasons.
Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.
> Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.
But the parts of Android that are majority outside developed is still available as the Linux kernel. I have my doubts that the uniquely Android bits of the userland and system services have many outside contributions.
Isn't the biggest problem caused by the opaque drivers for the hardware? At least that seemed to be the roadblock a few years ago.
I forgot about this. Epic lost the same kind of suit against Apple. That's hilarious.
I think this is true, but I also believe the original people who built it are not the people in charge now.
Like most projects, anyone that thinks Linux or Steam will stay as they are when the generation that started it all is gone, is in for a surprise.
I'm convinced that this is causing a lot of problems right now, including outside of the tech industry.
A lot of the people now in charge of large organizations have never been down in the trenches. Or even near them.
They operate in an abstract world with very little connection to reality.
We haven't had antitrust enforcement for 25 years. It's high time we did.
Google needs to be broken up.
Its still crazy to me that a judge effectively said "yes you're a monopoly, but it's too hard to break you up so we won't bother"... I'm being glib, but only slightly.
Start with Apple which actually has a monopoly on mobile devices in USA and let's go from there then.
You do care about the market and aren't just angry because a corp doesn't listen to your orders, right? RIGHT?
You would have a heck of a job convincing a court that 60% domestic market share in a two competitor market constitutes a monopoly.
Then how is Google a monopoly at 40%?
It isn’t, and nobody said it is. The ruling in question did not find that Google had a mobile OS monopoly. It found that they had monopolies in both the ad server and ad exchange markets, and was using them to reinforce each other in an anticompetitive way.
So why would they breakup Android away from Google (essentially killing the product as a whole due to lack of funding from Play) instead of separating the Ad business?
That’s not the metric under which Google is seen as a monopoly, and you know it.
It’s search. And ads.
No I don't know it. Is that what echelon meant when saying Google needs to be broken up?
Wow, Apple really made the right business choice only catering to people who don't care about any of this. Google set different expectations, and it already bit them with Epic.
MS was never broken up.
So do M$ as well ?