Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet

Re:Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet by parennoob on Tuesday July 26, 2016 @03:48PM (#12168287)

You are conflating technical and financial power. If your company has bleeding edge technology, and the only thing you want is to see it widely adapted, open source or freely license all your software, so a large number of small companies can build things using it. But (my guess is, I don't know what company this is) you won't do so because you want to leverage the financial power of that knowledge. In that case, why begrudge the Google researchers their 300k?

An example of a truly distributed purely technical power group would be something like Debian GNU/Linux. One of the reasons it's possible, and getting easier by the day to run desktop software that isn't locked down by one of the big corporations is the existence of distributed projects like the kernel and Debian.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet by AndrewKemendo on Tuesday July 26, 2016 @04:05PM (#12168389)

I'm not conflating it, they are related. I had this argument at AGI 14 where someone was trying to argue that it was possible to make disruptive FOSS to the same scale as Google. I just don't believe it. Why? People have to eat. If you want to compete, at the impactful-change the power structure level, you have to pay people real competitive wages to work full time.

What you say is anathema to everything else written on this site about how to build good products with good people that have impact.

Otherwise you wait around till the next gauss/perelman shows up that's only working for passion.

[ Parent | on HN ]