It's a lame argument that just because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product that you are using, you need to shut up and stop criticising them!
The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company.
The fact that a public for-profit corporate made a product open source doesn't mean that they have suddenly become altruistic - it just means that it made business sense for them to make it so.
The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.
I don't think that's what op wrote.
It doesn't make sense that folks use open source code from these companies but then there's shock and outrage that these companies are also using open source code written by others.
>because an evil company like Google or Facebook or Microsoft made an open source product
It's hard to take you seriously when you blanketly dismiss companies as being "evil" (whatever that means). By what metric are these companies "evil"? Wow.
The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ... The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you. And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.
> The fact that someone uses their open source product is an endorsement to the open source movement, not of the company ...
Terribly ungrateful of you, but okay, it's not a crime.
> The fact that it is open source means that the company doesn't own the product nor can it control you.
No, releasing open source code doesn't imply signing away copyright or ownership. For instance, Mozilla owns Firefox (not only in the trademark sense); you can build another browser with their code, but you need to call it Iceweasel or something else.
> And the fact that it is open source means that the product is being made by contributions from the general public too, and not just the company.
Open source doesn't mean that at all. Good old immutable tarball dump can be every bit as open source as accepting contributions from everyone on the planet. In fact, check out esr's The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
"Open source" is already intentionally or unintentionally skewed to represent many things it isn't, please don't add more arbitrary attributes to it.
Companies are not people. It is nonsensical to say that someone is being grateful or ungrateful to some abstract legal construct.
If the executives of some company decide to let their employees work on open source projects, it's because they think this will improve profitability in some way: advertisement, attracting talent, benefiting from free work, facilitating adoption, etc.
Most of these companies benefit from open source way more than they contribute. Which is fine, but let's not assign human emotions to things that are not human. Being grateful to a corporation is the same as being grateful to your coffee machine for making coffee when you press the button.
I am very grateful to people who contribute to open source on their free time.
How could I not? It's one of the most repeated clichés in the history of clichés.
In any case, I am not denying mutual benefit or trying to forbid anyone from anything. I am just saying that if you are shouting "you ungrateful bastard" and the target of gratitude is a legal entity, you are just being silly.
It's the other way around, if you hate them and criticize them so much, you need to stop using their products.
"We had horrible gravel roads and the dictator came and built good roads we use even today". Is my late-grandparents argument as to why dictatorship is by far the best way to rule a country. And I 'd happily drive on those roads to tell them they are dead wrong.
Yes. And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model. This "free to use for your personal data" model ensures that any potential competitor has a very high bar to entry, and it ensures that their product will always be inferior because of the lack of data that can make it better.
You sure it's not the same cheap consumers that cause race-to-the-bottom business models in a lot of other industries too (airlines)?
Right now the only way to charge the average consumer is through their debit or credit card. This makes micro transactions through the web infeasible.
Imagine a world where there weren't such massive legislative moats and selective enforcement in favor of big financial players and against the small.
Personally I believe if setting up the competetion to MasterCard/Visa weren't made virtually impossible via legislation, we'd see many card with transactions fees of $0.000X instead of $0.xx/transaction + Y%/transaction + minimums.
I think consumers would be much more ok with paying for reading a news article at $0.01/read. But alas, such options aren't on the table. I do concede it's hard to prove the reason for current transaction fees is what I attributed in my post, but there is evidence for it.
I also think that the way money is created an placed into the system could be done in a way that created more smaller competitors instead of such large pools of capital, which can more easily try and engage in anti competitive behavior.
I think you'll find that very few people are willing to engage in any degree of per article mental gymnastics to read a news article, and will instead be very very selective about what they read, with ruinous effects for local news.
If Spotify was not $9.99 flat fee you would likely not happily leave it on all night or use it as background music for fear of what it was costing. The difference between the way people used metered and unmetered internet was huge. Charging any kind of fee on a per article basis would have profound impacts on the way people consume media.
If only a few of the paywall newspapers would implement a direct per article fee, even at $0.10-0.50 I would pay for many articles because I'm too lazy and don't want to pull up a javascript disabled google cache version of the page or fire up a VM... or any of the other techniques SWIM would use to get around paywalls.
Pablo Escobar donated tons of money to the Medellín community. Doesn't make any criticisms against him hold less water.
I always kept quiet about this, but I've felt that way for a long time about anything that comes from Google and especially Facebook. Should I not feel a little icky about using React.js?
People are imperfect, and organizations made of people are inherently imperfect. If you didn't allow yourself to use anything made by anyone who acted immorally, you wouldn't be allowed to use anything.
Should I not use Comcast for my internet if it's the only provider in my area? At a certain point the 'karma' associated with taking a hard-line on a company's ethics is no longer worth the inconvenience.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the team behind it. The reason I might choose not to use a technology owned by Facebook is that my use would be promoting it; the more popular React becomes, the more encouraged people are to contribute code to it, which helps Facebook in a minuscule way. Nonetheless, the popularity of React does contribute to Facebook's success in some way.
Comcast is a different story, as I'm not aware of people helping them for free by using and developing their own tools. I get what you are saying by generally objecting to Comcast and facing the dilemma of paying them when you have no other options. I guess it depends on how much you dislike Comcast and if you are willing to replace them with free public WiFi and Netflix. At least with Facebook, there are plenty of alternatives(as well as ripoffs of React).
Contributing to firefox, openssh, wikipedia and the linux kernel also helps Facebook in various ways. Should we stop doing that?
React is an open source project. Facebook did right by it (unlike other open source projects coming out of FB such as Flow). I find this hardline stance kinda ridiculous when it's one of the rare good things to come out of Facebook. It should be encouraged if anything. But even if not, it is a standalone project and a very good model example of how companies should release stuff as open source, so not contributing to it "because it helps Facebook" is completely missing the point of what open source is.
I'd sign up for ad free FB for $2-$3 a month if it made it easy to set retention periods on my data and opt out of the collection.
So you're offering to pay far less than they make off you right now.
I block ads on Facebook web and don't have any of their mobile apps installed, so I can't imagine they're making more money from me than if I paid them to not have any ads.
They make money by being able to target ads, not just from simply showing them, so all the data they have about you, and your links to other people, and correlations that can be derived from all that, and so forth, all feed in to that earning potential.
You might not be seeing the resulting adverts, but can you say that about all your direct contacts, and all the people in groups you are linked to, and all the other people who interact with posts & events you comment on or otherwise interact with, and all the people that...?
You are still very much part of their income model by being part of the data graph - you are not breaking the system remotely as much as you think by arranging not to see adverts.
Letting people pay to not see ads would require both initial and on-going development & testing effort so you have to include that in any cost/benefit analysis of the situation too. And that design & development could be pretty complex: by making a legitimate ad skipping option available they risk creating a hacking opportunity that makes it easier for people to skip them without paying. It might also send a bad signal to the advertisers: people with more disposable income are more likely to pay to skip the adverts, because the cost will feel less to them, and people with more disposable income are usually those that the advertisers usually most want to reach.
That advertisers might want to reach me isn't especially relevant, because there's no situation under which that is a possible outcome for fb.
Who the advertisers might want to reach is relevant because FB can currently promise to do whatever is practically possible to block ad blocking. This doesn't amount to much (tricks like the extra divs littered through the word "sponsored" and so forth, to obfuscate the advert related code & markup from blocking scripts, for instance) but is better from the advertisers point of view than them admitting it is going to happen and they've given up stopping it. And again, the official ad blocking method is likely to make unofficial blocking easier - they would have to defend that to their advertising customers.
The other issue that could come up is effectively creating a two tier system, with those that can afford to pay and those that can't. Equality and privacy defenders might be all over that, and however right or wrong people think each side would be there FB are not going to want that on top of all the public scrutiny they are already getting.
Also that seems way way up since in 2017 they made only 6.18$ in Q4[1]... so who's suddenly paying so much money for our user data?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
I cited a number that is annual and is looking at North American revenue which is an indicator of mature market potential.
One day I'm going to build this premium Facebook clone that respects user privacy!
Come on Hacker News, make it so I don't have to!
Such a system could be easily abused, however, without some kind of bulletproof third-party auditing in place.
If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services (maps, gmail, search, docs, youtube, etc.) I might even consider using it.
It's too late for that, I'm afraid. Google and the others have invested billions in their ad products and made back many more billions. It wouldn't make any sense for them to offer any kind of paid opt-out.
And even if you didn't use any Google services, they already have reams of data on you based on your correspondence with anyone with a Gmail account, plus whatever data they can buy off your carrier network and your credit card provider.
Netflix etc do it with premium services etc
Gsuite?
Facebook tracks you regardless of whether you have a Facebook account.
Developers made these products. I'm sure they would be just as happy getting paid the same wage and making awesome products without working for a morally bankrupt company, but those opportunities don't exist. FAANG are the only institutions on the planet that have the resources to fund large-scale open source projects.
It's not their code. Linux didn't come from a company for example. The list goes on.
The amount of code they give back is peanuts compared to the amount of code they benefitted from to build their businesses. No need to feel guilty whatsoever to use it. Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.
>Also totally fine to point out the parasitic players.
Who are the parasites?
These bad-faith posts that are really just unconstructive rants are turning this site into Reddit.
There can exist a mutual beneficial symbiosis between companies and the open source community. But at some point the symbiotic behavior can become parasitic, causing harm. I think it's super important when such behaviors get pointed out (here at HN).
He currently does.
There's no logical contradiction in attacking a company for doing bad things with the open source software they wrote and instead praise company who use that software for good. Software is not good or evil, it's how the company/people that use it that determines good vs evil.
The people at Google who contribute too, and champion open source are probably not the ones who are making the decisions that we see as "evil."
Google is competing for top talent engineering, and Googles commitment to open source boils down to a company perk meant to attract and retain top engineers.
Google is a advertising company. Everything else they do is in service of that.
Regardless of my diatribe, the business decisions are what the HN community rails against, and those are typically not the decision made by the rank-and-file (who are likely contribute the most to open source).
From a consumer perspective, this is not particularly true, but it's definitely a factor in their behaviour. For instance, if Google made all its money by indexing data for big companies and selling the index, do you think they would own YouTube or have created Gmail?
The Ads org within Google is large but fairly compartmentalized and runs like an absolute machine -- there is no questioning that.
What most outsiders don't see, though, is how much independence all the other orgs have. For example, the fastest growing collection of stuff are the Hardware & Cloud areas, which account for probably 35000-40000 employees and are almost completely autonomous. If Ads show up on Google hardware products (let's use Google Home as an example), that's because the Home team exposed a service that allowed the Ads team to do it, not because the Home team was necessarily thinking about display/search ads during product design. In fact, there are many services Google provides where it's well understood that users will not tolerate ads at all (like Google Assistant surfaces).
The reason I responded to the parent was because they made a blanket statement, which, while true if you only look at the fiscal reports, is untrue in practice. One could certainly argue strongly that Google's inability to strike it rich with anything besides Ads is 1) the reason the stock has been in the [relative] doldrums for the past year+, and 2) why Google continues to invest in all sorts of things (like Wing, or Chronicle, or Stadia, or ...) that are pretty far afield, not to mention the pure & applied research happening inside the RMI/Brain org that's often much more academic than practical.
Besides search & mobile (admob) advertising, the only two major product areas inside Google that take a strong stance supporting the advertising mission are Youtube & Maps, but even then Maps tries to ensure it's surfacing useful, actionable, timely, and local information, which generally place it in a different category. Maps also have strong potential via partnerships for things like ride services, appointment bookings, travel, food delivery, and the like... some of which might technically be considered advertising but which manifests more like functional partnerships.
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Some people don't use FB.
Some people would say FU to the thought of paying $2-3 to FB for anything.
It's really a tragedy of the commons.
Users on average refuse to pay for software/web apps directly so companies have to find other alternative ways to get funding and make money.
People complain about Facebook constantly and how they're selling their data yet these users wouldn't sign up to pay $2-3 per month for Facebook directly.