So much money slushing around can make things a little grayer because in either case the investor didn't actually perform any work themselves. But I'm confident they can use some of that money to discern who ultimately owned what, who employed who, and what type of relationship was created.
I feel like newswriters just love to generate hot air with this "sue a robot" trope. Who to sue for that?
Although obviously such warnings can't reach some people... My favourite example of this was the collapse of OptionSellers.com following the huge move in Natural Gas futures. I mean, they were selling options - it's right there in the name...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/hedge-fun...
Saying the algorithm makes 95% winning trades may not mean much if those remaining 5% of trades cause you to lose most of your value.
For example, if not being able to explain a model leaves an organization open to litigation, they may instead rely on statistical based learning methods even if they performed less well.
Is cheesing an algorithm illegal?
For the time being, they often go back and give posts and accounts a manual second review, and often reverse the decision. For now, that keeps the general conversation around this issue from going too far. But it can't last.
In the end, people will use whatever software has a good reputation. If something bad happens, well it's on them. The sky didn't fall using this model.
Therefore his criticism made sense at the time.
While open-source code and open-source maintainers are critical parts of the ecosystem, I think open source users are underrated. If nobody shared their experience about how a piece of open-source software is actually behaving once you put it to use in production, open-source software would have much less value than it currently has.
I told him that most of the software using this model is simply more reliable than proprietary software, but he just didn't get it. There was already plenty of "reputation" even back then, he just wasn't a hacker and couldn't understand any other perspective other than his own.
The evolution of open source software in the twenty years hence suggests that this particular question is not as silly as you frame it.
You're right that open source had been a thing for quite some time in 1998. GNU was started in 1983 after all.
But I respectfully disagree that open source was "obvious" in 1998. Hell, at that time, one could argue it was not obvious for a lot of people how much the Internet and computers would alter our lives. Open source was the least obvious part of quite a few a mind-bending paradigm shifts.
One of PG’s essays has a line like, ‘any competitor using Oracle was easy to ignore.’ Successful OS software needs to be good enough not to need marketing and happens to be free. It might not be the best, but cheap and good enough generally has a lot going for it.
My CEO could do my job. He would need an additional degree in programming, and even more time in a day. He hires me because telling my bosses bosses (skip several levels) boss to get something done will go down the chain into figuring it out how to go from we need to grow market share in the area I'm working to actual code that will grow that market share. This across thousands of employees - the CEO could learn to do any one but he can't do all of them.
On the contrary every big org is using OSS.
OSS is in everything.
That there is 'nobody to sue' is besides the point, it's like suing the inventor of the fork because something happened with a fork.
If you bought something complicated from someone with a contract and you depend on it doing ABC and it doesn't, then there's a case of liability.
But tons of software is OSS and there's nobody to sue.
'Liability' in software is maybe important in some areas, but mostly it's not.
Most of our problems as a society are due to that gap.
If anyone should be sued, its Costa (Captain Magic/con-artist/salesperson/whatever) who, if what the investor claims is true, greatly oversold the capabilities of the software.
And even then there might not be a strong case against him.