To see them as "good actor" because of a token $200k, while stealing literally tens of billions is missing the forest for the trees. Strategically, feels penny wise, pound foolish.
I get the concern, and fines and punishment is all fine. But I think they might also have got caught in the geopolitical crossfire. It's a messy world; Samsung and Apple are stealing eachother's billions everyday, Google and Facebook are spying on us, DOD is killing people. I don't know who it's morally permissible to do business with anymore, but we're trying to get by.
Is an excellent argument for more technological sharing (as is/was customary in china), and less IP ownership.
Because they're incapable?
I think it's extremely naive to think that Huawei is just an innocent victim. Almost willfully so.
> I think the stealing instead of R&D thing is somewhat misled. These guys are definitely spending billions on research as well.
If you really think Huawei's R&D theft is blown out of proportion, there's a huge mountain of evidence that suggests the exact opposite. There's really not much wiggle room for ifs and buts. If anything, it's probably worse than reported.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-litte...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Intellectu...
and you know, this indictment.
That being said, I don't expect you to say anything bad about the hand that feeds you. Given Huawei's reputation, they're probably monitoring you as we speak.
> Almost willfully so.
> I don't expect you to say anything bad about the hand that feeds you. Given Huawei's reputation, they're probably monitoring you as we speak.
I think your post would have been just fine making your point without these remarks. It's just someone sharing their experience, that's what I'm reading the comment threads for. We can all see it's a new throwaway account without you lashing out at them.
Literally the same situation happens, when FB employees post from an anonymous account and defend Facebook.
Reactions are quite a bit more reserved, if not always nice or believing. They will get pointy questions, but they are expected to be treated with respect. Sometimes HN mods even remind people of this.
I think it's actually pretty disgusting how forgiving a large part of the HN crowd is, when they do it for US companies. It's just the big X-word. Hostility against those who are even suspected of doing it for the US media enemy du jour.
Now of course FB is a finger of the hand that's feeding you the very idea that Huawei is doing it more than USFAANG. (who, coincidentally, also are monitoring you as you speak)
- lots of companies, like apple, are stealing from non US companies.
- US companies like Google and Facebook have much more personal data than huawai.
The whole privacy concern regarding Huawai is not well argumented. And its mostly an excuse by trump to attack China that is becoming a big world economy with manufacturing and technology skills rivalling USA.
Huawai is good competition in their field making products across the board cheaper. Competition is in the core of capitalism. May the strongest survive.
5G will be more expensive to rollout without them.
Ok, if they "copy" certain tech youre free to go to court. But a complete ban... thats just bad politics.
At a national level, the R&D spending is actually important to build up your society's fundamental expertise in an area. You learn from your failures and mistakes. And in the meanwhile, you build up the expertise in your population, and those people, may later leave, and form other companies, which further advances your society.
However, if you can get the research results of your competitors, and learn that certain paths don't work, then you can save time and money, and not go down that same path. But, I still feel that you learn most from your failures, because you build in safeguards to prevent them from happening again in the future. So you end up with a technique, a system of systems, to build out your final product.
It's like Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
We're a US-based startup that does about $100-200k in business annually with Futurewei (Huawei's R&D subsidiary). I've never dealt with Huawei proper. I can say they're genuinely investing in R&D, and trying to build a product unlike anything being offered right now. We're working with tech that's floating around the academic conferences, but no one else commercially will touch.
This in contrast to our experiences with established US companies which, a) don't want to deal with early-stage research, b) wouldn't work with us as a new, small company, and c) gave bad IP terms (ironically).
Not excusing other activities, but for us it's been above-board and beneficial. If they want to pump their profits into the US ecosystem, I see that as beneficial.