Keybase seems like something that should be small, isolated, FOSS, supported by a foundation, etc. They could have built a business _around_ Keybase I'd imagine, but all they managed to do with this is invalidate Keybase and make people like myself, who feared their business motivations, feel vindicated for being paranoid.
I'll never blame anyone for wanting to make money, to make a business, etc. But if you make a product that walks talks and acts like a FOSS project, but keep it to center your business around... I'll always be longing for a real, true FOSS replacement.
In this case a good looking FOSS alternative came out a few months ago iirc. Though for the life of me I can't remember the name.
edit: https://keys.pub/ - though I will still miss KBFS
I don't see how Google's proprietary search engine or Facebook's proprietary interface to our social network rely on the broken window fallacy.
Would you mind elaborating?
Open source is famous for fostering a bunch of different approaches to the same problem, and slightly different forks of the same concept. That's the "bazaar" in the famous metaphor, as opposed to the "cathedral" of monolithic, hierarchical, linear proprietary development within a closed-source company.
"Everyone working on the same thing" only works well when there is broad agreement on what that thing should be, and strong governance to resolve disputes. National highway systems, militaries, and power grids are good examples.
I don't think search engines are a good example of where this would work; it's not clear in advance what will make a given search engine better. Thus we benefit from a variety of competing approaches, essentially to expand the space in which we're searching for the optimum.
Also, the broken window thing asserts that small amounts of criminal activity lead to larger amounts of criminal activity via signaling that being bad or neglectful is OK, which is both not proven and irrelevant to software writers being prone to reinvent the wheel for whatever reasons they have.
I think you would be right about the greater good being served by everyone being aligned on the same search engine ONLY IF we understood search engines so well that we knew there to be only one mathematically optimal way to build search engines.
Since we don't understand search engines that well, there is a LOT of value in the exploration over the space of search engines that these different companies represent.
The broken window fallacy argument is that those speaking of the benefits of the broken window are mistaking maintenance cost for generated value. That doesn't seem to be the case here. This is society implicitly investing in exploration over exploitation.
However they would still be able to borrow good bits from each other and gain insight on how things could be done differently, so arguably the end result would be a win. From a technical standpoint that is -I think where it gets messy is when we try to factor in the business implications.
Arguably I think they agree with me, about the extensions at least. As seen by their seemingly random directions of feature extensions that Keybase was prone to. My issue is not that they chose random features to try to make profitable, but rather that the core premise, a public keystore, was tied so closely to a for profit company.
It would be like losing Git because Github went under. (Though, terrible example because Git works without a centralized repo, but it's just the first company <-> FOSS relationship that came to mind lol.)
Keybase was a centralized key storage with value-add services such as file storage and chat.
That was absolutely comparable to github, as you could've just gone back to manually syncing pubkeys and encrypting msgs. If github went away, you'd be without a lot of value-add services as well such as wiki, issues user management etc
Realistically speaking, nobody is going to do that... And tbh, it was already dead in the water when they added crypto currencies... Just took a while for their money to run out.
The actual difference is that there are enough competing products for github, not for keybase however, as that is just too niche
> It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.[1]
Capitalism is about acquiring capital, i.e. money. There's no such evidence that people with money actually spend it in ways other than investment, and the sole purpose of that isn't to donate to companies that need it, it's to profit off it and essentially hoard more capital. Sure, poor people with either very little or no capital spend that capital on necessities, and thus drive the economy, but there's no evidence that people with large amounts of capital spend that on anything at all, there's more evidence that they hoard it and seek only to acquire more capital. The entire system is built to favour those people.
If you have to pay to replace a window that should have lasted, say, ten more years, that's money you now cannot spend on improving your factory somehow.
It is still economic activity (and the glazier doesn't mind the work) but it's remedial rather than generative. (The glazier that repairs the window could have been installing a new one in a new factory, eh?)
EDIT: It looks like it might, from the front page, I will try it out to make sure. If it does, that'll be great!
EDIT 2: It sort of does, but it's on a per-key basis, not an entire identity. You can publish proof on Twitter/Github/whatever, but it's only for one specific key, and it's one key per service, which means you can't only have one identity and multiple services.
And even if retention wasn't a problem at all, skilled people are not inherently skilled, they need to keep challenging themselves in their area of expertise to stay sharp. If the "home" product was failing to foster in-house expertise before then chances are high that it's a problem based on culture and priorities and experts injected from outside would quickly lose their edge. Keep them on the project they became experts on and they stay experts.
I wouldn’t quit my job (and I’m not looking anyway), but there’s plenty of hiring going on.
People went to work for this company based on the domain, the people, or the culture. With the acquihire they change the domain first, and the culture about a year in. Then the people start to leave, and it's just a job, and one you didn't even apply for.
On my worst days it felt like I was sold like cattle, and I would have seen more upside by hiring on someplace else.