Re:Zoom Acquires Keybase
by 411111111111111 on Thursday May 07, 2020 @10:22AM
(#23103263)
It's actually a pretty good example to be honest.
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
Re:Zoom Acquires Keybase
by semi-extrinsic on Thursday May 07, 2020 @10:13AM
(#23103185)
Maybe "losing Ubuntu if Canonical went under" is a better analogy then?
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.)