I agree, and just want to reiterate what was written in the article: we genuinely feel no animosity towards Meta and its gaming headsets. We don't even feel animosity that they have leveraged their economies of scale to provide them very cheaply to consumers (something we aren't able to do yet[1]). We just disagree with their product vision, and are pursuing our own. We also think subpoenaing us for this case seems unreasonable.

[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/why-is-the-simula-one-so-expensive...

I suspect that with all such things, that a hacker's opinion on the relevant law is probably `/r/ConfidentlyIncorrect`.

I have no opinion on the substantial legal matters at question. It's been my observation that the ranking folks at Meta in the VR world are as ethical as fiduciary obligation permits, but YMMV.

I thank you for your reply and hope that you agree that a substantial legal matter which will inevitably be resolved by people competent to do so shouldn't become a political football in a small but influential forum of people who on average know as little about IP law as I do :)

Wether it's reasonable or not is orthogonal to the law. It's not because something is legal that it should be a thing. I think that whether or not this is legal, the idea Meta can access internal documentation from a smaller competitor is unreasonable.

Sure, but do we even know what the law currently says on this matter? I've seen a lot of speculation in the comments here, but very few facts. Even the original blog post seems to have been written before consulting an attorney.

For example, does the law have any mechanism for compensating SimulaVR for their work on this case? What mechanisms exist for appeal? Does Meta have free reign to examine the subpoenaed documents, or are there restrictions on how that information can be used and who can see it?

It just seems to me you ought to know what the law says first before arguing it needs to be changed. Chesterton's Fence and all that...

Presumably they did get a lawyer, but I don't see why they should get off the Internet.

If Meta is going to use the legal system to bully tiny startups that tangentially compete with them, they might as well take a bit of a PR hit for doing it.

The parent is already going grey via downvotes, which I think is a bit harsh: "hire a lawyer and let them hire PR people" is in fact generally good advice.

This thread is 1 part "this isn't the place to litigate this" and 2 parts "i've got a beef with big tech", so it's unlikely to be germane and therefore the all caps are likely to be a bit much.

But it's good advice generally, and that shouldn't be downvoted.

Hiring a lawyer was the first thing we did. For the rest, I'd gladly do this if we had the funds to do so. We don't.

Plus, we as a company are (maybe excessively) open. Of course we're going to get involved in legal proceedings, that's a fact of life. Doesn't mean we won't talk about it.

In my highly uninformed view, you're thus far in the clear near as my uninformed, ignorant ass can tell.

But the GP's advice is still as good as when it was printed: for the most part, the under-resourced party is courting nothing but trouble by courting public opinion litigation.

Do talk to a lawyer, don't say more than you can help on the Internet. It's good advice.

> corporate funding of all the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the megacorps

This is a fallacy: It's possible comparable open source contributions could have been made without the graces of the corporates.

For example: The giants tend to buy out their competition early, so how could it mature enough to be able to contribute comparably, or possibly better, to open source?

IMHO the open source contributions of these companies are a form of tech-washing, regardless of the honest and best intentions of their employees.

There really isn't any way to confirm or refute that kind of argument. What would happen if regulation or social norms or whatever prevented big tech companies from existing? I don't know and (frankly) you don't either.

I use emacs a dozen plus hours a day, and GNU wouldn't exist if RMS hadn't been bullied at the lunch room in the MIT AI Lab. Would the world be a better or worse place if he didn't have a personal jihad against Symbolics draped in a GNU bumper sticker?

I don't know.

Of course, but you don't know either. So your argument that these (or equivalent) contributions wouldn't exist without the megacorps doesn't hold.

It's dramatically easier to prove to a reasonable observer that Kubernetes got lifted off the ground by a bunch of folks on Google payroll than it is to prove that some GNU diehard would have inevitably sold that (silly) idea to like a zillion people if only Google didn't beat them to it.

I make these sort of observations with a certain regret: I was a kid already pushing the limits on a DOS-type machine when you could first get Slackware media: the GNU userspace has been home since before I ever woke up next to a girl.

But it's kinda over now. LLVM vs. GCC is a desperate rearguard action, the Rust people have broken the mindshare monopoly on shared libraries that was insulating `glibc` from it's better (`musl` in almost every case is better), old-timers like me are me are a bit attached to emacs and bash, but neovim and fish are pretty fucking good.

GNU and free software in general are no longer superior by virtue of Sun Microsystems leaning too hard into the JVM: they've got to work for it now, and they're getting their asses kicked.

That's taking it to extreme, though. It's possible that a large number of medium companies, for instance, would have the same open source yield as the megacorps who just bought them out (in our reality). Especially if it were easier for them to attract more talented engineers, which would be the case if the big companies had less of a grip on the existing market (e.g. if Meta were forced to split up, as regulators push for)

I'm kind of confused but maybe it's my age. My career ran parallel to the birth of open source and it was explicitly a reaction against megacorps behavior and practices.

The participation in it part is newer, they were initially very hostile (I was warned any number of times aligning strategies against oss projects incase it was 'detrimental to my career')

The thing about reading GNU mailing lists is that they're so, I don't know, intimate or something. They're freely available for anyone to read, but community members talk so openly on them that you feel like you're wire-tapping someone's living room.

I've had enough professional stuff on the line to need to pay attention to GNU over the years even though it always creeped me out a little bit, and I don't see how anyone can read them without concluding that Stallman feeling personally slighted was the reason he went on the crusade, and the software freedom thing was a reasonably comfortable paintjob.

He got picked last for Symbolics, the LMI people didn't really want him around either but were getting clobbered on defense contracts so they kind of couldn't turn down his code (he's a great hacker), and the rest is sort of history until Linus comes along right?

Yeah, I agree. I distinctly remember open source becoming more corporate as the years got by, and corporate becoming more open source aligned.

Sidebar: I don't know what "tech-washing" means. When I see that a company is laundering some bias or some social advantage through a machine learning model I just call it money laundering, because the inputs and outputs are both money and I think we've coined enough new victimhood words per year every year for many years.

If a company is profiting off it's "open-source" contributions, getting out more than it's putting in, then it's washing money through GitHub I guess. That's fair.

But "tech-washing" has this implication that any computer hacker is in a bad way, which is just silly: back when we had to go to the office the freeway overpasses we drove on had tent encampments under them.

Take that up with the Ayn Rand idiots who are not uncommon in these parts.

By "techwashing" I mean using some of the money a company makes in its main business (which in the case of Meta and some other corporates has a bad impact on society) to make a positive technical contribution to the public , thus helping existing and prospective employees work there with less of a guilty conscience.

Similar, to e.g. a pharmaceutical company raising the price of a medicine excessively, but then donating some of the money to build a hospital.

It's just that in the case of tech companies, the reputation washing is done via technical contributions.

I think you're giving HN too much credit. Threads involving certain topics (e.g. big tech) are completely overrun with snark and hate that I don't see much of the relentless curiosity you're talking about.

Agreed, it has become more and more frequent that HN threads are overrun by comments that seem more like they're straight out of reddit or even just your local newspaper comment section. With all the snark or aggressive dismissive pessimism they involve.

It's really sad to see because I love the HN comment section for how easily you can say a thing and everyone understands there's nuance and lots of angles to address the topic.

I've made posts about an app and the author appears curious about the issue (I'm not asking for support, just fun that folks are curious). Other people who understand the complexity (or just that there is complexity) involved are around to explore the issue / ask great questions.

Where other places the response would be the typical cynical "Oh that's just because they want you to upgrade!" and so on.

In fairness: if you talk shit on Rust here you're in for a stomping, but if you praise Rust on `/r/programming` you're in for the same stomping by a different crowd ;)

I know what you're talking about in only the way that someone who too often has been part of the problem can :)

But this forum is coming up on two decades and has like one or two full-time moderators and somehow remains an island of rational discourse in an Internet full of "I'm trained in gorilla warfare".

It has it's good days and it's bad days, (just as I do as a participant) but I think it's pretty unique.

Yeah it's definitely been making me pull my engagement back on HN. It even motivated me to get onto Twitter lol. At some point I want to read something a bit more stimulating than Tech Nextdoor. I originally came here from Digg and Slashdot because I enjoyed talking with other engineers and founders in the weeds, but I think the HN crowd has drifted far away from that start.

That said the conversation quality here on the non-hellthreads is still quite high. I enjoyed the thread on C yesterday. It's just that hellthreads and strident comments "feel" like they're becoming the norm here and it's harder to escape from them.

Yeah I have a mental denylist of HN terms at this point where I just avoid reading hn comments. In contrast to some topics where I can't wait to see discussion, those still exist, but these days (I say that like it's new, but it's been like this a while) they are fewer.

I'm sorry you don't like our tone.

Hey, I've been around here a long time and I mouth off more often than most: no moral judgements from me.

But yeah, it's a pretty gritty tone and at times it tends to blur a bit with the complaints about the interviews being too hard and the pay being too high, which isn't an awesome vibe.

I'm the last person to judge someone for shooting off, I get heated myself, but I try to be honest about what exactly the pebble in my shoe is.

unfortunately it looks like many internet threads lose their nuance and devolve into black and white, and HN is no exception

> try saying something bad about Kubernetes if you don't believe me

Kubernetes is an absolute mess, and I would never willingly subject myself to it.

If a humongous corporation is giving something away for free, it’s either because it suits their agenda, or because it’s so irrelevant to them they do not care.

But maybe, and hear me out here, FB deserves the shade.

FB definitely deserves some shade: the “move fast and break things” philosophy is real, and they’ve (we’ve) played fast-and-loose with things we didn’t fully understand, some of that ended very badly.

But as megacorps go, FB seems to have had a “come to Jesus” moment on those kinds of mistakes and done a hard pivot to a more responsible and adult posture. It was built by people barely out of childhood, certainly I was still a child when I worked there and putting a 20-something in charge of a powerful company is going to create some collateral damage. No one can say with a straight face that FB hasn’t fucked up more than once or twice.

But those kids grew up a bit, whether via altruism or pragmatism have decided to step quite a bit more carefully, and unlike 10 years ago, FB is probably closer to “don’t be evil” than Google is. It’s still a ruthless megacorp answering to shareholders, but I wouldn’t say that in 2022 it’s even close to the worst of the bunch.

> People are quite pleased to enjoy the corporate funding of all the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the megacorps

I used to be in that boat. But after seeing where Chrome ended up, and how this affects the web today, I can't help but think that long-term, we'd be better off if the megacorps disappeared together with the funding.

I think its good for the society as a whole to always view Mega Corps. which have more money than several governments combined with suspicion, Because even when they get punished for their 'shady dealings' the fines are usually a rounding error for their weekly revenue; Meta's recent $400M fine for Instagram not protecting children's data comes to mind.

Public opinion on the brand seem to hold more accountability than the courts for these Mega Corps, After all Facebook did become Meta FWIW.