Can you clarify what you mean? I think there's a sense in which sometimes people say that google ruined the internet b/c (a) their prominence and their algorithm induced the creation of awful content farms, and (b) they pulled ad revenue away from some businesses that create content leaving us with a more impoverished web experience.
If you're making a different kind of assertion, please elaborate on it.
Wrt (a), I think site owners that had useful content weren't for the most part pushed to remove it, but were often pushed to pad it to the point that it feels less valuable to users (like recipe sites where every recipe is 12 paragraphs of prose before the actual recipe, IIUC), so I think this still fits in with the "dilution" framing, rather than removing valuable material in a way that excludes others from its use.
Wrt (b) I do think that when google displays content on the search page in a way that stops most users from continuing on to the page from which the information was sourced, that does seem effectively extractive. But I think that's distinct from the OSS project-capture problem.
> if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.
I actually think google is a good illustration of the full spectrum of OSS projects. They're definitely "getting their way" but:
- gson, guice, protobuf, snappy, the go language are all examples of projects that are very useful and pretty separate from any revenue-generating google product
- kubernetes, istio, etc are projects that can easily be used without touching any google revenue-generating project, but if you're using some of their revenue-generating projects, you may likely want something like this. Perhaps this is OSS but writing for your paying customer-base as a target audience?
- android, chrome, tensorflow are all about building little googleverse of customers in their orbit
I think an example is LLMs like ChatGPT. Basically consider a website that has good info on it. The LLM scrapes the site and regurgitates it's content to their user, and the original site never get a visit or recognition. The end result is the death of the site (much like strip mining results in).
Since the 80s or earlier, companies always sought to exert control over their audience. Things like Compuserv were early entrants, followed by Prodigy and eventually AOL and Microsoft’s entry - MSN.
Google made the network aspect of the internet better and ended up being a sort of gatekeeper. Facebook reinvented AOL, and a thousand copycats did variants of the same… Discord, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit.
Social wounded the internet. If anything “killed the internet”, it was Reddit and Twitter, cancer-like services both of which metastasized to destroy small-time internet properties, only to consolidate them into poorly managed, unprofitable companies.
Nonsense. If google scrapes your site, your site is not affected. Where is the toxic pit, exactly?
They don't push real content "down the internet" they push it down the google rankings.
And while Google search is not as great as it was, it remains a strong contender for the best way to find stuff on the internet.
I don't think the internet would be better off without it.
You can however make good arguments for Google News, "Instant Answers" in Search, and other products, taking (impressions) from the internet.(And Chrome, Chrome worries me.)
From experience, many people can truly not tell the difference.
Sorry, what?
For example, I am still working with my partner to get her to recognize and ignore the top level garbage: sponsored links and obvious SEO bait* when she blasts off a "Best <kitchen widget> 2023" search.
*You know, those listicles offered up from a handful of different sites that tend to be a 'top ten' list of a selection of 15 or so different products that are mostly just 7 actual different products white labeled by some brand and sold on amazon through a referral link in the listicle.
FTR, I think youtube is one (among a few) exceptions to this overall trend from google.
- US company false DMCA's your video
- you are in Nigeria for example, whom do you complain?
- YouTube subject to US laws and must comply, while you can't do much
- YouTube probs doesn't have much incentive to investigate or sue false DMCA
Kubernetes was developed, paid for and released by Google and loosely inspired by Borg.
ElasticSearch meanwhile wouldn't exist without Lucene which was again paid for and released by Excite in 1999, and who were very much not a David at the time.
PostgreSQL came out of Berkeley.. is the idea that David is the PostgreSQL Global Development Group (which includes Microsoft, Google and Amazon employees)? Or maybe it's EDB (https://www.enterprisedb.com/)?
> "Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with physical material means that others cannot have what you've pulled out; it's gone.
For instance, look at the amount of brainpower wasted on using tech to steal our attention via adtech (and its supporting industries), large companies using OSS to increase their monopolies instead of giving back, small companies trying to build nothing of immediate value, but rather blitz-scale so they can get sold at valuations not reflecting their value.
It can, but it often does the opposite. "Extraction" may not be a metaphor that's quite true to the material. But it's very true to the attitude with which many companies operate, and that's because a lot of business culture was developed in extractive contexts and then applied elsewhere.
Fortunately, our project is moving in the opposite direction than the one that the article describes: we have an independent steering committee & well-funded core team now, and lately have been actively trying to boot proprietary features out of the core offering. But it's a lot of work, both technically and socially, and we'd have much more time to spend on new features if it weren't for the dead weight we have to deal with.
Or even replying that they are busy with other things but if the company wants to pay for the change they can work on it, and company replying that that seems like "extortion", as if the developer is under moral obligation to fix Initrode's problems for free by the end of the week.
One clueless employee, almost certainly without the knowledge of his cow-orkers or managers let alone any kind of authorization to represent their employer when communicating externally, writes a dumb email to a FOSS project and suddenly the tech commentariat is all abuzz about "$BIGCORP (the whole thing) is 'practically crying and begging' to $FOSS_PROJECT for a feature"? Surely there must be a name for this fallacy and, if not, there should be. The organizational hivemind fallacy perhaps?
One reason beside bad culture is another aspect of bad culture. If they want a fix to a piece of FOSS, probably a library, they might have to beg their management for weeks or months, instead of just specifying that their project requires lib-from-overworked-dev-in-Nebraska-who-is-thinking-of-taking-up-alpaca-ranching-instead version 2.44 or later, which is what they can get if they beg, cry, and/or bully said alpaca contemplating developer.
I've been slow walking my FOSS releases because I have no idea how to squeeze some ramen out of it. Though my (dare I suggest) paradigm/category busting project was really hard (for me) to figure out, the end result is simplicity itself. And so therefore trivial to clone, fork, run away.
Possessing the business acumen of plankton, I've been swindled, plagiarized, and mooted a few times before. I don't need much more than ramen money. But not getting anything while others profit from my work, again, would really suck.
The project started as nonprofit with both a business goal (sustain itself by selling online courses) and a philanthropic vision (essentially: increase education access by disrupting the degree market & also open sourcing the code).
A decade later, the nonprofit sold the entire online course business, its brand, and most of its staffing to a for-profit company. It kept the copyright to the open source code, and the remaining staff now use the proceeds of the deal as an endowment to pusue the original philanthropic mission, which includes being a sort of core team for that open source code.
Some details [0]. The online course business is edx.org, the buyer was 2U, the source code is Open edX [1] and the nonprofit started as edX Inc and was renamed to Axim [2] after the sale.
0. https://press.edx.org/2u-inc.-and-edx-complete-industry-rede...
TL;DR: Start off as a nonprofit, build a valuable product, sell the product, and then use the money to continue the nonprofit. YMMV ;)
They don't need to, until they realize people aren't upgrading to the added layers of offerings and then start removing that value. This is required because the base value tends to be substantial enough to swiftly encourage people to use it, and VC loves the growth this comes with.
There is a crucial subsection of OSS used within companies but those often come with support contracts and branding which is what you're referring to with Google, but a far cry from "most".
I really do think you're not seeing the forest through the trees here.
The analysis isn’t suffering from it but rather that is the analysis.
The authors whole point is that these foss communities and projects will die as a result
> From this perspective most VC investments aren’t about creating value but about strip-mining FLOSS projects and communities. The scale is for extraction.
As with so many things, I find this analysis suffers for using metaphors about the physical world with software. Strip-mining is a loaded term because it uses destructive means to acquire exclusive access to physical resources, in a way which leaves literally less than there was before, and which can be literally lethal to a literal biological ecosystem and literally toxic to physically proximal human communities. "Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with physical material means that others cannot have what you've pulled out; it's gone.
A company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools (operating system, languages, build tools, application frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to) remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from enjoying it. To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can make it healthier, if for no other reason than they are cultivating more engineers that know how to use these tools. "Extraction" is not the right metaphor.
The issue of adding proprietary features to OSS projects I think we should acknowledge as diluting value, not subtracting it. If the choice is between project development being discontinued at time T with core feature set F, vs continued through time T+K with extended feature set F + G + H where H is proprietary, but G is not, users who won't use the proprietary features may still benefit from G, and are still better off with continued development -- but we must acknowledge that it's at a slower rate than if H had not been added. Communities should evaluate whether diluted support is worthwhile, or at what point it should be considered abusive, or at least separated into distinct companion projects.