seldom good ever happens in ... the universe
Goodness is a human invention, and a rather young one at that.
Profit drives innovation, and more importantly makes technology accessible at scale. Do you think most of the world would have access to washing machines (which are of ridiculous utility, especially when you factor in their price with profit margins and all!) if it were not for some schmuck wanting to line his or hers of pocket? Because it would not.
At its heart, capitalism is a (greedy) solution to a planet-scale resource allocation problem, and there are no viable alternatives (give or take some modifications/variations).
Tl;dr: Economics 101.
But yes, people make the most incerdible stuff without being paid to do so.
I am pretty certain we had economics for millenia before capitalism has emerged about three hundred years ago.
Local agent behaviour may be greedy, but this could still result in something approaching a global optimum - the economy could work like Ant Colony Optimisation in aggregate.
Isn’t this Adam Smith‘s theory?
Yeah, like US cable and telco companies like to remind you every time they do an anticompetitive move.
And despite that, who is helping move the telco world forward? Pointing to one mediocre example is certainly not proof that profit doesn't drive innovation.
More interesting is what people would achieve if their time wasn't dedicated to profit seeking. The measure of success then may be the subjective usefulness of someone's contributions. It is a big subject but waving it away as you have isn't a satisfactory answer at all
My personal take is that in practice most of the innovation we see in tech comes from the universities. E.g. the tech in search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI etc.
The tech is then, in practice, given to the private sector. There the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate.
Commercialization does often require some innovation around the edges, which companies often get by hiring talent from academia.
I realize this is unlikely to be a super popular opinion for some HN readers. But to me it's the one most defensible by evidence.
100% false, normally the people that created the tech while in university are the ones that create the business using the test (see facebook, google, etc), it is their tech to begin with it was not given to them
In most cases the University is also either paid a fee, or is part owner in the company as a startup, cashing out when funding starts.
Nothing is "given away"
now I personally think anything developed using Government Grants should be Public domain, non-patentable, non-copyright, 100% public domain, but ....
Yes, a lot of discoveries (not "most innovation", but besides the point!) happens at Universities. But so what? Universities are either for-profit themselves, or they are financed through taxes which depends on the profitability of businesses in the economy which they exist in and contribute to. And like a sibling comment pointed out: Researchers are often the ones commercializing a discovery. Moreover, I specifically stated that "[the commercializing actor] makes technology accessible at scale."
Your statement that "the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate" is a half-truth, because the profit motive is very much present once you consider more than the first-order effects.
I 100% agree that commercialization of new techology (again, innovation is a lot more than bleeding-edge research) e.g., search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI, is optimally done through some kind of interaction between univiersities and commercial actors – but to the mutual benefit of a spiderweb of stakeholders affiliated with both academia and commercial actors, and not some quasi-altruistic act of sacrifice on the part of the university.
Alas, me having the business acumen of plankton means I'm easy calories for the vulture capitalists. Sigh.
Sadly, they are both extinct beasties, these days...
> Which is why seldom good ever happens in the land of profit-driven business.
Many responses disagree with this comment. My knee-jerk reaction is the same.
OTOH, there is truth to the comment in that many examples of "good" are examples in which a business is driven by vision or value, not by profit first.
Apple bought CUPS (printing) and now owns it and hired the original developer (who left at some point):
10^10 / 31 / 24 / 10^6
To beat Sentry's 500k, they'd need to spend about 2 minutes and 20 seconds worth of December profit.
The only organizations that provide free services are, like, donation driven charities. Or hobbyist groups.
Maybe somebody could argue for government funded organizations, but I don’t want to get into that whole can of worms.
In reality they get a TON of value from this "free" service, in addition to the already mention AI, there is Value for MS to control the Dev Community, there is value to MS to extend git via github to lock in Devs, there is value to MS to be able to pickup on dev trends for their own products / offers.
It is universally true, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product, anyone using github free account is the product.
What is the difference? Nobody supports open source for the sake of it, we support it because we get tons of value from the "free" service. It sounds like incentives are properly aligned.
Issues, Wiki, Automation (Github Actions) etc
The capability has existed to ingest all of that information (minus actions, there is no standard for that) for a long time.
I stand by what I said. That isn't lock in.
Also people who pay for their GitHub account.
Let’s not kid ourselves, by now we know that data is gold and we hand it to these corporations without ever getting paid for it.
One of the main reasons they can “incur losses” on co-pilot is not only future monopolization by market share but also by being provided endless amounts of golden data through usage.
So yes, hosting “social git” with some fancy UI and CI and spinning up GPUs (they will constantly need to ramp up on anyways) is peanuts in comparison to the upside.
Yes, open source developers as well as co-pilot users should get paid for their labour. Directly and by MSFT.
Looking at the dates, it seems they sponsor a few people each month? Or some variation of that.
GOOG, AMZN, MSFT really?
Obligatory:
Something like an SOS License.
Support Open Source
...
All development on this project will cease to exist if dev fund does not meet "DOL Software Dev CPI adjusted Blah Blah Salary" * Number of active/approved devs.
Bugfixes will stop if dev fund falls below Y amount or something
...
Lots to consider here, but it's weird that no popular licenses have this as a clause in there - almost like it's frowned upon to ask for money?
Not sure what is your source for that? At a quick glance most contributions come from Red Hat, Google, VmWare, Microsoft, Amazon. Lot of independent contributions are done independently but as part of employment, which I guess is not free labour?
- https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/9/companies-table?orgId=1
It is opensource so there is still a lot of volunteer work going on there but the infrastructure (CI/CD, image hosting, etc) is also paid for by corporations and not by the community. Its millions of dollars a year in contributions.
So this is literally taking money that would otherwise go to grandma and giving it to open source.
Money that would go partially to hedge funds, sure. But money that's also partially going to grandmas.
How about you let individual shareholders themselves decide if they want to donate to open source personally, since the profit belongs to them? They can take their dividend and they can transfer it to open source. But not Apple.
I mean, I personally just don't like other people donating my things for me. And if I want to donate my money, maybe I want to donate it to something else like fighting poverty?
It's awesome for a privately-owned two-person company to choose to donate to open source. It would not be cool for a publicly traded corporation to take a twelfth of the dividends I receive and send them to a charity that is not of my choosing.
[1] https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/finance/average-net-worth-...
Second -- if you're 65 your savings have got to last you for the next 20-30 years. Including often expensive nursing home care. Suddenly even a million bucks... isn't that much.
So no -- in general, they can't spare a twelfth of an investment. But more importantly, if they want to, it should be up to them. Not somebody deciding for them.
They can decide to move their money out of Apple whenever they like...?
Because the moment Apple announced that they were going to implement a policy like that, the value of the stock would drop by a twelfth. Instantly.
So by the time you found out about it, the damage would be done.
But you're missing the bigger picture anyways: business is business and charity is charity. The job of publicly traded corporations is to make money, not to give to charity. Then individual people can take the money the business made, and give to the charities of their individual choosing.
Having to choose which stocks to invest in based on their charitable giving portfolios just mixes everything up. The profits are all the same in the end, but charitable giving decisions around those profits should be in the hands of individual people, not corporations.
Shoutout to Tarsnap, who's already doing awesome stuff like this.