Wikipedia is altruistic, and serves humanity quite well.
Contributing to it might not necessarily be. Most open source development is funded by large companies after all and from their perspective it can function as a cost saving measure. Allowing them to focus on their core products and removing the possibility of their rivals from getting a competitive advantage due to having a superior low level stack under their product.
Which is why open source is so successful in areas where software is a cost-center but mostly failed for consumer products (since spending resources on them would actually be altruistic unlike e.g. Linux kernel development)
any altruistic act can be perceived as self serving
Software engineers need money to survive. If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive? Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
From open source. You can earn money from open source. Open source is not opposed to capitalism, idk where you got that idea.
I said open source is derivative to capitalism. Meaning open source cannot exist without capitalism. I never said they oppose each other.
Second I said you need to follow the money trail. Money given to people who work on open source comes from non-open source places.
Are you not implying below, with your words, that working exclusively on open source cannot bring money?
> If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive?
You seem to imply that open source is incompatible with making money. You seem to believe that if someone is making money they are not doing "exclusively open source" but something else in addition to open source.
> you need to follow the money trail. Money given to people who work on open source comes from non-open source places.
Money spent on coffee comes from non-coffee places, mostly. Does that mean one cannot make money exclusively selling coffee?
I get your point, it is very uncommon to live only of open source. That I can agree with. It is the exaggeration and dogmatism that is untrue.
No I am implying that it in itself does not generate money because it is given away freely. Open source can draw donations but that is not part of a transaction and the source of that money is from incentivized labor.
> You seem to imply that open source is incompatible with making money. You seem to believe that if someone is making money they are not doing "exclusively open source" but something else in addition to open source.
Usually yes but not necessarily. They may exclusively do open source but then in this case they must be supported by some kind of monetary source. That monetary source will be a for profit incentive. For example: donations. Donation money must be generated by for profit ventures. Or salary money paid by companies for employees to work on open source. That salary money is generated from for profit ventures.
> Money spent on coffee comes from non-coffee places, mostly. Does that mean one cannot make money exclusively selling coffee?
Dude. You’re missing the point and making a wrong analogy. It is not about where the money comes from but whether a transaction occurred. When you sell coffee you make a transaction. When you give away software… no transaction occurs. You lose time effort and money for nothing in return. Thus the effort must logically be supported by something else. I am exclusively talking about a logistical issue with a logistical consequence. That’s it.
> That I can agree with. It is the exaggeration and dogmatism that is untrue.
Where did I exaggerate or dogmatize anything? I am talking about a logistical reality and you’re getting emotionally worked up over it. Don’t fucking accuse me of shit I didn’t do.
The problem is you define open source as giving away software, and any money making aspect as "not open source". That is the exaggeration.
If one releases some software as open source and charges for support they are living of open source (my pov), not doing some open source + something else on the side (your pov). I disagree with your definition of open source.
Imagine I create my own illustrations and make them available for free (with some conditions GPL, or even almost without conditions MIT) and print tshirts with the illustrations, and sell them for money. Would it be fair to say I live of being an illustrator? or would you argue I am not living of my illustrations, that I am merely giving them away and really selling tshirts is the business?
You’re right. One of its big uses is for big companies to destroy the ability of individual developers or small companies to make a living selling software. It’s also used to harm larger competitors whose revenue depends on some non open source software. Essentially, open source is the new “dumping”.
That’s not to say open source is bad. But in a capitalist context, it’s certainly a very double-edged sword.
These are orthogonal. One can have a paid job while contributing to open source for entirely altruistic reasons.
> Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
BS. Humans do things for altruistic reasons devoid of individual reward all the time.
I, myself, maintain multiple OSS projects entirely for fun and with the hope that others will find it useful. That's it, that's all. I also donate entirely anonymously to charities simply because I believe others deserve support and dignity.
This form of cold, American libertarianism you espouse is pure poison in the body politic, both in this US and globally. It degrades all of human interaction to transactions. Its no wonder that the US is where sociopaths like Zuck were birthed.
That I misunderstood your point in context is a different issue, in which case, yup, my mistake.
> This form of cold, American libertarianism you espouse is pure poison in the body politic, both in this US and globally. It degrades all of human interaction to transactions. Its no wonder that the US is where sociopaths like Zuck were birthed.
Was an outright attack. But whatever, all water under the bridge, stuff like this happens. I might attack someone too if I misinterpreted something. Not a big deal.
> That I misunderstood your point in context is a different issue, in which case, yup, my mistake.
Thank you for taking the extra time to understand.
I suggest you practice a much greater degree of self awareness.
I’d rather speak the truth and what I believe in rather than cater to the feelings of people who cannot face objective reality.
And I didn’t openly or directly insult anyone. I criticize where it’s deserved and where it is true. He personally attacked me and I criticized his attack as appropriately as I could.
If you disagree with my premise, attack my argument. Don’t make it personal by telling me to be self aware and replying to a section of my comment not meant for you.
> Your comment is highly uncivil because it relies on aggressive profanity, condescending directives, and absurdist hyperbole to attack the other person. It lacks self-awareness because you hypocritically engage in the exact same hostile, rule-breaking behavior you are condemning.
From my interpretation here he attacked me. A defensive response is appropriate, but one where I do not attack his character directly but one where his unjust actions are criticized honestly. Unfortunately criticism is always somewhat condescending and for people to even be receptive of it you need to match the tone.
1. Profanity helps illustrate my point and I never directed at him.
2. I disagree with hyperbole. I think you’re outright lying to me here. So this is on you. You’re exaggerating things. He literally associated me with psychopaths and I called what he did a “misunderstanding”. So really you need to be more self aware, not me.
3. I never commented on my own rule breaking behavior and my stance on the rules of HN. I just commented ON his rule breaking behavior just as you are commenting on my behavior while ignoring your own.
I think this is enough. I’m not perfect with the rules here but this is becoming a bit of flame war and I’m fucking done. I’m ejecting myself from this thread.
Any individual that provides free labor cannot survive off of said free labor. He must work for money to survive or get donations from someone who earned that money from incentive based labor in order to even buy the food he needs to exist as a living human being. Much of the time that labor is actually closed source.
This is a logistical reality. A lot of open source advocates are unable to get their brains out of the whole mentality that open source literally cannot exist without incentive based software supporting it. Who pays for GitHub to exist? Who pays for the food swes eat? I just code for open source all day and money falls out of the sky.
My smart friend says there are jobs that pay you to work on open source exclusively. Smart guy. In this case you follow the money trail. How does that company get enough money to pay a guy to work exclusively on open source?
Put it another away: if we removed your ability to do incentivized labor and all you can do is charity work… you would run out of money and die from starvation. If we did the opposite and we removed your ability to do charity work… you’d be fine.
All of this re-emphasizes the point of this thread: In our objective reality, the world is driven by incentive based work while altruism is a side effect of surplus wealth generated by incentive based work. That is the fundamental reality.
My one other point is that incentivized labor is not the same as the value it creates. Indeed, it must be less. Otherwise, our economic system could support only a fixed number of people (subsistence), which would decay inevitably because there is no margin for error. But my point is that margin in reality isn’t fully realized, even by trillionaires, because then there would be no growth to support more people growing in their standard of living. There must be slack in this distributed system and the slack wasn’t valued: it’s free labor. It’s mixed in with incentivized labor, so I understand if you reject the premise entirely, but I do believe this is the essence of modern (specialized) capitalism. If skilled workers try to optimize or invent, more resources will be available for distribution for the same incentive (i.e. “worker productivity”). You can say “yeah that’s their job,” and I can say “that productivity wasn’t fully monetized because otherwise productivity would be lower overall.”
So, incentivized labor presupposes free labor, and economic productivity is a mix of free and monetized labor.
[†] Another problem with altruism: we don't all agree on whether a goal is altruistic, and what's altruistic in the enactor's eyes might not be in yours. Curating a fountain of human knowledge like Wikipedia? Probably altruistic. Protecting humanity from itself by installing your company as the stewards of frontier LLMs? Not so altruistic in my view.
The War on Drugs had the purpose (not just in its origin but in its perpetuation) of inflicting harm on elite-disfavored subsets of the population that could not be openly targeted for Constitutional reasons, which is about as far from an altruistic reason as it possible to get.
I don't see an inconsistency. money is pragmatic, the mission needs money
The real mission statement for most companies is to make as much money as possible.
OpenAI might have the same flaw, but you need to demonstrate it, not just assume it
Markets don't run on altruism.
US labs in Google, Meta and SpaceX are not leading, none of them managed to build something on par with GLM 5.2.
Care to explain to me why they still don't collaborate and still choose to do it in private?
Those are mostly for embedded devices and the current "sponsor" is Apple.
From a practical POV having all the training data, training infrastructure, and training know-how wouldn't help you either unless you could afford to spend the millions of dollars (hundreds of millions for a SOTA model) in compute to train it each time they released a new training set, in which case you're only talking about the big commercial companies. "open source for the people" just does not apply.
But even if I can't build it from source locally, being able to see what went into the model is an important part of what open source is about.
Yes, but for whatever reason this usage seems to have stuck. Open weights is definitely a better name. I assume the reason "open source" has stuck is because you can download and use it for free, but "open source" was always intended to be about "free as in speech", not "free as in beer". That said, I remember when the term "open source" was invented, and it was always a bit different, more commercially aligned, than the goals of the FSF.
> But even if I can't build it from source locally, being able to see what went into the model is an important part of what open source is about.
True. Unfortunately LLMs have become such a big money and closed enterprise (the opposite of OpenAI and Anthropic's altruistic founding principles) that it's hard to see these commercial models releasing their training data, especially since this data is the closest thing they have to a moat other than the cost of training.
The most valuable training data right now seems to be "reasoning data", and the need for this at least may disappear as AI moves beyond pre-trained language models to smarter systems capable of learning for themselves, and that can actually reason, not need to parrot reasoning data.
Particularly when it comes to tool use w/ self-distillation it can be done without any data... have a tool the model doesn't know? a teacher model RTFMs and the source code, and helps the student learn to get it right.
I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.
A better reading (IMHO) Of the situation is that China believes that AI shouldn't be used simply to mint a few more trillionaires but the benefits should be shared with society. Why do I say this? Because we now have 70+ years of China doing exactly that. The transformation in China all the way from rural villages to Tier 1 cities has been utterly astounding. China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty.
In some ways we're at a similar point to the late 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft execs complained that Linux, being free, destroyed intellectual property value. Linux should be a perfect example of how people can and do act altruistically, or at least not in a way to bait-and-switch to enrich themselves.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1d26grm/in_the_...
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.
This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.
Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.
If you simply take what the Chinese government says at face value, you will be correct way more often than 95% of Western policy wonks, media talking heads, "analysts" and so forth. Because, like you say, they tell you everything they're doing.
In the recent US-China summit, Xi Jinping just came out and used the Thucydides Trap metaphor, which tells you everything about where China thinks it is and where it sees the US going, which is to become increasingly belligerent as their power declines. Now whether or not you agree with that assessment (I do agree), it still tells you China wants to avoid open hostilities, it sees itself as continuing to rise and it fears what a declining US might do.
But western politicians keep raising this metaphor. So at some point they're like "okay we'll speak your language". They then used this metaphor to make the point "our rise isn't the threat, your fear of it is. If you resist it you're walking right into the trap Thucydides warned about". So your conclusion is still right, they don't want open hostilities, a stable world is in their interest.
Then western media ran away with this and were like "OMG Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap", completely ignoring his point.
For something shorter, you can see Arnaud Bertrand's recent review. https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/the-book-the-west-refu... The review is behind a paywall, but not expensive.
If you want to read policy documents directly (primary source), try the State Council / Chinese government policy database: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/ and https://sousuo.www.gov.cn/zcwjk/policyDocumentLibrary
They also provide official translations: https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/
For Central Party documents: https://news.cn/politics/zywj/. It lists recent Central Committee / General Office / joint Party-State documents, e.g. 2026 documents on township duty lists, Party member development rules, carbon evaluation, long-term care insurance, and SOE leadership rules.
I think the author wrote a twitter post with a summary of the content, and someone on twitter who had read the original Chinese source also chimed in with a summary
In communist or post-communist countries like China and Russia, the percentage of government workers is extreme. To them, all social action is political action, and that includes economic. Since there is only one party allowed, any economic action (and thus political action) which threatens the CCP is unacceptable. They leave other private companies alone.
The CCP is bad and this conclusion is justified not only in theory as a distant observation of ideological concepts, but from their behaviors around the world which echo some of the causes of World War 2. That doesn't mean Chinese AI companies are bad, but the CCP will certainly find ways of using it for its purposes. For now, they're quite far behind on AI, but they deserve credit for optimizing for some use cases which masks poorer generalization.
...you've almost achieved enlightenment on the nature of the majority of HN comments: vibes-based, off the cuff braindumps, where an idea is examined as it is being typed. It's great for tech and software discussions where many commenters have good knowledge or even mastery, but on "exotic" topics, an incorrect take can be voted to the top because it sounds right by affirming the biases of the majority. If you're a practitioner in a non-tech field and a topic in your field comes up for discussion on HN, be ready to be disappointed - and be ready to question all the other correct-sounding comments in areas unfamiliar to you.
In Netherlands, the government wants to reduce emission, so it incentivizes people to isolate their homes better, and to use heat pumps instead of gas heating. On the other hand, if you actually try to install a heat pump, you'll run into all sorts of regulation issues: the unit can't be too big, there are only a few specific places where you're allowed to place it, a ton of people can object to it, permitting takes years if at all. Oh and if you isolate your house, then voila, during the current heat wave it's a constant 35 C in your home. So you try to install AC and you run into permitting/regulation issues. So you then use a super inefficient portable AC that just barely lowers the temperature by 3 C and uses 4x more energy, and that's fine. facepalm
And the government and banks also want to combat money whitewashing, so they incentivize people to use digital payments and discourage cash. Police could look at you suspiciously merely for having too much cash on hand. On the other hand, NATO and also a bunch of government agencies are warning about war and encouraging people to have lots of cash at home for emergencies.
"They" do not "clearly" want one or the other. Different government branches can have different, conflicting priorities.
The Netherlands is tiny. China has 1.4 billion people, and its state apparatus is orders of magnitude bigger. Forget about coordinating the population, even coordinating the tens of thousands of local government bodies has always been a huge problem. All the previous dynasties have said that governing such a large country is a huge pain.
Xi is not personally in charge of the censorship bureau. The top government sets broad direction and KPIs, while local governments and government agencies are given a lot of leeway for implementation as they see fit. And frankly you cannot run a large organization any other way — there is no large company in the world where the CEO micromanages everything without burning out. The KPI is "social stability", and as long as this is kept and there are no grave problems like corruption, it's not the top government's job to dictate how the censorship bureau do their work.
Furthermore, many people tend to be risk averse, and would rather instinctively deny something than to take chances. There was a famous scene in the Jiang Zhemin days in which Jiang said something frank in some meeting with a foreign politician. Then the cameraman was like "uuh should we record this?" and his boss was "no, cut it away". Then Jiang said "why shouldn't we record this? of course this should be recorded!" This risk-averse attitude is still pervasive in a lot of places. It's not just DeepSeek that's "paranoid", everybody implementing censorship rules is paranoid similarly. This likely won't change until the current censorship bureau generation retires, and gets replaced with the next generation that's more confident.
Finally, whatever Poland did pre-1989 has absolutely nothing to do with China. There are no similarities no motives or circumstances. You can't just lazily lump random Soviet-era countries together with China just because you give them both the "communist" label. China's adaptation of and motivation for adoption of communism is wholly different from the Soviet Union.
Or because they're human and that's what humans have always done. If the US is no longer a check on China, what will happen to Taiwan?
Frankly, you seem to be arguing that the US is somehow uniquely bad when, in actuality, The US has been hegemonic during a time of incredible peace and minimal imperialism.
The issue is one of incentives. The US needs cheap foreign labor because of deindustrialization policies in the 60s and 70s. These were arguably passed as a check on labor power since socialism was still looking potentially ascendant at the time. Whatever the reason though, the contemporary US is reliant on keeping foreign wages down and domination of the oil trade. Imperialism grows out of this need for external resources to maintain economic growth. It would be less relevant to us if we had better fundamentals, but we traded those away to avoid letting certain demos get wealthy and powerful.
China's play is more mercantile. They benefit most from stable trade conditions. They get richer the more customers they have. They benefitted massively from becoming an industrial trade partner with the US in the 60s and 70s. Because of this, they have completely different foreign policy objectives. All they need to do to win is normalize relations and build trade infrastructure. Its way cheaper than imperialism.
For the world. Compare the those 70 years to the previous 70 years. Regime change and intervention is significantly better than full scale invasion, total war and colonization of other people.
> China's play is more mercantile.
Because they are held in check by US power. Remove the US and China is taking what it wants.
I mean maybe, but China's industrial strategy isn't well served by war. I just don't see the structural incentive.
Russia, China and Iran all make public statements as if they abide by international law and everyone else are the law breakers, while their measurable actions are shockingly contradictory.
It is their actions that have caused the US reactions, but many people present them as if they occur in a vacuum.
The AI race sits within this context, with a constellation of concerns that most people do not think about. Of course the AI engineers have their own motivation, the companies will share some of that motivation combined with their business trajectory and governments will get involved with it for the justifications they see.
Destroying the growth story of overvalued stocks is an interesting investment strategy. It's not even new. Shortsellers understandably get terrible rep from execs, but their actions are more often in the public interest than you'd think. Normally it's exposing fraud, but here we get the really fortunate side benefit of what could eventually amount to the most significant contribution to the general software community since Linux.
Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.
There's always an announcement by one of the frontier labs.
Chinese AI companies also face a domestic market where open-source distribution is often the only way to reach enterprise clients who won't pay SaaS premiums. The business logic aligns with openness in a way that US labs' VC-funded models don't.
That used to be true, but now they've raised ~7B$, so we'll see how / if that changes.
Chinese companies understand this and they're treating models as shared infrastructure akin to Linux. The money is going to be in customization niches. Companies will charge to tune models for specific use cases and charge support for that. There's also going to be money at the bottom for hardware vendors making chips and memory. But the middle tier of generic LLMs is seeing involution where there's relentless competition driving profits towards the bottom.
Even if they're ahead they don't have enough GPUs to scale. Open sourcing is hence a good strategy to at least get market share (even if not $).
Meanwhile we in the US are blocked from buying Huawei GPUs and retirees are boasting about the nvidia in their portfolios.
I suspect their tune will change if they ever take the lead..