I strongly believe you guys should be compensated very well for what you bring to the ecosystem but the probability of open source projects being enshittified by private interests is non-trivially high.
Speaking of, could we start using version control for keeping track of laws and updating old laws? It seems to me like a much better system than randomly burying in a new law that it strikes out some text from an old law.
I’ve been meaning to ask Qi if he’d be open to cutting a final 6.0 release on the repo before re-archiving.
At the same time it’d be nice to modernize the default settings for the final release. Disabling the (somewhat confusingly backwardly-named) “cache oblivious” setting by default so that the 16 KiB size-class isn’t bloated to 20 KiB would be a major improvement. This isn’t to disparage your (i.e. Jason’s) original choice here; IIRC when I last talked to Qi and David about this they made the point that at the time you chose this default, typical TLB associativity was much lower than it is now. On a similar note, increasing the default “page size” from 4 KiB to something larger (probably 16 KiB), which would correspondingly increase the large size-class cutoff (i.e. the point at which the allocator switches from placing multiple allocations onto a slab, to backing individual allocations with their own extent directly) from 16 KiB up to 64 KiB would be pretty impactful. One of the last things I looked at before leaving Meta was making this change internally for major services, as it was worth a several percent CPU improvement (at the cost of a minor increase in RAM usage due to increased fragmentation). There’s a few other things I’d tweak (e.g. switching the default setting of metadata_thp from “disabled” to “auto”, changing the extent-sizing for slabs from using the nearest exact multiple of the page size that fits the size-class to instead allowing ~1% guaranteed wasted space in exchange for reducing fragmentation), but the aforementioned settings are the biggest ones.
The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years. Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up" will be gone too.
Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?
- Google Maps
- Google Mail
- Google Drive
- Google Docs
- Google Groups
- Google Forms
- Google Cloud
- Google OAuth
- Google Search
- Google Analytics
- Chrome
- Android
- Android Auto
- Fitbit
- Google Fi
- Google Fiber
- Google Flights
- Google Translate
- Google Pay
- Waymo
In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. You wanna talk monopoly? You haven't seen anything yet.Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools. This will affect many more people than just Google's direct users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs, shrinking economies, lack of services.
There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully, there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.