Readit NewsThat said, I’ve also been in the camp that avoids AGPL-except maybe as a way to sell a commercial license while still being "open source," or just to be obnoxious. And honestly, I am still failing to see the upside in being obnoxious for its own sake.
Personally I have found Linux to be ready for (some) desktops (including mine and several friends) since around 2005 and I have even worked for a company that mandated Linux for everyone who couldn't document a need for Windows only software.
Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the possibly. Then the controls come.
> There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs,
You would think, but in the age of $6,000 fully specced MacBook Pros, $2,000 monitors, $3,000 standing desks, $1500 iPads with $100 Apple pencils and $300 keyboard cases, $1,000 chairs, SaaS licenses that add up, and (if allowed) food delivery services for “special circumstances” that turns into a regular occurrence it was common to see individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range. It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.
Some people see a company policy as something meant to be exploited until a hidden limit is reached.
There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.
1. My brothers (I have a number of them) mostly work in construction somehow. It feels most of them drive a VW Transporter, a large pickup or something, each carrying at least $30 000 in equipment.
Seeing people I work with get laptops that use multiple minutes to connect to a postgres database that I connect to in seconds feels really stupid. (I'm old enough that I get what I need, they usually rather pay for a decent laptop rather than start a hiring process.)
2. My previous employer did something really smart:
They used to have a policy that you got a basic laptop and an inexpensive phone, but you could ask for more if you needed. Which of course meant some people got nothing and some people got custom keyboards and what not.
That was replaced with a $1000 budget on your first day an $800 every year that was meant to cover phones and everything you needed. You could alsp borrow from next year. So if someone felt they needed the newest iPhone or Samsung? Fine, save up one year(or borrow from next year) and you have it.
Others like me who don't care that much about phones could get a reasonably priced one + a gpod monitor for my upstairs office at home + some more gear.
And now the rules are the same for everyone so even I get (I feel I'm hopeless when it comes to arguing my case with IT, but now it was a simple: do you have money for it? yes/no)
You can argue that maybe a highly competitive browser market would lead to more innovation, but I'm not sure that's the case. Could a highly fragmented market build something that is as good as Chrome? IDK, but my (moderate confidence) bet is no. Browsers are a pretty mature product at this point and I don't think that competition would produce enough competitive pressure to outweigh the massive resources of a dominant near monopoly.
And now Google is slowly but surely moving to shut down ad blocking.
Some of us just saw it coming a mile away.
And so on.
They are not yet in striking distance to truly become independent, but they are making significant steps in that direction. The share of Google money in their revenue went from 90% in 2020 to 75% in 2023.
I don't think following the money actually shows what you think it does.
As a postscript:
Damned if they do, damned if they don't. There were plenty of people at the time arguing that Firefox maintaining one independent browser engine was idiotic and they should just switch to Chromium like everyone else. People like to lambast Mozilla over relatively minor advocacy spending stuff and cry that it should just focus on Firefox, but insist it should have obviously continued with Servo. Even though Servo probably wouldn't have made a substantial difference to Firefox post Quantum for a very long time.
And yet, somehow, they still struggle to secure adequate funding for Firefox itself, while millions are allocated to executive salaries and various advocacy initiatives.
I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience.
Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook.
Personally I'm over the moon to be living at a time where we have access to incredible tools like this, and I'm impressed with the speed at which they're improving.
Even more important for me, as someone who did ask questions but less and less over time, is this: with GPTs I no longer have to the see passive-aggressive banner saying
> This question exists for historical reasons, not because it’s a good question."
all the time on other peoples questions, and typically on the best questions with the most useful answers there were.
As much as I have mixed feelings about where AI is heading, I’ll say this: I’m genuinely relieved I don’t need to rely on Stack Overflow anymore.
It is also deeply ironic how stackoverflow alienated a lot of users in the name of inclusion (the Monica case) but all the time they themselves were the ones who really made people like me uncomfortable.
Let's you do what you want here and now and then pay dearly for it afterwards :-)
I'd make it MIT tomorrow if you know a workaround or alternative model
Both for the explanation and for being a person that respects the license even if you (like me) don't particularly like it.