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by ALLTaken 437 days ago
Correlation isn't causation, I hate to say this, but here's really applicable. Facebook aka Meta has always been very opensource. Let's not talk about the license though. :)

Why do you imply malice in OSS companies? Or for profit companies opensourcing their models and sourcecode?
2 comments
mwigdahl 437 days ago
Personally I don't impute any malice whatsoever -- these are soulless corporate entities -- but a for-profit company with fiduciary duty to shareholders releasing expensive, in-house-developed intellectual property for free certainly deserves some scrutiny.

I tend to believe this is a "commoditize your complement" strategy on Meta's part, myself. No idea what Deepseek's motivation is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a similar strategy.

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eidifikwn24 437 days ago
In its ideal form, the sum of every participant commoditising their complements is how competition should benefit everyone — albeit at the expense of excess returns
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astrange 437 days ago
Companies basically don't have fiduciary duties to shareholders. Also, Zuck has all the votes and can do whatever he wants.
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ALLTaken 437 days ago
This I think is closer to the truth, there can be despite all fiducuiary duty an executive who just wants his way. I admire being bold. OSS is in my opinion a "Co-Operation request" and co-operation is in game theory a winning move.
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throwaway314155 437 days ago
Meta is decidedly not an "OSS company" no matter how much they put out.
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SXX 437 days ago
In this case there are very few truly "OSS companies" except for Red Hat and few other Linux distribution maintainers. Even companies centered around open source like Gitlab are usually generate most of their revenue of proprietary products or use liceses like BSL.
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throwaway314155 437 days ago
> In this case there are very few truly "OSS companies" except for Red Hat and few other Linux distribution maintainers.

Okay then. Fine by me.

> Gitlab

Perfect example. They have OSS offerings. They are not an OSS _company_.

This also serves to exclude the hundreds of VC-backed "totally open source 100% not going to enshittify this when our investors come asking for returns". Which, again, I'm fine with.

The business model of the purist OSS company is not one that's been found to be terribly successful. Nevertheless, it _is_ one which has a sort of moral high ground at least. I would prefer to leave definitions as is so as to keep that distinction (of having the moral high ground) crystal clear.

Does that make sense?

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