[mceachen]

Please don't conflate a volunteer effort with no expected economic gain with a very well funded company (or fleet of companies).

With the CCP's highly successful track record with subsuming other markets, Occam's razor applies to why they're doing this.

[windsignaling]

There is clearly an anti-China bias here. Show me comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing projects like Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Flutter, Chromium, etc.

[venussnatch]

The chromium example is wild. There's an extreme distrust and contempt for chromium becoming the defacto browser and therefore Google becoming the defacto gatekeeper of the web.

[gizajob]

They’ve been that since about 2003 regardless.

[windsignaling]

What? I was around back then. Chrome/Chromium was awesome because we finally had something significantly better than IE.

[akoboldfrying]

I'll supply such a comment: Any software open sourced by any for-profit company, including Google, is a calculated move ultimately intended to increase their bottom line, and it's naive to think otherwise.

[jcelerier]

Isn't it borderline illegal for publicly traded companies to not try to maximize profit? "interest of the company" in theory but in practice

[deaux]

No, it is not. This is a common misconception that the large companies are very happy about.

1. The century-old Ford decision wasn't about this. It was about him refusing to pay dividends to shareholders he was feuding with. I.e. dominant shareholder using his control to starve minority shareholders of returns.

The court still let him keep spending huge sums on factories and price cuts that didn't clearly maximize profits.

2. Even if the case was about profit maximization (it wasn't), the judgment was a Michigan state decision. It doesn't have force outside of it.

3. US business law is in practice actually the opposite. A business can do pretty much whatever it wants. This is fundamental.

4. Even if it were illegal (it's not), anything can reasonably be framed as being in the long-term interest of the company, including donating to causes, raising employee wages and so on. Courts never question this.

Just imagine this was a thing. It's completely untenable for this reason. Who is a court to judge that something isn't in the longterm interest of shareholders unless it's literally spending all the company money on yachts for personal use?

5. No company has ever been prosecuted for this, obviously, because it's not a thing that exists. The closest you can get is that there's a potential duty to seek the best price if a company must be sold or broken up. But that's a very specific situation.

It's 100% a myth. Feel free to copy this and spread it when you see someone saying this.

[kristiandupont]

This thread goes into further detail: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...

[postepowanieadm]

Think about the shareholders!

[snowpid]

Chromium and Kubernetes do have their business function. Tensorflow had a business function but it failed.

So Google is not a great counter example.

[windsignaling]

AI doesn't have a business function...?

[thegrim33]

Scroll the front page. Find literally any story that has to do with a major US tech company. Open the comment section. Look at the the top comment. It will be negative. Most of the other top comments as well. Trying to gaslight us into not believing our own eyes ..

[d5lt5]

* "Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now"

"Drilling into the original article where Jarred explained the reasoning behind the change, It's pretty clear that under zig the team was doing things by hand that are automatic in rust."

* Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

"This is a rare instance where feeding this groundbreaking information into an LLM gives _them_ psychosis. I fed this to claude code and watched it verify the result in 7 different ways to be 100% certain, and it was just flabbergasted. Quite remarkable."

* Ollama: All Aboard Open Models

"A year and still no implementation for such a basic need as offloading MoE layers onto the CPU selectively. On llama.cpp I can get models like Qwen 35BA3B running partially on gpu/cpu with 40t/s on a laptop thanks to --n-cpu-moe but on this VC funded joke it would be simply unusable. I can't quite understand how you make a wrapper so much worse than the code you're ripping out."

* Blender 5.2 LTS

"Look at that wow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I"

* OpenAI reduces Codex Model Context Size from 372k to 272k

"I know a lot of people like to say that compaction makes this moot, but the level of detail you lose across compaction is wildly too much for most things that I do, unfortunately."

* M-Chips: M7 with up to 1.5 TB – and why Apple is skipping the M6

"I hope they put a better connector than TB5 so we can cluster them properly at 1TB/S"

--

Your math is not mathing.

[sph]

> Open the comment section. Look at the the top comment. It will be negative

My favourite pastime is clicking on any comment section of any topic whatsoever, betting that the top comment is someone going "well, ackshually..."

HN loves a contrarian skeptic, it has nothing to do with Western tech or AI specifically.

[windsignaling]

Looking at the top comment about Google right now. Big difference between "their products/processes suck" vs. "these people and their companies and government are an insidious evil".

Ah, the ol' gaslighting you into thinking you're gaslighting me trick.

[benterix]

There is a lot of distrust against Google and Microsoft here, also when they opensource stuff, and Chromium and AOSP are great counterexamples.

[kelnos]

I mean, I expect Google open-sourced those projects because they see economic benefit to themselves in doing so, not because they are good-hearted.

Chromium is an especially silly example to use: they benefit by controlling the web platform, and open-sourcing Chromium has allowed them to get their web engine into many other browsers.

[pessimizer]

> There is clearly an anti-China bias here.

Yes.

> Show me comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing projects like Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Flutter, Chromium, etc.

There's a search bar at the bottom of the page. Most people, including me, detest google and think of them as a thoroughly dishonest and sleazy organization. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to not boost China for a moment in order to accuse you of dishonest rhetoric.

It's almost insane that you've posted "comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing [...] Chromium[...]" as if that's not a hobby for thousands of people (including me.)

edit: this has got to be a submarine shill account: 226 karma in 10 years. If this is true, pleas stop. China is doing a good enough job that they don't need it.

[windsignaling]

I always wonder who these weirdos are that look at commenters' past comments to try and deduce some fact and "win" their argument. More common on Reddit, but still exists here. Basement dweller-level weird either way.

"226 karma in 10 years." - What does that even mean to you? Should I be posting more? Does my behavior not align with your list accepted human behaviors for a non-Chinese?

The ridiculousness of your post shows how far the anti-China bias goes with you people.

> There's a search bar at the bottom of the page.

The dishonesty here is coming from you. You're assuming something exists. I'm saying show me. If it's so easy to find, wouldn't it be way easier to simply put this definitive proof in my face instead of this weird roundabout argument you're trying to make?

[cma]

It could be as simple as do open releases and publication at first to help recruit talent who want that or who want to make a name for themselves. learned from the likes of... OpenAI, Google, Meta, Emad

[seanmcdirmid]

There must be some Alibaba posters who could clarify this. I think it’s like how Amazon pushed AWS, alibaba is hoping create a similar ecosystem. I wouldn’t conflate them with the CPC or other more niche players like deepseek.

[shimman]

IDK how this doesn't apply to American tech corporations too? Or is it only scary when America corporations face actual competition nowadays where they can't rely on the US government to bomb/sanction competitors?

[watwut]

1.) Majority of debian contributions are from people paid for it.

2.) It is scary because they do what sillicon valley did for decades? While it bragged about disruption being the goal?