The article cites CouchDB as how this kind of thing can play out differently for open-source software. The first example that came to my mind was Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and the subsequent MySQL forks (e.g. MariaDB). Of course, we still have MySQL today, and AFAIK it remains to be seen what will happen to FoundationDB. I doubt Apple will kill it.
What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
#22Were these people paying customers? If not what did they expect would happen.
To combine this with another comment, free and closed source means that at some point, many of those users will be massively disappointed. I can think of very few exceptions.
Google search engine is free and closed source?
Sure, some of us are disappointed with how our search data is treated, but the disappointment for most generally ends at incognito mode, not that close to 'massive'.
That's quite a big exception.
Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
#23Same thing happened with the 13th Lab pointcloud SDK getting sucked into Oculus. We also see it with developers getting sucked into Google/FB etc...
Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
#24The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out. Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack. I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefull…
> We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.
And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well.
So in essence we as humans would probably be better off expecting things to disappear instead of the opposite maybe? Not sure I can do that, but still, seems like a more fitting strategy.
Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
#25The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out. Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack. I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefull…
I don't think they're saying anything in particular. The conclusions you take from it are yours.
Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine it's impossible in practice, but it's fun to entertain theoretically. Right now it seems GOOG has a market cap of $383.11B and Apple has $178B on hand [1]. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-cash-178-bil...
Google has $60b cash. Apple can borrow $205b, buy Google for $383b, use Google's $60b cash to pay off the debt, with Apple ending up owing $145b. It's not too unreasonable for a $718.66b company to be $145b in debt. Alternatively, use a script and cash offer. Pay $178b in cash and the rest in shares. All of this is possible, but as Page & Brin own 56% of voting power so all Apple would be getting is Google's income,…
Pretty sure the FTC would not approve that merger, since it would give Apple a monopoly on mobile device operating systems, and arguably "tech" in general.
Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
#27The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out. Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack. I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefull…
"I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever"
When I read that, I immediately thought of craigslist, for some reason.
Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
#28The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out. Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack. I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefull…
> Why is this so exceptional?
Because code isn't a good that spoils. When someone shuts their door to my favorite restaurant, the presumption is that they were losing money, and needed to close the doors. When my favorite SaaS service shuts down, it's the same deal.
This is different. They're just being selfish because they got some money, giving the middle finger to everyone. That same code is still sitting in a git repo somewhere, and that's frustrating as hell to anyone that trusted them. It would be no sweat off their backs to at least scale down support over a year to let people transition.
But let's not place the blame on them. It's probably not their choice to fuck over all of their users. I guarantee this is coming from Apple, and you should all remember that when you line up to buy this new fancy 1 port macbook: Fuck Apple, they don't give a shit about open source. They're embrace/extend/extinguish just as Microsoft. They just operate on Unix so it feels like they give us more.
It's okay though. Someone inside will realize they're sitting on a goldmine of information on how to make good software, they'll leave the hellish work environment that is Apple, write an open source version, and it will be superior.
>We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.
There is no "short of that". Demand open source for everything you do. It's not unreasonable. The modern computer ecosystem IS open source.
You are very much overstating the similarities from open source developers disappearing and a closed source software company leaving you up to dry. One can live on, and one has no hope.
Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
#29The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out. Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack. I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefull…
> We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow. And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well. So in essence we as humans would probably be better off expecting things to disappear instead of the opposite maybe? Not sure I can do that, but still, seems like a more fitting st…
> And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well.
I can continue improving an open source project that gets abandoned.
Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On
#30The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out. Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack. I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefull…
I don't think they're saying anything in particular. The conclusions you take from it are yours.
I think they are trying to say something, especially when they add the 'apple' part. As if apple makes this especially egregious. I know, apple is the top dog to aim for in tech now, so they are a nice whipping boy.
Oooo, what happens when Oracle buys a company you depend on (Sun/ZFS). What happens when SAP buys a company you depend on. What happens when Cisco buys a company you depend on (any number of Hw companies). What happens when Amazon buys a company you depend on (robotics), what happens when a free software you depend on shuts down (TrueCrypt)
Wired is just capitalizing on an anti-apple wave. I'm not an apple fan, but, it's not as if they are much worse than others.
They could have just said "What happens when the products you depend on disappear?" But that's not sexy. It also does not fit their "narrative".