> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…
> and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big. I sometimes wonder what motivations these orgs have in contributing to open source. My cynical side refuses to believe that the reasons are altruistic (although I'm sure there are altruistic individuals in those orgs!). I think that the decisions to contribute to o…
In other words, wiping out your competitor's business moats. If their cashflow is dependent on selling phones, open source your phone operating system to lower the value of the proprietary system.
It can also be used to quickly gain market share where you previously had none and wants to catch up on your competitors. You're bleeding money any way to try to pry open an established market, and open source might be the cheaper route. Most famous examples are perhaps Apple (webkit, cups) and Facebook (AI).