What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On

Post by pc2g4d » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 12:50 AM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #42

jsprogrammer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A restaurant requires continuous inputs: fresh food, labor, electricity. Code is a purely digital good. What was in the repo a few days ago could be released at no ongoing cost to FoundationDB/Apple and it will stay exactly how it was, forever.

I disagree. Code gains technical debt over time, bugs are found, compatibility with other libraries and the OS fray, security vulnerabilities are exposed, and what were awesome features 6 months ago become commonplace or superseded by the new awesome. Essentially, code starts to rot after a while.

Its utility diminishes as the difference between its original environment and the current technical environment increases. However, given a replica of its original intended environment (e.g. an OS image in a VM) the code will run just as well as it always did.

So code does spoil. And it doesn't.

Post by awinder » Sun, Mar 29, 2015, 8:08 PM UTC

capkutay wrote: post #18

awinder wrote: post #16

If this acquisition was in any way related to Apple wanting to use this product in-house -- call me massively confused. It really would be a mental sickness if Apple were so insistent on using closed-source tech across the organization, even while that is a very obscure line of thinking amongst it's competitors in the cloud space. On the other hand, if Apple is acqui-hiring these guys -- then why kill the download li…

Just because the tech companies we read about on hacker news rely on and contribute to open source, doesn't mean that its a 'mental sickness' to use proprietary products. There's good workloads for open source (Apple uses hadoop/hbase heavily internally), and then theres unique proprietary solutions.

The mental sickness wouldn't be using any proprietary software. The mental sickness would be acquiring a closed source database and keeping the tech closed source. Databases specifically seem to have a huge mindshare and usage share around open source. And when conventional stores haven't fulfilled a need, solutions like Cassandra, CouchBase, and Mongodb have been released as open source software. I don't really think Apple has some unique data persistence needs to require such an obscure path, if that is really what they were doing

Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On

Re: What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On