For the data api we plan to stay free for a while and then charge new users with a low per subscrition fee to indie devs and have a plan for big data consumers.
Offtopic: how much would you have payed for the Hooks app? Just from the top of your mind.
I think that recent initiative by YC under sam to invest in startups that may herald breakthroughs in sustainable fission is a great start. This should lead to a healthy competition which so far has been missing since it used to be a government only venture for a long time.
I'm not convinced that YC is the vehicle through which the next major breakthrough in the field of energy generation will be conceived.
YC companies that do relatively tiny hardware projects tend to fail at a rate much higher than their software siblings and the kind of investment required to get a next generation nuclear reactor from the drawingboard to a reality is not usually associated with start-up accelerators.
I know they're funding two start-ups in this domain but I don't believe this is a path that will work out. On the other hand, I've been wrong in the past on other predictions so feel free to ignore me :)
Great question! I'm assuming that if AI and genetic engineering hit their stride at the same time, copyright is the least of our concerns.
We engineer machine intelligence just enough for it to spark (tipping point, runaway, whatever you want to call it), and then it'll engineer us "better". Is "better" what we consider better? Or what it considers better? Interesting times.
Or, rather, how does copyright work for genetic designs? Syn Bio papers are published all the time, and their designs are copyright like any other invention.
Shouldn't it be "Twitter is building open source software"? Pointing out the obvious since most of the software companies are built on open source software but only a few build one.
I think close to 100% of the internet is built on/with open source software.
But it's a major headache to get your in house libraries/software released as open source. There's reservations because by default everything developed is considered proprietary and a trade secret. It's difficult to convince management to give stuff back and/or see a benefit, the larger the org the harder it gets. Then comes legal with the legal derp.
And finally you can't just put stuff on Github and expect it to thrive, you need resources to maintain your open source projects and again convince management beforehand that it's not just a liability.
I don't think it's anywhere near "close to 100%", like you're claiming.
IIS is still quite widely used for many web sites. Netcraft's latest survey results suggest just slightly under 30% of all web sites are served by it. So that's some closed-source software powering a significant portion of the web, at least.
And it's quite safe to say that those IIS installations are running on some variant of Windows, which is yet another generally closed-source software system. Then there are other non-web services (DNS, FTP, and so on) handled by such Windows systems.
There are still a surprising number of proprietary UNIX systems out there in production, on the public Internet. We're talking HP-UX, AIX, UnixWare, and even BSD/OS in some cases. There are many behind the scenes, indirectly supporting web sites and other publically-accessible services.
There is a lot of other networking gear that runs proprietary software, too.
Is open source software important to the Internet? Absolutely. Is it the "100%" you're claiming? Absolutely not.
Yes, you're right if you take it that way.
I didn't mean the internet is built exclusively with open source software, but the majority of developed applications contain at least a bit of open source software, like a library, curl, Apache, PHP etc. That's much closer to 100% I think. Something where you can say "we took something for free, we give something back". Not that that's required in any way.
There's some high profile exceptions like the infrastructure parts you mentioned, but noone expects you to open source your router and unix config, there's nothing worth contributing and collaborating on here.
The one exception I've seen though is Microsoft stack applications. For whatever reason open source libraries aren't as widespread there. Sure, there are some and with things like NuGet it's getting easier to use them, but a lot of developers don't seem to bother going outside of what Microsoft offers out of the box.
Sure. Your grateful users might add a feature you didn't have time for. Or they might find a security issue and send you a patch as a part of responsible disclosure. Or they might start hacking on your codebase and actually do something cool. Then you can hire them/buy them out, turning your codebase into a nice recruiting tool.
Think about this: if Twitter open sources 100% of their code, what would change? Would Twitter clones pop up all over the place? No, because Twitter is the software + infrastructure + name. Most companies think that their code contains some type of secret sauce that makes it special. In reality that's not true. Sure, Google may hide their exact PageRank algorithm, but they don't need to hide their web server code. Or their indexing algorithm. Companies like Twitter are even better for this: they do absolutely nothing that's really proprietary.
For an example of this on a much smaller scale look at TheTVDB (http://thetvdb.com/), their entire site source is OSS, yet there are no clones.
For some companies where the barrier to entry is very high or requires a lot of market share to compete, this may be true. But for others where the investment in actually building the thing was the only barrier, giving the code out to the world can be a terrifying prospect.
You are right, it's not always appropriate. However, in most cases, it's just fine. Here's a list of companies that I think could open up at least 95% of their code: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Tesla/Ford/GMC/Toyota/BMW/any car manufacturer, Apple, Home Depot/Walmart/Safeway/any retailer, Mint, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and many more.
I built a number of those open source libraries (Summingbird, Storehaus, Algebird, etc) - often more than 50% of our contributions would come from outside Twitter. Scalding has far more outside activity than inside, where a few talented folks are holding down the fort.
Interesting times. There is no doubt that the legal punches thrown at Android have been anti-competitive and kills innovation instead of what there were meant to protect. For example reportedly Microsoft earns more from Android than selling Windows phone: http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-is-making-2bn-a-year-on-andro.... If the patents were that useful for innovation, Microsoft would have been ahead of Google by miles.
What kind of innovation do you see in Android? It has been almost being copy-pasted. Google copied everything, from kernel (Linux) to UI design and trying to make lot of money from it and expecting others not to sue.
EDIT: The replies of this comment say that the others (Apple etc) are too copying and copying kernel in not wrong. Well, I did not say that copying is wrong. What I mean is that copying is NOT innovation.
There is nothing wrong with "copying" kernel. This is what the open source is aimed at: Infectious growth. In fact that was the right and smart thing to do.
I think you might be unfamiliar with 'open source' and its licensing. Android is a Linux-based distribution, which means that it uses a Linux kernel.
'Copy': make a similar or identical version of; reproduce: [1]
Google forked and contribute to the kernel. They did not create their own identical version of, or reproduce, the kernel.
"Forking" does not necessarily mean "innovation". Innovation, by definition, requires something new. "Doing the same things differently" is only innovative to the extent that things are done differently. (Android certainly did do some innovative things, just saying that forking the kernel was probably not it.)
Yes, but reinventing the wheel is not innovation, it is stupidity. Why write a new kernel if there is a very good one available? Innovation often is in taking existing things and combining them in new ways (or improving already existing inventions, which is what google is doing).
I think the correct term you're looking for is 'forked'.
Which inevitably brings forth the discussion of dongling the fork, or is it forking the dongle?
BTW, widgets were original to android in regards to apple, were they not?
Although it seems so now, keep in mind Google bid for these patents themselves and lost. They were also offered to join the Rockstar consortium, which they declined. Unfair definitely, but not enough to qualify as anti-competitive under a black & white banner.
A serious question, what was the patent system created for?
> ... gives Congress the power "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).
From what I read based on what some legal experts simplified but again, "it's the Internet" but basically, they considered patents as legal rights to monopolize on such innovations.
So, based on that, exactly how is it anti-competitive to disallow other companies to use the said patents unless they agree to pay for the rights?
It's by definition anti-competitive. Its entire purpose is to reduce competition so that the inventor can profit from it. Even if inventors were required to license their inventions to other people for a truly fair rate it would still be anti-competitive since it would increase the costs (and thus barrier to entry) of competition. The inventor still enjoys a significant advantage in the market (not having to pay the license fees).
It's fair to ask if it's bad for there to be an official form of anti-competition, but call a spade a spade.
One could easily make the argument in this context by this part: "by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
The argument here is that the only ones that should benefit from this are the authors and inventors, and they and only they are granted "exclusive" rights. No one else. In fact, I'd find that fair. The implication being you can't sell or transfer those rights to someone, and those rights are only granted to the authors and inventors.
Which leads us to this question:
"exactly how is it anti-competitive to disallow other companies to use the said patents unless they agree to pay for the rights?"
It's not, as long as the one doing the license is the author or inventor. One should not be able to transfer those rights to a third party, as it's explicitly an exclusive right.
Except that Microsoft innovated, got there first and clearly has something valuable if other companies are using it's IP (self evident since companies are paying them licensing fees).
The reason for paying licensing fees doesn't have to be that Micro$oft has something valuable, it could very well be they are afraid of legal repercussions.
If they weren't infringing, the companies wouldn't be paying. It's not like we are talking about some mom and pop that is going to go out of business from legal fees. We are talking major handset manufacturers.
It's not about going out of business, it's about cost/benefit. What good does it do you to avoid paying a million dollars in license fees if it costs you two million dollars in lawyers fees to do it?
(The answer is that it keeps you from being painted as a mark by other trolls. But it still doesn't change the math -- it costs more to fight than to pay.)
That's because you happen to value gold just like someone else did 100 years ago.
But there are plenty of other forms of money that have vanished, from stone wheels, to shells, to papers. And all of those would be considered hard money.
Is ad the only means a free product can survive at scale like Google, Facebook and Twitter? Free services (of good quality of bad) entice users to use their service and trap them into their cage for advertisers to peek at.
