Why would a company do any of these things? What is their motivation for any of it? That’s like saying cloud providers should be commodity and should open source all of their platforms and eliminate egress fees so customers can easily leave at any point in time.

That’s a charity, not a business model.

▲ c1sc0 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe these things should be utilities that can be swapped out at will and shouldn’t even be privately owned at all? Heresy, I know!

▲ ignoramous 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> That’s a charity, not a business model.

  Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: The pattern of "commoditizing your complement", an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a choke point or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.

  No matter how valuable the original may be and how much one could charge for it, it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere.

  This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields, such as the high rate of releasing open-source contributions by many Internet companies or the intrusion of advertising companies into smartphone manufacturing & web browser development & statistical software & fiber-optic networks & municipal WiFi & radio spectrum auctions & DNS: they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.

https://gwern.net/complement

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kristianp 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Here's the Spolsky article, called "Strategy Letter V": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Here's links to the whole series up to VI: https://lettersremain.com/joel-spolsky-on-strategy/

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cj 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere.

That's a big "if" for Claude Code, et al.

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mpyne 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

Is it? Seems from the outside that it was the thing that finally drove Anthropic into profitability.

	▲	cj 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What drove them to profitability?

▲ femiagbabiaka an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The cloud provider isn't the harness, Terraform/OpenTofu/Pelumi and the abstractions you build using them are. The cloud provider is the LLM. It's not as fungible as the LLM and there's no direct comparison to egress costs of course, but that's moreso a problem with the metaphor.

▲ sharts an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you think Internet Explorer 6.0 was a good decision?

	▲	digitaltrees an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There is a difference between a loss leader that drives a monopoly. Microsoft gave away a browser to make their monopoly OS more valuable and deepen their anti competitive moat. They were almost broken up as a result and honestly should have been if we had any anti trust enforcement. How does open sourcing a Claude code clone drive adoption of anything that is a monopoly or even commercially related? Instead it seems like an attempt to undermine US AI companies. That being said I am increasingly skeptical of how the US leaders are converging on creating monopolies and going deeper into the app layer that means they will end up owning everything rather than being the substrate of a competitive and flourishing ecosystem. If it were up to me I would implement a regulation that 1) AI labs can’t own inference hardware, data centers would be a regulated utility like electricity and the internet required to provide open access third party safety, guardrails and audit, 2) inference providers can’t build apps beyond serving API requests 3) training data sets are required to be open sourced within 3 years of training a model. What we are doing now is allowing vertical and horizontal integration of the hardware, training, inference and application layer. Last time we did that standard oil ended up owning the rail network, pipelines, oil fields, gas stations and refineries. Go see how that worked out for society.

▲ 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲ pstuart 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Good will and trust can ultimately have monetary value, and having a funnel based on open source is a viable play if it leads to a service that is sticky.

▲ devmor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Public good isn’t a charity, and a business model that doesn’t contribute to the public good should not be allowed to exist.

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digitaltrees an hour ago | parent [-]

Is it public good? Or is that a coincidence covering the real motive of an attempt to undermine the viability of American companies?

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devmor an hour ago | parent [-]

What?

	▲	digitaltrees 3 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		China is giving away AI for free so it’s harder to make money. The same strategy they did with solar panels. Sell them at a loss long enough until the manufacturers go out of business and you’re the only one surviving. Then flip to extract monopoly profits
	▲	cj 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		In other words: Do we all think china is releasing MiMo Code open source for the public good? Or ulterior motives.

▲ idiotsecant 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The capital motivation isn't the only one that exists. You can say something should be true without having a plan to maximize quarterly revenues.

Even if you consider profit motive, what is the profit motive for corporate contributions to open source? The same applies here.

▲ jrflowers 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

“A business that does things that customers actually like is a charity” lmao