Meta response: This account’s recent comment history is almost exclusively self promotion for their content, YouTube channel, and school. Much of the comment text appears LLM generated with classic signs such as the em dash, bullet point lists, and this-not-that comparisons that are common to LLM generated output.

It’s noteworthy because this comment is currently the top voted comment, probably because it hits all the notes of what you’d get if you asked an LLM to generate some content to tap into anger in a Hacker News comment section. It’s scary that this type of LLM powered engagement bait is so successfully being used to advertise on HN.

LLM generated reply right here. Not the worst I've seen but please just post your prompt.

Are you using LLM-generated comments to peddle your book/fake college?

You AI generated this whole comment…

This is 100% an AI generated post. Incredibly disappointing to see this stuff making its way to HN. If you want to promote your school, at least write a post yourself.

Is it just me or is this entire comment AI-generated?

Holy survivorship bias Batman, and yeah, nice punchy AI sentences you got there.

> Linux: 33 years old, runs the internet, community-funded

Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM.

GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux

"1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux."

SQLite made and makes a lot of money from a lot of the people who use them. It's free for us to use, but it wasn't free for Motorola and AOL and Nokia (and later Google, Apple and Adobe) who contracted the team to build it out, add features, fix bugs on it. This wasn't FOSS funded by a few people's free time. It was a commercial business that made money by finding product market fit - the best embedded database in the world. Their scale then allowed them to find more bugs, fix them and become more reliable than anything else.

The whole story (https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/) is fascinating, but here are a couple of interesting excerpts:

> I scrambled around and came up with some pricing strategy. [Motorola] wanted some enhancements to it so it could go in their phones, and I gave them a quote and at the time, I thought this was a quote for all the money in the world. It was just huge. ($80k)

> [Nokia] flew me over and said, “Hey, yeah, this is great. We want this but we need some enhancements.” I [Richard Hipp] said, “Great,” and we cut a contract to do some development work for them.

> We were going around boasting to everybody naively that SQLite didn’t have any bugs in it, or no serious bugs, but Android definitely proved us wrong. Look, I used to think that I could write software with no bugs in it. It’s amazing how many bugs will crop up when your software suddenly gets shipped on millions of devices.

If you can find paying customers that can fund your development, then it's fantastic. It's even better if those contracts give you scale that none of your competitors have. You don't need VC money if that's the case. But let's not pretend that Astro were in that situation. No one was paying for a web framework.

It reminds me of this HN article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550912

European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

The EU is looking for facts like this as it figures out how to use OS to begin to extend its digital sovereignty. I don't think it's as simple as, "get funding from a giant continental government instead of VCs!" but what I hope is that there is a structure the EU and Open Source can forge together that gives OS software the funding it needs to build more Nginxes and SQLites in a way that fosters the independence of those projects along with the independence of the entities that use it.

The VC funding model is broken in general - it's not only bad for open source projects, it's bad for most projects.

Modern expectations that a VC pumps in millions (or billions) of dollars and then extracts 10s of billions a few years later is an unrealistic expectation for most companies, and forcing everything into that model is killing off a lot of projects that could be successful on a smaller scale. The pressure forces small companies to sell out to bigger corporations, consolidating the industry into a few huge players who gate keep and limit competition and choice.

SQLite probably never took VC money, yes. People pay them for work.

Many, many people working on Linux work for companies that pay them to work on Linux. Linux is not, and I don't believe has ever claimed to be, community-funded.

Nginx was bought, a couple of times maybe, so they have had cash injections of some sort.

> We need more ways to fund infrastructure that don't require artificial monetization timelines.

Funding infrastructure isn't the problem, exactly. VC is for a specific type of funding: risky businesses that need scale to make money. We have found the answer: VCs, who are willing to lose all their money on your project.

Markus Allen of Founderstowne thinks the umpteenth js web framework is infrastructure and puts it in a category with Linux.

Nitpick: While Linux is not VC-funded, I don't believe you can say Linux is "community-funded".

Not really an apples to apples comparison. You are comparing it to core technologies that millions of things sit on. There will always be money for that.