alt Hacker NewsWhy 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.
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On the question of language models and periphery tooling -
Open weight models are disruptive to the business models of closed model businesses. An incentive is if your business is built around X but model training is helpful to you, but you don’t expect to meter it specifically. You can release your models and undercut the exclusive moat of a new model company like OpenAI or Anthropic from becoming at some point a competitor, or holding their access as a chip in pricing negotiations. By opening your architectures and weights other competitors can build on them and newer better models emerge faster decoupled from a small number of proprietary models. This lets you focus on X while gaining overall momentum on your model release at no additional cost and no loss in focus on X, while defending against upstarts and monopolies.
This is effectively a lot of the open source world that comes from corporate development as well. It feels odd after this many decades of discussing corporate reasons to participate in open source we keep rehashing it.
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!
Cloud providers are commodity, and egress pricing is partially cost following because they have to pay peering to their interconnect points for WAN. Internal networks are not charged within the account because the economics of the VPC overlay are optimized for that use, but inter account and VPC and other boundaries carry cost - especially interconnection between accounts because the way VPC treats virtualization requires a relatively expensive routing. Inter AZ and inter region pricing also exists for the same cost following reasons. They also help shape incentives because it allows them to optimize placement of compute within the same AZ to physical buildings or rings.
The case that is largely nonsense is the egress pricing on direct connects since beyond the circuit costs, which the customer pay, there’s no costs for aws not already on the customer regardless. It also makes DC friction weird in that you are incentivized to NOT move storage before compute.
After 16 years on Hacker News, I've come to associate its readership with cheap bastards who think everything should be free while simultaneously wanting to keep their 6-figure jobs.
There's a very strong overlap with male gamers, who also think everything involving sophisticated engineering and design should be cheaper than a cup of coffee.
Just call it out and maybe we can collectively choose to towards a culture that doesn't encourage such shameless behavior or perverted values.
> 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.
Public good isn’t a charity, and a business model that doesn’t contribute to the public good should not be allowed to exist.
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.
They did steal all of our written knowledge
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.
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.
“A business that does things that customers actually like is a charity” lmao
Because there is literally nothing special about coding hardnesses. The models are doing all the lifting. It just user experience that separates them.
A coding hardness with just bash outperforms Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, Pi ect. The added features are just user experience features.