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[–]Pat55word 15 points16 points  (2 children)

I remember watching a video of Peter Thiel claiming that “Technology” companies were doing a lot of negative business to avoid anti-trust lawsuits. I.e google releasing open source components is driven by a desire not to commoditise internet protocols/whatever but to pretend to be competing with Facebook/Microsoft rather than monopolising search. I like Gwern’s theory more.

[–]twistmyhram 2 points3 points  (1 child)

How can this be so vital, widespread, and also unheard of? If this happens as much as Gwern and Spolsky say it does, how could Peter Thiel not know about it?

Is is possible that companies do this without necessarily realizing it?

[–]rakkur 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't think Thiel's perspective is in opposition to the commoditize your complement advice. I'm sure Google has many reasons for working on open source software, just of the top of my head:

  1. It helps them credibly make the claim that they are in a larger space than "search and internet advertising" (the Thiel perspective).

  2. It helps them since the open source they are supporting complements their core products (the Spolsky perspective).

  3. It helps them because it attracts positive publicity regarding their openness and the strength of their technology.

  4. It helps them because great engineers like working for companies that have such projects.

  5. It helps them because it's stuff they needed to work on anyway and when made open source they get community feedback and more importantly the community uses it in ways they wouldn't think of doing internally.

[–]Ilforte 4 points5 points  (2 children)

For me and some people I've shared this article with, it was one of those ideas you feel very stupid for not having realised on your own. It makes so much sense in retrospect, but somehow the pieces that were available to me didn't click into place, some crucial intuition was lacking.

[–]Imaginaryprime 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Huxley thought the same about evolution:

My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the "Origin" [i.e. On the Origin of Species] was, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"

[–]wisty 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Isn't this just what Joel on Software was blogging about?

[–]Richard_Berg 1 point2 points  (8 children)

I don't see that Gwern has added any meaningful commentary to the decades-old observation?

[–]ulyssessword{57i + 98j + 23k} IQ 23 points24 points  (6 children)

Well, it's new to me.

[–]Tenobruseveryone on reddit is a P-zombie including you 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I don't think he provided much more commentary, but he did provide a lot more examples than Spolsky. He directly quoted the relevant bits and added some extra value, but more importantly brought a very old post to the attention of people who hadn't seen it before. If Spolsky posted it in 2012 I could see wanting a direct link back to the original, but 15 years later a "tumblr reblog" equivalent doesn't seem offensive.

[–]thirdtrylucky 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some good new examples; in that article the Illumina sequencer example is one I'm quite familiar with. They've been very smart about keeping control of the market, and they have quite good technology. Now next generation tech is getting tangled up with Illumina (10x chromium single cell sequencing generates Illumina ready output) which facilitates their near monopoly.

One thing that might knock them back eventually is novel sequencers like nanopore getting some traction in niche areas, creating enough revenue to polish their tech. Killer app for nanopore is alternative transcript identification, high noise doesn't matter if you have a reference transcriptome. Short reads, even paired end are kinda crap for that, especially when you have lots of splice variants for a gene. Particularly important in the brain...