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There is clearly an anti-China bias here. Show me comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing projects like Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Flutter, Chromium, etc.
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The chromium example is wild. There's an extreme distrust and contempt for chromium becoming the defacto browser and therefore Google becoming the defacto gatekeeper of the web.
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They’ve been that since about 2003 regardless.
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I'll supply such a comment: Any software open sourced by any for-profit company, including Google, is a calculated move ultimately intended to increase their bottom line, and it's naive to think otherwise.
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Isn't it borderline illegal for publicly traded companies to not try to maximize profit? "interest of the company" in theory but in practice
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No, it is not. This is a common misconception that the large companies are very happy about.

1. The century-old Ford decision wasn't about this. It was about him refusing to pay dividends to shareholders he was feuding with. I.e. dominant shareholder using his control to starve minority shareholders of returns.

The court still let him keep spending huge sums on factories and price cuts that didn't clearly maximize profits.

2. Even if the case was about profit maximization (it wasn't), the judgment was a Michigan state decision. It doesn't have force outside of it.

3. US business law is in practice actually the opposite. A business can do pretty much whatever it wants. This is fundamental.

4. Even if it were illegal (it's not), anything can reasonably be framed as being in the long-term interest of the company, including donating to causes, raising employee wages and so on. Courts never question this.

Just imagine this was a thing. It's completely untenable for this reason. Who is a court to judge that something isn't in the longterm interest of shareholders unless it's literally spending all the company money on yachts for personal use?

5. No company has ever been prosecuted for this, obviously, because it's not a thing that exists. The closest you can get is that there's a potential duty to seek the best price if a company must be sold or broken up. But that's a very specific situation.

It's 100% a myth. Feel free to copy this and spread it when you see someone saying this.

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Think about the shareholders!
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Scroll the front page. Find literally any story that has to do with a major US tech company. Open the comment section. Look at the the top comment. It will be negative. Most of the other top comments as well. Trying to gaslight us into not believing our own eyes ..
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* "Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now"

"Drilling into the original article where Jarred explained the reasoning behind the change, It's pretty clear that under zig the team was doing things by hand that are automatic in rust."

* Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

"This is a rare instance where feeding this groundbreaking information into an LLM gives _them_ psychosis. I fed this to claude code and watched it verify the result in 7 different ways to be 100% certain, and it was just flabbergasted. Quite remarkable."

* Ollama: All Aboard Open Models

"A year and still no implementation for such a basic need as offloading MoE layers onto the CPU selectively. On llama.cpp I can get models like Qwen 35BA3B running partially on gpu/cpu with 40t/s on a laptop thanks to --n-cpu-moe but on this VC funded joke it would be simply unusable. I can't quite understand how you make a wrapper so much worse than the code you're ripping out."

* Blender 5.2 LTS

"Look at that wow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I"

* OpenAI reduces Codex Model Context Size from 372k to 272k

"I know a lot of people like to say that compaction makes this moot, but the level of detail you lose across compaction is wildly too much for most things that I do, unfortunately."

* M-Chips: M7 with up to 1.5 TB – and why Apple is skipping the M6

"I hope they put a better connector than TB5 so we can cluster them properly at 1TB/S"

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Your math is not mathing.

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> Open the comment section. Look at the the top comment. It will be negative

My favourite pastime is clicking on any comment section of any topic whatsoever, betting that the top comment is someone going "well, ackshually..."

HN loves a contrarian skeptic, it has nothing to do with Western tech or AI specifically.

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There is a lot of distrust against Google and Microsoft here, also when they opensource stuff, and Chromium and AOSP are great counterexamples.
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Chromium and Kubernetes do have their business function. Tensorflow had a business function but it failed.

So Google is not a great counter example.

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I mean, I expect Google open-sourced those projects because they see economic benefit to themselves in doing so, not because they are good-hearted.

Chromium is an especially silly example to use: they benefit by controlling the web platform, and open-sourcing Chromium has allowed them to get their web engine into many other browsers.

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> There is clearly an anti-China bias here.

Yes.

> Show me comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing projects like Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Flutter, Chromium, etc.

There's a search bar at the bottom of the page. Most people, including me, detest google and think of them as a thoroughly dishonest and sleazy organization. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to not boost China for a moment in order to accuse you of dishonest rhetoric.

It's almost insane that you've posted "comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing [...] Chromium[...]" as if that's not a hobby for thousands of people (including me.)

edit: this has got to be a submarine shill account: 226 karma in 10 years. If this is true, pleas stop. China is doing a good enough job that they don't need it.

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It could be as simple as do open releases and publication at first to help recruit talent who want that or who want to make a name for themselves. learned from the likes of... OpenAI, Google, Meta, Emad
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There must be some Alibaba posters who could clarify this. I think it’s like how Amazon pushed AWS, alibaba is hoping create a similar ecosystem. I wouldn’t conflate them with the CPC or other more niche players like deepseek.
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IDK how this doesn't apply to American tech corporations too? Or is it only scary when America corporations face actual competition nowadays where they can't rely on the US government to bomb/sanction competitors?
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Well of course nobody believes that, there are a large number of great Chinese open source projects, and plenty of great Chinese contributors to open source projects. I have zero doubts that Chinese people are at least equally as capable of embracing open source as anyone else. It would be strange to suggest otherwise.

That said, though, I do have trouble believing the long-term story for open weights, anywhere. We do not need an evil government for open weight to "make sense", but I do think we need some government involvement for open weight to make sense in the long run. Otherwise, it's not 100% clear how they could be sustainable, and I don't think massive companies really can be trusted to just be philanthropic with no incentives indefinitely (or really, much at all to begin with.)

Chinese models being open weight does help them gain some Western mindshare, whereas for obvious reasons Americans would be very suspicious of running their source code and prompts through Chinese providers. (And I think that's justified, I just also think that American providers aren't really that much better in the long run, and you should prefer to not have to go through any provider for true privacy.)

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The CCP encourages open source contributions from companies, you can see this in how much Alibaba open sources across their entire stack

Chinese tech leans much more heavily towards build vs. buy than the SaaS dominated West (where programmers are more expensive) so the positive externalities on their tech industry are more pronounced

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Sure, when it comes to the big corporations I don't deny CCP's influence on their strategy. Hell, in some cases, it's easy to root for their strategy, because sometimes our tech industry sucks. Don't have to love them to occasionally agree with them.

But, in terms of individuals, of course, we're really not so different.

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Sir, this is a multi-billion dollar operation. There have to be some incentives.
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You could argue that Linux is a trillion-dollar project, it doesn't shift the goalposts.
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Yeah, but the trillion dollars are not concentrated in the Linux kernel project, but instead distributed all over the planet. That's not how the AI lab economy works.
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Linux is a huge project and is not really comparable to Debian
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This is an interesting statement that I found myself reading from two different interpretations of what you meant, and I find both possibilities to be equally true depending on your POV.
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I like the comparison, but I'm not sure it holds. What did it cost him to develop beyond intangibles such as his time and money forgone? Because the latter especially is not equivalent to upfront capex and opex costs that preempt any ability to be charitable. Genuinely asking, but I'd be hard pressed to think it's even within the same magnitude.
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Well there is a close equivalent today where a similar situation is playing out.With the argument being made that the dev cost aside - the pricing is being tied to what the potential future treatments would have cost.

Save a child from crippling illness and a lifetime of pain with a single dhot: Jonas Salk 0$ ,Doug Ingram 3.2M$ [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260118223436/https://www.cbsne...

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1.) Majority of debian contributions are from people paid for it.

2.) It is scary because they do what sillicon valley did for decades? While it bragged about disruption being the goal?

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