Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
Wouldn't be possible nowadays to LLM your way out of this?
Really no idea, just asking.
Honestly, the whole thing felt LLM to start with, tons of people lacking context and throwing words and summaries around.
Couldn't have said it any better myself having worked at AWS for close to 8y. I was there during their peak growth years and remember very well how some of these processes that were once not as maddening, devolved.
If I had 5 million I’m going to retire and never code for money again.
I do want to make small video games though, make some music. Pay for a friend’s kids college.
I wouldn’t waste a single extra hour making more money. Usually the golden handcuffs fall off after a year or two. That’s why Heroku went to crap, all the core people left.
Heck AWS is the sole reason all these projects needed to go through these license changes to prevent AWS from completely destroying their business models.
Weirdly I’d put Microsoft above modern-Google, and that’s still a low bar.
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
When a bigger entity (e.g. AWS) decides to undercut the original creator/vendor (e.g. redis,elastic search), MIT code des not help.
I know some lawyers who specialize in these choices. Everyone thinks their choice doesn't smell, but there are the resources to make informed choices.
There the question turns to "you may sue me, if it breaks" as reasoning. In reality sueing will rarely work, but having a business contract satisfies the company's board and insurance about using the software over an "AS IS"-license alone.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.
I can't speak to how successful it is, but Daniel/Curl have been running with this model[0][1] for years. Probably not too different from 'drh and SQLite[2][3].
[0] https://curl.se/support.html
[1] https://rock-solid.curl.dev/
You really underestimate the value of support contracts.