> How do you think an alternative to duopolistic apps valued hundreds of billions could emerge without funding ?
Government or non-governmental public bodies. Or new legal / administrative entities that are not driven by profit; we are not, as a matter of fact, tied to a binary choice situation whereby private businesses are the better option for such a crucial service.
> Isn't open-source software the closer model to what you desire ?
It can (and it should) definitely be open source, I concur. But that's not necessarily an ownership and control discussion, even less so when we're taking into consideration the infrastructure required for such a project. Genuine public ownership / control assumes giving the leverages (decision-making, governance, choices, infrastructure, model etc.) to the public itself in one form or another. It can be done via a government, but there are reasons to suspect that governments will eventually abuse it or under-fund it, like they often eventually have done; however, that is still a better option than private ownership and control.
> A "public" map app in the sense of "developed and hosted by the government" could enable large funding, but could also be quite frightening.
I disagree. If it's a dictatorship, then private ownership and governance are already not very credible or private. If it's a real democracy, then the public should be able to exert control over it via its institutions and democratic processes. That said, I also prefer a model where the government doesn't own such a platform and dictate how it's developed and used.
In a hierarchy of ownership and governance models from worst to best, private is likely the worst (Google, Apple & the like), followed by governments, and genuine public ownership where citizens themselves can decide how it operates and evolves. The question of money is also partially real: private companies themselves don't create money out of thin air, they rely on public infrastructure (from currency, to legislation/operating rules, to the economy) to operate and need paying consumers that have money, especially a b2c company like this one. In other words, the money is already there, it's just out of reach.
It should be noted that what Americans often define as left (Kamala Harris), most of the world correctly defines as right. Bernie Sanders and AOC are left, but even they are centre-left.
> We considered this option: letting everyone contribute an amount of their choice to support the initiative. But Cartes.app is not a charity, nor is it a free software component on a shelf: it is a service that consumes resources with every use and must handle the load of thousands of daily users.
> Moreover, we still have many features to add to compete with Big Tech, which requires investments.
So you want the public to fund your business and what it gets in return is the honour of improving your business and "compete with Big Tech"?
I think there's a strong incentive to take their chances with Big Tech until a better alternative pops up. In my view, a public service should benefit (and be controlled by) the public. If it's not controlled by the public, there's little difference between a big US provider and a big Chinese or European one.
I don't think that you're necessarily wrong but I tend to doubt it. Who exactly has advocated for that? What is commonly referred to as "the left" is in fact an extremely fractured set of subgroups and political nuances. So perhaps it's more of a case of "some people"?
> Edwin Black, whose book IBM and the Holocaust was published in hardback last year, says new evidence set out in the paperback version shows that executives at the firm's New York headquarters directly controlled a Polish subsidiary which leased punch-card machines used to "calculate exactly how many Jews should be emptied out of the ghettos each day" and to transport them efficiently on railways leading to the camps.
> When the Nazis invaded Poland, Black wrote in the Jerusalem Post, "IBM New York established a special new subsidiary called Watson Business Machines," after its then- president, Thomas Watson. "IBM's new Polish company's sole purpose was to service the Nazi occupation during the rape of Poland." Watson Business Machines even operated a punch-card printing shop over the street from the Warsaw Ghetto, the paperback claims.
Private businesses should not have any insight on what's on people's phones, let alone the ability to ban images. Whilst we, as a society, may have an issue on our hands in that sense (I believe that we totally don't), it is for us to decide how to tackle that, not for governments to actively allow and enforce such rules via private enterprises.
Nah, I'm not unhappy that SO burned. Either the platform became a community-owned, not-for-profit, volunteer-driven project whose sole purpose was to be useful, or it was going to become yet another enshittified platform - which is exactly what happened. In that sense, it deserved to disappear. We're worse off without it, I agree, but we were heading in that direction anyway.
In 2 out of 3 cases, the responses I received to my questions were poor, wrong, snarky, or generally unhelpful.
I still believe a platform like that would be useful: something closer to MDN Web Docs, but with a Q&A mechanism. It should exist as public-interest technical infrastructure funded by govs, not as another asset to be squeezed until the community that made it useful has nothing left to give and everyone was worse off apart from the owners.
> In 1940, the federal tax rate on income over $200,000 started at 66 percent. By 1944, the top tax rate on all income over $200,000 — about $3.4 million in today’s dollars — had jumped to 94 percent.
I find the left/right approach altogether ridiculous for this, it's but a spurious oversimplification which usually shows lack of understanding for the topic discussed. In this particular case, it also shows that you didn't bother to read what meritocracy actually is, since you claim, against the very inventor of the word, that it's a good thing without producing any evidence or reasoning.
> Wherever one looks at the origins of the police (and prisons), one finds they “develop hand in hand with social inequality and hierarchy”, as Robert Reiner, the UK’s leading scholar of police, explains. The police is, he writes, a “means for the emergence and protection of more centralised and dominant class and state systems”.