"all 100 people in my village need a cheeseburger very badly; this piece of paper says that if any of them lay a finger on it, they get carted off to jail"
> In giving companies a free pass to enter the “open source community,” however, certain hackers said “take what you want and give what you want” to a bunch of organizations built around maximizing the ratio of the former to the latter.
Like the author says, investment by these entities can balloon the (F)OSS ecosystem, but when they contract (as is inevitable in a boom-and-bust economy), the nonrenewable resources that actually write the stuff (humans) will burn out.
> See, when you build an education product, you’re competing against two massive institutions: the formal education system (schools, colleges, state universities, etc.), and the laws and cultural expectations around that system.
What you’re competing against is the natural tension between these things and the demands of the market.
You get a good sense of this after 5 years at a math tutoring startup that’s always grappling with the dual expectation that you give the kid the answer quickly (“the customer is always right”) vs. you patiently sit with them until they learn (the goal of formal education).
Dang. My hunch is that most of them happened to only pick a few and through a stroke of bad luck none of them overlap. Stay tuned!! And thanks for the suggestion, will put it in my todo list.
Let me know what you think - it hasn't had intensive play by a ton of users yet, so feedback is very welcome!