NPM (the company) was about to go under in 2020. They raised VC but never found a sustainable business model. GitHub acquired them to keep the ecosystem alive. The acquisition hasn't really benefitted GitHub much at all.
No there are gobs of node projects on GitHub. I'm sure someone did the math on how many paying customers would have been fucked if npm.org went away and it worked as a loss leader.
I don’t know if this is the case here, but it’s very hard in general to judge how much software projects ought to cost.
Software projects will grow in complexity to consume whatever budget you give it. If you hire 50 devs and give them a bunch of business objectives, they are going to do what they do and write a ton of software.
It’s not obvious to me that it would be theoretically impossible to build a cheaper package manager.
Eh, easy to say. Remember how Sourceforge started shipping ads in binaries people downloaded? If you think failing was the worst scenario, you lack imagination.
Voting control doesn't change management's fiduciary duty to all shareholders. The founders retaining voting control has worked out fine for Alphabet shareholders.
> The founders retaining voting control has worked out fine for Alphabet shareholders.
Only after the cofounders brought in veteran "adult supervision" who offered guided the company with a steady hand, while Larry and Sergei were safely in their moonshot hobby project play-pens, away from the core products - an arrangement that would greatly benefit shareholders in Musk companies.
Getting together a group of owners with 3% ownership by value or 3% by voting rights both seems do-able, and I'm sure would be done of there was a serious case of mismanagement.
Fiduciary duty is meaningless without recourse. The governance structure denies any recourse. A case of breach of fiduciary duty would never make it to trial under the governance structure.
> The Google founders are, lets say, more reliable than Musk when it comes to making sound business decisions.
I've no idea about that and I won't opine. But every time I see that sort of statement it seems likely motivated by the whole Twitter acquisition. Perhaps that was just a toy or vanity project for him, one he could afford, so even if you think he's running X terribly it might have nothing to do with how he's run or would run any other companies that are not related to social media. In other words, what I read into such statements is "I don't like the politics he's brought to Twitter!", "the board should rein in the guy whose politics I don't like!!". It's like saying Bezos is bad at business because he owns the Washington Post -another vanity project- and you don't like the Post.
Do people not get bored of that sort of take?
Tell me he makes bad business decisions all you want, but in the context of everyone-hates-his-acquisition-of-Twitter I'd like to hear about his other businesses. Tell me something useful, not something political.
And, sure, politics at some point bleeds into business. Maybe Trump is out to get Bezos over Washington Post coverage, or maybe the next Democrat President will go after Musk for his politics. It's possible that X will eventually cost him dearly and personally, and it's a solid argument for these billionaires and trillionaires to stay out of politics. Or maybe it's a good argument for them to stay in because maybe by demonstrating electoral influence and power they can make the POTUS-of-the-day fear them enough to not go after them too hard. But if you made any such argument it still wouldn't say tell me anything about the rest of these billionaires' businesses.
Space GPUs are stupid, so is hyperloop, so is the Vegas Loop; robotaxis don't work, cybertruck sucks, the humanoid robots don't work, the new roadster is nowhere to be seen.
SpaceX blew up an entire launchpad because Musk thought flame diverters are gay, or something.
Every single one of those examples is both valid and - I believe, at least - misunderstood.
Musk has a singular goal as far as I can tell: to make humanity a multi-planetary species. All of those things are testing the boundaries of what's possible in areas that will or could be very important for building a permanent settlement on Mars.
I posit that while there's much room for debate around whether or not those projects are viable, as far as I can tell everything Musk has done has been in service of building the corporate framework, talent pool, skills, and technology necessary to colonize Mars.
Ok. A permanent settlement on Mars. Given the personal control structure at play in his companies giving him autocratic control there, why would anyone believe he wouldn’t be anything but a Martian autocrat, and who in their right mind would willingly submit their own sovereignty to Emperor Musk the First of Mars? It’s not exactly like you could change your mind and walk away. You’d be literally putting your life in the hands of this wildly erratic person.
SpaceX and Tesla used aggressive vertical integration, manufacturing simplification, and reuse to radically lower the cost of building rockets and EVs. It's not unreasonable to speculate they might be able to do the same for hyperscale compute.
Imagine Anthropic had gone public a year ago when it had a $61.5 billion valuation. Index fund investors would be up in arms demanding this change after missing out on the 15x run to $965 billion.
The point is that that’s a valuation on paper, made up by a small group of investors that have a strong incentive to have the number be high. Would the number have gone up like this if it were a public company?
Who knows, it could have gone up more. Sandisk just did 40x in a year as a public company. That's the point of an index, buy everything so you don't miss out on the outliers that provide most of the return.
On one hand, every VC who passed on Cloudflare missed out on what is now an $88 billion company. On the other, if they didn't invest because they didn't like the underlying economics, they were actually correct. 17 years after founding, Cloudflare still has never turned a profit.
I think people just say this to make themselves feel better about the dire situation we're in. Whatever works, but it's not quite true in my opinion. The dinosaurs weren't just a "blip" to us.
I started reading history hoping to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, and instead came to the conclusion that history inexorably repeats itself, over a cycle just long enough for the current generation to forget the last event. (I'm trying to indicate similar kinds of mistakes in judgment, the details are always different of course.)
> I started reading history hoping to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past
It's a noble pursuit, but the key part for you is that you _wanted_ to avoid those mistakes and put forth an effort to learn how to. The necessity, in order to truly avoid them, is that enough individuals collectively desire and pursue that. It's why (good) public education is so important for the long term health of societies.
Presumably their position remains that training on public repos is fair use and doesn't require a license. If it doesn't require a license it's still "appropriately licensed".
reply