Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook-chris-cox.html <comment><USER2> I've known Chris Cox since freshman year of college and he was an informal advisor to my first startup. The NYT article referenced in hashberry's earlier comment includes a key quote:

"For over a decade, I've been sharing the same message that Mark and I have always believed: Social media's history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral," Mr. Cox said in a note to employees on Thursday. "As its builders we must endeavor to understand its impact — all the good, and all the bad — and take up the daily work of bending it towards the positive, and towards the good."

"This is our greatest responsibility," he added.'

When the Chief Product Officer says on his way out that "social media is not neutral" and encourages all employees to bend it towards the good... you barely have to read between the lines to understand what's really happening.

The real story here isn't the "spin" from the NYT. It's the fact that Facebook is hemorrhaging its best people as those on the inside finally start waking up to the fact that Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a good thing for the world was a lie.

If the guy who is officially in charge of product and who has been there since 2005 can't make a difference, what chance does anyone else have?

Source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook- chris...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook-chris- cox.html)

<comment><USER3> "Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a good thing for the world was a lie" \- That is such a broad generalization. In the developing world where I live Facebook gives me the opportunity to maintain contact with my family who live on the other side of the world, as I walk the streets of São Paulo, for free. There are hundreds of millions of others like me who keep in contact with their family because of Facebook (and the companies they own). The alternative (cel phone calls and sms) is literally an inch away on our smartphone, but it is such bad quality and so expensive its unusable. For all of us, Facebook is definitely a good thing.

<comment><USER4> > In the developing world where I live Facebook gives me the opportunity to > maintain contact with my family who live on the other side of the world, as > I walk the streets of São Paulo, for free.

Cool. In other developing countries it lead to a massacre.

<comment><USER5> Would you mind reviewing [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and following the rules when posting here?

They include: " _Don 't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive._"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chris was one of the rare people who understood both the technical side and business side of a product/business. There were so many times where an engineer would start blabbling big terms to avoid doing something or an PM spouts MBA Bullshit and Chris just shuts it down.

What outsiders who focused on the PR never knew is that there was a balance of power in FB that kept things going forward. Now, with these changes along with Jan Koum leaving last year, I don't know if there is anyone with enough influence to counterbalance the Sheryl-driven short-termism view.

For people without real defined values, "privacy centric" is yet another empty cover to do exactly the opposite.

<comment><USER7> Sheryl-driven development?

<comment><USER8> I'm curious about this as well. From her Wikipedia article[0] and experience in online sales, maybe it means this:

> Author Shoshana Zuboff called Sandberg "the Typhoid Mary of surveillance > capitalism."

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Facebook is big tobacco. Intelligent people generating profits that knowingly harms society (even if you do get some joy from a cigarette, that doesn't justify working for a tobacco company).

I really hope the smart people at Facebook see the obvious parallel, and choose another career.

History will judge you.

<comment><USER10> Not exactly. Tobacco has no benefits to society except possibly a dopamine hit for the user.

Facebook has a lot of positives to go along with its negatives. For me, it's the only way I stay in touch with a lot of my friends from high school. And I know that it's only because of Facebook, because Facebook didn't exist for the first 10 years after I graduated, and most of my friends didn't get on it until about 15 years after graduation. It was great finally reconnecting them with them all.

They are people whose company I enjoyed, but we just didn't have the time to have individual conversations every week with the 50 people we knew from school. Having a way for them to broadcast updates has been super helpful.

Also, the Portal is great. I got a pair when they came out, and it's easy enough that my four year old will call her grandparents regularly without my help. It's the only platform that we've found that is easy enough for both the four year old and my parents.

I use messenger and WhatsApp to keep in touch with friends in other countries. They are easy to find because we're friends on Facebook.

So yeah, Facebook still has a lot of positives for society. I don't judge someone who works there just for working there. I hope that they are working to enhance the positives and minimize the negatives. From what I've seen with the folks I've talked to, that is always the case.

<comment><USER11> I hear this quite a lot from the people who have worked at "damaging" companies (facebook, reddit, twitter, uber) but I still have to wonder if the personal benefits these platforms bring are really worth the societal cost, and if people are just using the idea that they can "change things from inside" as a justification for taking money to damage the world.

Don't get me wrong, I think that communication is great. It's fantastic that grandchildren can talk to their grandparents without their parents having to get off the couch and help. But is it worth people literally dying[1][2]? Is being able to post funny memes worth giving violent communities a place to thrive[4]?

At the end of the day people have to make their own decisions about things, but I think that tech workers as a whole are way to eager to wash their hands of the matter, take a paycheck, and blame others while ignoring that these companies could not function without them.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-facebook- neverending...](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-facebook-neverending- crisis/)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar- facebo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook- genocide.html)

[3] [https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/facebook-un-myanmar- geno...](https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/facebook-un-myanmar-genocide.php)

[4] [https://www.fastcompany.com/90244757/the-inside-story-of- red...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90244757/the-inside-story-of-reddits- struggle-to-deal-with-its-most-toxic-pro-trump-users)

<comment><USER12> It's sounds like you're arguing we should shut down the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I used to be a fan of Facebook, but I was never obsessed with it. I even used to work there.

I'm over it.

It's useful for groups, some of the ads really are useful, it's nice to sometimes keep up with people that are far away, but the news feed has had done way more harm than good for our society, including my own life.

After the 2016 Election, Facebook posts lead to so much drama in my family that certain "branches" of the tree have unfriended and blocked each other and we haven't spoken since. My dad and I constantly argue because he will see some comment I made on someone else's post and have to give his own opinion, or read to me what the other person said back. There is no way to turn this part of the feed off.

Overall, it is a totally unpleasant product to use now. The only reason I want it to succeed is because I own stock from when I worked there.

<comment><USER14> > There is no way to turn this part of the feed off.

Unfollow everyone, and you don't get sucked into interacting with the facebook feed. Use it for Messenger, groups, and events. I've been doing that, and facebook is a perfectly good communication utility without any of the grief.

Honestly, we as users should demand a simple switch that entirely disables the feed. It turns facebook from a socially messy skinner box into something benign and generally quite useful.

<comment><USER13> I don't care about seeing other people's comments, but I'd like to be able to prevent people seeing my comments on other peoples' posts unless it is a mutual friend or something. No matter what it is I comment on, a news article, or a group post, and my dad (and I am sure other FB friends) see it even if we aren't connected to the same groups and sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why would anyone want to work for Facebook these days? When you are maintaining the largest advertising stream since TV while actively destroying society's discourse, I'm not sure what redeeming qualities it has. I think the most important thing any of us can do is get away from Facebook and move towards pursuits that fix problems, including the ones Facebook helped create.

<comment><USER16> My wife has been doing taxes for a few people at Facebook (including engineers and PMs) -- many of them make an absurd amount of money. (>$800k / year)

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure if it's a fiduciary duty of an accountant not to disclose this kind of stuff, but it should be.

<comment><USER18> As long as she doesn't associate names with those salaries in the conversation, i don't think it's unethical. Or she doesn't act on those salaries and commit some kind of security fraud, it's just a conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > As part of this, I'm sad to share the news that Chris Cox has decided to > leave the company.

"this" reads as though Cox's departure is a result of the decision to build out a "privacy-focused social platform".

<comment><USER20> That's how it is intended to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting spin from the NYTimes ("Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox"[0]):

"The departures follow two years of scandals for Facebook around data privacy and disinformation. The issues have buffeted the Silicon Valley company, causing internal turmoil and a redirection in strategy."

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook- chris...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook-chris- cox.html)

<comment><USER21> This is what pisses me off. I'm more than willing to criticize Facebook when they deserve it but IMO the media blitzkrieg has said more about the media than Facebook. Not that FB hasn't done scummy things but my faith in the whole attack angle has been reduced

<comment><USER22> Why? What level of criticism is acceptable, and what level is not, and why?

This is something I've not really been able to understand about those who defend Facebook against these "attacks". Nothing reported (AFAIK) has been untrue. Facebook is one of the richest and most culturally central companies of the 21st century. It seems fair game to examine what they do.

<comment><USER23> Significant portions of NYT's reporting have been highly misleading, to the extent that it's difficult to conclude it wasn't intentional.

"Facebook allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users' private messages." [0]

Netflix and Spotify have Messenger plugins that allow you to share movie trailers and songs from directly within the Messenger app. Spotify's desktop app also used to connect with Messenger to enable similar functionality. NYT equated having standard "read/write" permissions necessary for basic app functionality with Netflix and Spotify being able to access, store, and modify all of your private messages.

Read the comments on that article and any prior discussion of it on the internet and you'll see that many technology illiterate people misinterpreted what that meant.

Also, it's fair game to examine what Facebook has been doing, but it's also fair game to examine what NYT's motives are for scrutinizing them so closely. When Google, Twitter, Equifax, and others have been largely ignored one naturally begins to wonder if there's an underlying agenda at play.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook- priva...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html)

<comment><USER24> I'm confused. Netflix and Spotify did have the ability to read anyone's private messages. That's what they reported, and as far as I know none of the involved parties disputed that.

The point isn't that somebody at Spotify was sitting there reading everyone's messages. The point is that they could have been doing that, and Facebook had nothing in place to know if they were doing that, and none of the users sharing a song with friends would think that doing so would enable them to do that, and such extensive privileges were not necessary to implement a simple sharing feature.

<comment><USER25> Without regulatory oversight and third party auditing of certified access logs, you can't really be sure what was or was not accessed. Of course, if you imposed those kind of requirements on Facebook, that would take a significant amount of resources and therefore reduce their profit margins. Probably not very investor-friendly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I just don't understand how anyone can believe his vision for "a privacy- focused social network" is even possible this late in the game. There is too much money riding precisely on the reductions of privacy Facebook has enabled for this to be realistic anymore. The ad dollars come from _knowing_ you, not _concealing_ you. Plus, once you're a public company, the rules change—you have shareholders to honor—and if you got to that IPO by being shady or unethical, backing out of that position is going to be nigh impossible. Their entire business model developed itself on a privacy-destroying data-suck of colossal proportions so where is profitability without that?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

<comment><USER8> Some theories:

1\. Rebranding Facebook as secure and private

2\. If this increases usage, more opportunity to display ads

3\. Their data shows they gain more information by monitoring what people publicly share, not say in private

4\. Removes all responsibility to work with law enforcement and governments for illegal activity, since it's encrypted

<comment><USER27> Could you ever consider that Zuck has enough money, and that he really believes in making a product to connect people for the greater good and use ads to make it available to everyone?

<comment><USER28> As a person, maybe if I squint very very very hard.

Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board and investors. And there hasn't been a business model that provides a free consumer web product without monetizing user data.

<comment><USER29> Why does this shareholder value meme keep getting perpetuated?

<comment><USER28> Because that's who a CEO reports to and that's how a CEO gets fired.

Some CEO's like Elon and Jobs can spin a great story and hold on by sheer force of personality, but pension funds aren't buying FB in bulk to get more green cars on the road.

<comment><USER30> > Because that's who a CEO reports to and that's how a CEO gets fired.

That has nothing to do with the legal requirements of the company or the CEO. That would be the same as saying I am "legally required" to go to work tomorrow, because I could get fired for not showing up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For those who aren't FB insiders, what is the read on this? Do the two Chris' reputation in the company have any bearing on how this is read?

</comment><comment><USER32> Chris Cox is a huge loss for Facebook. His first day speech is still the reason Facebook has the strongest culture in the valley.

<comment><USER33> > Facebook has the strongest culture in the valley

For a company so regularly beset by scandal, this feels like a bold assertion.

Culture of what?

<comment><USER32> Any other company in their shoes would have had a mass exodus. Chris was a big part of making employees feel like they shared a piece of the dream.

Whatever your thoughts about Facebook, the fact that some of the smartest people have worked, and continue to work at a company "beset by scandal" should give you pause.

<comment><USER34> Smartest people? Their tech stack is a dated cargo-culting of Google, hell, their newest thing is just using kubernetes with a thin wrapper.

Their AI platform is a also ran in pretty much every aspect.

Where exactly are the smart people?

<comment><USER35> FAIR is one of the most advanced AI research labs in the world. PyTorch has massively growing adoption because it is substantially better than the competitors and FAIR work consistently pushes the state of the art forward. Calling their AI work 'also ran' is ridiculous.

<comment><USER34> FAIR is just an advanced PUBLIC AI research lab.

Just because they're the best ones talking about what they're doing, doesn't mean they're anywhere near the best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> (Reposting since the parent comment I replied to was deleted)

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Whatsapp have all been (and continue to be) exploited to spread messages of hate and ignorance. It seems strange to me that Facebook is coming under so much criticism relative to the other platforms when, from my perspective, they've also been the most proactive about trying to address these issues and dedicated significant resources to moderation. That isn't to say that these moves have been successful or productive, but I haven't heard anything from Twitter recently regarding trying to minimize hate speech and ignorance on its platform (and its the worst service for divisiveness, in my opinion). Google only just recently demonetized anti-Semitic and anti-vax material on YouTube and only after significant backlash from its advertisers (not its users who have been calling for a response for years). Why is this?

</comment><comment><USER36> Some of the good things are happening, they are starting to lose good talent, it's only a matter of time before they are replaced.

Repeating what I said earlier

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614163)

This company is the drug dealer of Silicon Valley. They have consciously destroyed a generation attention span using psychological tricks.

</comment><comment><USER37> They just spent the last 5 years drilling into their employees a culture where online privacy doesn't exist, I think it's going to be pretty steep turn of the ship. Nevertheless I hope the announcement is not merely lip-service. I'd love to see the same commitment out of Google.

<comment><USER38> Google+ was good privacy-wise.

<comment><USER23> In what sense? Google exposed the information of 500,000 Google+ users and tried to conceal it.

"Chief Executive Sundar Pichai was briefed on the plan not to notify users after an internal committee had reached that decision, the people said." [0]

[0] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-exposed-user-data- feared...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-exposed-user-data-feared- repercussions-of-disclosing-to-public-1539017194)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> munk-a [https://outline.com/yTPSbh](https://outline.com/yTPSbh)

(An outline version for those tracking aware or blocked on corporate nets)

<comment><USER39> That was the original submission. The current article is at [http://archive.is/VTCwx](http://archive.is/VTCwx).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > But after 2016, we both realized we had too much important work to do to > improve our products for society

"Primum non nocere."

I cannot help but laugh at this statement. I think Facebook has done, and is still doing, way more harm than good for society. Like many other addiction- based services, it generated massive revenues for very few people, at the expense of society.

<comment><USER41> My friends and I derive significant value from keeping in touch via Facebook. I find your attitude condescending and insulting.

<comment><USER40> You just proved my point.

<comment><USER42> "In other words, Toine is being condescending"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The differences stemmed from Mr. Zuckerberg's asserting control over his > company and its apps — Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger — by > rolling out a plan to integrate the services into a single privacy-focused > platform, according to six people involved in the situation.

I'm mystified as to why Zuckerberg would let them leave over this. It very simply doesn't seem like a good idea (how many WhatsApp users know FB even owns it? What good does it do to remind them?) and when you've got major product heads disagreeing with you it's time to make a clear argument. So far I haven't seen one.

</comment><comment><USER43> Here is my informal ranking of Facebook's biggest problems:

1\. Facebook itself (built on multiple harmful feedback loops)

2\. Facebook's business model (selling eyeballs, etc. to advertisers)

3\. Mark Zuckerberg (expansion justifies anything)

4\. Facebook's customers (advertisers who only care about influence)

5\. Facebook's users (rotting apples in a rotten barrel)

</comment><comment><USER44> The rats are leaving the sinking privacy nightmare ship?

If the co-founders of your only significantly growing products (Whatsapp and Instagram) leave (publicly in disgust about product direction) and your Head of Product for similar reasons now too this makes me wonder what working in Product Manaqgement at Facebook is like these days.

It's the Zuck way or the out-the-door way? Why would any semi-creative person want to work under those circumstances?

</comment><comment><USER45> Are these choices of the individuals or were they asked to resign? It seems pretty odd that all these people would just decide to leave _at the same time_.

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't see how they can make money on truly private communications channels. If they aren't gathering data, and they aren't showing ads (who would put up with ads in IM?), where does the money come from? Is it just a way to hold on to users for future monetization?

<comment><USER47> I think it's actually just a red herring. I think one could better define "private" in this context to mean "between two individuals", with the false implication that they mean "away from advertisers". Facebook has proven itself an exception to Hanlon's Razor by this point, so I'd say its probably deliberate.

<comment><USER46> Perhaps, but WhatsApp is already (allegedly) "truly private". I've never understood how it makes money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Interesting. The article seems to emphasize that the conflict was over merging the messaging apps (Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp).

What are the upsides and downsides of merging the messaging apps? I wonder if there's any way that could turn out to be a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER49> FB seems to be a reincarnation of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster)

</comment><comment><USER50> Has no one heard of planned obsolescence? Facebook has outserved its usefulness; it is little better than a rudderless ship under the current leadership and business model. The bell has tolled; and the Feds are at the gates. Cease operations and move on. There's a plot available in the social media graveyard next to MySpace with Facebook's name on it.

<comment><USER51> That's not what planned obsolescence is, but there are certainly cycles of capital whereby businesses build great and useful products with the initial help of capital infusions, then slowly degrade the usefulness of said product or increase their exploitativeness in order to reduce costs or increase prices. Perhaps that is happening with facebook now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Side note... Outline.com doesn't want to outline nytimes articles anymore...?

</comment><comment><USER53> What happened to their "Blockchain" division?

<comment><USER54> It's forked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> So the possible #2 (it was debatable as to whether Sandberg or Cox would have take over) and the person who run Whatsapp just quit.

Some pretty big power struggles going down it seems.

</comment><comment><USER54> "privacy-focused social platform"

See also:

"sobriety-focused keg party"

"health-focused donut shop"

"quality-focused downvotes"

<comment><USER56> This sort of thinking fits into the old mindset of how people envisioned facebook. Just a year or two ago the prevailing consensus was "don't post it if you don't wan't it public".

But people have since realized that facebook collects far more than what you give them. It pays for data. It mines data from millions of web sets. It follows you around in ways people don't understand.

maybe "key part where the host sneakily follows you around on a daily basis to better understand your drinking habits" would be more appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Can someone tldr; this please? It seems like some people "left" the company because Facebook is taking a PR hit on its bad privacy practices. Is that right?

</comment><comment><USER58> What is the tldr of this?

</comment><comment><USER59> And nothing about the massive downtime fb just experienced yesterday.

<comment><USER60> Luckily it's not a critical service, nor is Instagram. WhatsApp is probably the most critical as a lot of people depend on it every day, even for business purposes.

<comment><USER61> Why is that, is it incidental or based on the features they offer?

<comment><USER62> Out of the handful of messaging services with end-to-end encryption, I'm pretty sure Whatsapp is the most popular. So the security would probably be the main driver, and the popularity would be why Whatsapp in particular.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do SAAS clients ask you to sign NDA - <AUTHOR>

If you have a SAAS product and you could get a big client, do you agree to sign NDAs ? What does that even mean ? <comment> o0-0o Yes, I do. If you want, email me and I'll send you what we use. It's not a big deal. Focus on the product.</comment>


Making Great VR: Lessons Learned from "I Expect You to Die" - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JesseSchell/20150626/247113/ <comment><USER2> The criticisms of tracked hand motion are spot on, at least with regards to the Leap Motion device. But even if the controller were to work well, having no feedback makes actually interacting with the environment extremely difficult.

So I hacked together a haptic glove out of an Arduino, a few vibrating motors, and a WebSocket-to-Serial-Port bridging program in a weekend. Took it to National Maker Faire and demoed it to a few hundred people. There were only a handful of skeptics, and of them, only two of them walked away unconvinced. Even basic haptics has a huge impact on the believability of the motion interaction.

<comment><USER3> Hi! I saw you guys there! A friend suggested that adjustable tension in the glove rather than haptics might be a good way to deal with interaction.

<comment><USER2> Hey there! So I imagine based on your "you guys" comment you're actually thinking of NullspaceVR [0]. They are a team out of Rochester University that is developing a slew of haptic devices. I got to talk to them some and they are a very good group of people that hopefully we can do some work together in the near future.

I was there with DCVR [1]. We're a social meetup group for entrepreneurs and hobbyists in the Washington DC area centered around virtual reality. We decided to organize and put a booth together to help promote our individual projects, while also trying to grow our local community for our meetups. But otherwise, in regards to my projects, I was there myself.

Since you sound like you're in the area, please come to our next DCVR meetup. They are a lot of fun and it's probably one of the best ways to get involved with VR from scratch right now.

[0] [https://twitter.com/nullspacevr](https://twitter.com/nullspacevr)

[1] [http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality- DCVR/](http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality-DCVR/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was I the only one disappointed to hear that the knife couldn't be used as a screwdriver? I would think that a game designer would be excited to allow the pocket knife to be used as a separate, emergent solution to the puzzle. Don't give the player a tool and then tell them it doesn't work. That's not immersion, it's a tease.

</comment><comment><USER5> I liked "Fail Fast, and Follow the Fun" and emphasis on immersion.

But this article, like Carmack's pro-VR article, convinced me that VR isn't ready. Before it was unacceptable latency for some motions; now it's motion sickness.

But these are clever guys. One day it will be ready.

<comment><USER6> You should try a current-generation VR system, or even last year's tech like the DK2. You would be surprised.

Motion sickness is now mostly an issue of badly designed software, not hardware. Developers porting content designed for 2D screens don't realize that their camera movements make people sick.

As someone who writes VR software, I think VR hardware unfairly gets blamed for bad VR software.

<comment><USER7> My biggest problem with VR, and 3D goggles in general, is that eye- accomodation is not necessary in the virtual world, with current technology. This means that the eye will get lazy if goggles are used too often.

<comment><USER8> From what I've heard, keep in mind I have a bad memory and am not an expert, your eyes are supposed to work just as much if not more than while using a regular screen. You will focus your eyes all over, while on a 2d screen, you keep your eyes on the same position (center of screen, 20 inch away) for the duration of your gameplay.

<comment><USER7> You are talking about a different kind of eye-movement/muscle-group.

I'm talking about accomodation (the mechanism the eye uses to focus near and distant images with equal sharpness on the retina).

That mechanism (not the muscles, but the part of the brain responsible) will get lazy.

<comment><USER9> And once you hit my age, your have have stopped accommodating for quite a while. I also wear glasses with two quite different prescriptions. I wonder how many of the VR systems will work for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/content_farms_impact.php

<comment><USER2> Good article. I get a lot of interesting information from following a small number of technical blogs of people I know (usually just through years of email contact) and trust. That is how I get valuable/interesting things to read. (I also use twitter for this purpose.)

Redit (hint: strong customize the 'My Redit' lists you subscribe to narrow things down to your particular interests) and Hacker News are also pretty good if you stick to the first few pages of up-voted links.

re: search engines: one of my primary uses for web search is pasting in error messages from server build errors, runtime errors, etc. Also, for quickly looking up an API I can't quite remember. A very different process than using search to find fun stuff to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of interesting articles/links never get voted up so I do try to spend some time on new submissions and vote.

I've given up trying to predict which of my links that I submit will get voted up (I just post links that I find interesting). I notice the types of subject matter that gets voted up can vary depending on the time of the day and weekend/weekday content so you might lose a lot if you just stuck to the front page for instance (though you do note sticking to the first few pages). That said, we all only have so many hours in a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> PageRank needs to get a lot smarter.

<comment><USER4> Spot on. I can't imagine that Google isn't already working on the solution to this. Of course, when that solution means altering an algorithm as opposed to arbitrarily targeting some of the higher profile sites like those mentioned here, it will take time to resolve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Baidu Baike and Baidu Zhidao is the similar content farm, but in Chinese:

<http://baike.baidu.com/robots.txt>

<http://zhidao.baidu.com/robots.txt></comment>


Is everything in JavaScript an Object? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.simpleblend.net/is-everything-in-javascript-an-object/

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope someone gains value from this article. It's the first in an ongoing series I plan to write on JavaScript. Would love any and all input!

Andrew</comment>


A deep learning model that converts hand-drawn web mockups into HTML - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ashnkumar/sketch-code <comment> jake-low Coincidentally, I just ran across this article [1] about Airbnb's tool to turn UI sketches into interactive running code. The author of this project links to it in the post about their project (which is in turn linked from the readme).

[1]: [https://airbnb.design/sketching- interfaces/](https://airbnb.design/sketching-interfaces/)</comment>


Why Greet Apple's Swift 2.0 With Open Arms? - <AUTHOR> http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/06/15/apple-is-not-our-friend.html <comment><USER3> It's frustrating to see this somewhat blinkered view.

Yeah, Apple definitely doesn't like copyleft. That's okay; lots of people don't (especially larger companies – how many large companies actively release GPLd software?). It's a legitimate business decision, and there are some good arguments that support it (which you may or may not agree with).

The idea that organisations 'owe' the community copyleft software is therefore a bit foreign to me.

Furthermore:

 _We 'll likely see pieces of Swift 2.0 thrown over the wall. But the best stuff will be kept proprietary._

That's a bit of a weird assumption. Apple's statement was the the Swift code and standard library would be open-sourced. What is the 'best stuff' that we're not going to get?

 _Apple 's not-yet-executed move to liberate some of the Swift 2.0 code seems a tactical stunt to win over developers who currently prefer the relatively more open nature of the Android/Linux platform … the copyleft license of Linux itself provides the opportunity to keep the core operating system of Android liberated._

That's a bit flaccid. Google and the Android platform has equally went out of the way to isolate the platform from the effects of the GPL. In fact, I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Bionic (the Android libc) exists is specifically to limit the impact of GPL code on the platform. Android's use of Linux is basically a historical accident, and painting it as some kind of concerted effort towards software freedom isn't a compelling point.

TL;DR - you need to relax. Apple releasing open-source code is a good thing. We can now all benefit from using this code. Maybe you'd prefer if it were copylefted, but it's not – it's still good, and painting it as an evil move against software freedom seems like a bit of a mental stretch.

<comment><USER4> Imagine Swift becomes a wild success; everyone's writing everything in Swift. What will your reaction be when Apple again makes a "legitimate business decision" and leverages the success to the benefit of their company and implicitly disadvantages other platforms? Maybe they double up on Swift support on Mac and start shipping additional features first for LLVM/Clang on OSX. Will you brush it off again as an understandable move by Apple?

I think you would. I certainly wouldn't be happy with Apple for doing it, but I would definitely say it's understandable. Like you're saying, they're a business, they make business decisions.

The point I'm trying to make there is any problems that arise from this fall squarely on the developers choosing to embrace this new language. I'm not writing this comment to convince Apple to act differently. The original post didn't make those arguments to Apple. This is all directed at developers, trying to change THEIR actions and feelings.

So as a developer right now, given that you have a plethora of open tools and an open ecosystem, why would you choose to use a language where a company has the opportunity to manipulate you in the future? Why write libraries and provide support and do this work for free for Apple? Writing libraries for the benefit of the community provides some security in that no one except the community stands to benefit from it. You can go to sleep happy knowing that you're helping out your fellow devs.

Writing for the benefit of a community that is paired with executive power means that it can all be swept from under you. Your library is still helping your fellow dev, but it helps the fellow dev with OSX 10.12 more. Now you've contributed to Apple's bottom line. Was that your intention?

I completely disagree with other commenters in this thread that we have some obligation to be thankful for companies for putting out things with strings attached. I'm not a spoiled brat for not liking everything. These companies would be absolutely nothing without their developers. It's time the community sticks together and realizes the power they have. It's not unthankful to demand more. It's dangerous to get swept up in the excitement of new languages and to assume good graces. Look no further than what Apple has done to Webkit, LLVM, CUPS and more. First class on OSX, give back only what's not newest. Swift will certainly be the same way.

<comment><USER3> _Imagine Swift becomes a wild success … Will you brush it off again as an understandable move by Apple?_

I'm a bit unclear what you seem to think is lost under these circumstances versus copylefted software. Let's say Apple released Swift under the GPL. They would still be free to do all of the things you describe.

 _So as a developer right now, given that you have a plethora of open tools and an open ecosystem, why would you choose to use a language where a company has the opportunity to manipulate you in the future?_

This is, as above, no different from the copyleft case.

 _So as a developer right now, given that you have a plethora of open tools and an open ecosystem, why would you choose to use a language where a company has the opportunity to manipulate you in the future?_

It's extraordinary difficult to argue that Apple would be in a position to manipulate me as a developer if I started using Swift. For one thing, once the code is open-source – that's it. I can continue developing software using that language. If Apple decide not to release new features, and instead keep them proprietary, then the community is free to fork development.

More importantly, if it's important to members of the free software community, they are _entirely able to develop capital-F-free software on top of Apple 's release!_

I'm really thankful for copyleft licensing and the amazing tools it's given us. But it's a vary complex issue, and I just don't agree that release under a license with _fewer restrictions_ is necessarily a bad thing!

<comment><USER4> __EDIT: I 'm wrong see below __

> "I'm a bit unclear what you seem to think is lost under these circumstances > versus copylefted software. Let's say Apple released Swift under the GPL. > They would still be free to do all of the things you describe."

Absolutely not. GPL means anything you put out must be published. If LLVM and Swift are GPL'd they can't develop additions to them, ship them on their Macbooks, and not publish the changes to the rest of the internet.

This is what's happening right now with LLVM.

<comment><USER3> _If LLVM and Swift are GPL 'd they can't develop additions to them, ship them on their Macbooks, and not publish the changes to the rest of the internet._

This is true if you redistribute the GPL code of others.

However, as the copyright holders, Apple are free to release their code under whatever license they wish, or to refrain from releasing it. They can ship it on MacBooks, and are under no obligation to release the source code.

You could argue that they couldn't accept GPLd submissions anyway, but since they'd require copyright assignment in any case it's a moot point.

<comment><USER4> Oh crap, you're completely right. Good point.

The bit about copyright assignment is significant though. There is a way for Apple to ensure the community that they will not screw them over for embracing their language. I think it would be prudent for the community to ask for that.

<comment><USER5> I guess one aspect is that LLVM (which Apple doesn't completely own, as far as I know) should have been copylefted to begin with, then any changes (like adding a language) would need to be shared with the community.

The exact same situation happened with Objective C and GCC. In that case, the Objective C frontend was released as free software.

<comment><USER6> > which Apple doesn't completely own, as far as I know

Apple don't own LLVM at all - they hired Chris Lattner who was one of the original directors of the project when it started at the University of Illinois.

> should have been copylefted to begin with

Why? To prevent the vast majority of companies with the money to actually support and grow such a project the way LLVM has, from doing so?

<comment><USER7> > Why? To prevent the vast majority of companies with the money to actually > support and grow such a project the way LLVM has, from doing so?

You mean the ones that haven't provided LLVM with changes for the compilers they are selling?

<comment><USER8> They might not have "provided LLVM with changes for the compilers they are selling" but they have provided TONS AND TONS of changes and fixes and new features for the core LLVM infrastructure.

I could not care less about having the changes to their compilers, and I would even dislike it if LLVM's license required them to do so if that meant they wouldn't touch LLVM in the first place -- in which case we wouldn't get all these core LLVM improvements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reading this thread, I can only imagine some people saying to themselves: _and this is why we don 't open source our code._

I wonder how many companies keep their source completely closed so as not to have to deal with this kind of PR? Would we not be in a better world if, when a company offers code under a BSD-like license, we just say "thank you very much" and move on? If we don't like the license, we develop our own code under a different one, and that's the way the world is meant to work, surely?

There's a lot about this backlash I genuinely don't understand.

<comment><USER10> I completely see your point. But then we've learned from microsoft "embrace, extend and estinguish" tactics that something that may look good at first happens to be, in fact, just a trap to lock you into spending money for something that you didn't used to.

Imagine that swift becomes a super dominant language both for client and server, but that half of the ecosystem still remains locked by Apple, to have you buy apple products (like developing for iOS today requires you to buy apple products, which i personally don't mind because i love their products, but it shouldn't be mandatory).

I guess it's normal that developers as a community takes great care into what path they're heading toward.

<comment><USER11> > Imagine that swift becomes a super dominant language both for client and > server, but that half of the ecosystem still remains locked by Apple

Isn't that exactly the situation with C# and .net?

C# is kinda open source but the runtime is completely Microsoft's. Nobody seems to make a big deal of it, and C# developers seem pretty happy with their platform overall.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't call C# a super dominant language. it is extremely popular in the corporate world, where paying for something is seen as a good thing, because it means you've got support from a vendor.

In the start up culture, where technological innovation and taking risks are core values, people tend to favor maximum freedom and maximum technological possibilities, which are often in contradiction with what a corporation would like you to do.

Now that corporations want to have the same level of innovation you usually find in start ups, they start to want to use the same tools and embrace a bit of its culture. Note that Microsoft saw that and have announced massive open sourcing of every part of the .Net ecosystem just this year (which made a big impression here on HN, judging by the comments).

And now we've got Apple and swift, and people start to wonder if it's going to be "Ballmer" open sourcing, "Nadella" open sourcing, or "Stallman" open sourcing.

It's not just a matter of ideology. It will have practical consequences on the possibilities of using the language on every server configuration, of building innovative software with it, things even people at Apple wouldn't anticipate. Or if you're going to remain constrained to where Apple wants to allow this technology to grow.

<comment><USER12> Not just corporate, don't forget that Mono exists. And things like Unity include it, which means a lot of games are written in C#.

<comment><USER13> It exists but it's also tiny and poorly-supported compared to the Microsoft implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lots of comments are talking about how Apple "doesn't owe [the FSF] anything" and that it's a "business decisison". This is all true, but it misses the point.

The point is that the current trend of companies releasing stuff under non- copyleft licenses and keeping the 'good stuff' in proprietary forks is bad for free (FSF-style) software. That's why the article argues that you should take a good look at what these companies are actually doing beyond press releases and act accordingly.

You might still think that free software is unimportant or that having pseudo- freemium open source release is still better than nothing. But that's your own decision, based on your own values, which might not be the values the FSF thinks of as important.

<comment><USER6> > The point is that the current trend of companies releasing stuff under non- > copyleft licenses and keeping the 'good stuff' in proprietary forks is bad > for free (FSF-style) software.

Copyleft is meaningless without Copyright. Apple created Swift, and thus owns the Copyright. As the Copyright owner, Apple can licence/release Swift or parts-thereof, as it chooses. Even if they did release Swift under the GPL, nothing would prevent them from also using a non-released version of Swift or from keeping certain parts/libraries in-house.

> You might still think that free software is unimportant or that having > pseudo-freemium open source release is still better than nothing.

I think its both insulting and an incredibly narrow-view to call permissively licensed software "pseudo freemium".

<comment><USER14> > Copyleft is meaningless without Copyright. Apple created Swift, and thus > owns the Copyright. As the Copyright owner, Apple can licence/release Swift > or parts-thereof, as it chooses. Even if they did release Swift under the > GPL, nothing would prevent them from also using a non-released version of > Swift or from keeping certain parts/libraries in-house.

If swift is GPL, Apple cannot keep secret changes it makes on top of third party contributions.

If swift is MIT/ISC, Apple can keep changes made on top of third party contributions secret.

<comment><USER15> Oh like Oracle cannot make a commercial closed version of MySQL because it is under GPL[0] or QT[1] cannot have both a closed and a GPL version.

There are a lot more examples of this.

On the other hand look at how RMS/FSF talks about LLVM and BSD[2], i am a developer there prefers the MIT license for my software, and for me FSF and GPL are a lot more dangerous then apple and there open source license.

[0] [http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/#4](http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/#4) [1] [http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/licensing.html](http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/licensing.html) [2] [https://lwn.net/Articles/582242/](https://lwn.net/Articles/582242/)

<comment><USER16> As I see it permissively licensed code puts every one on equal terms. We all can make open source forks & we all can make proprietary forks. With copyleft some one is more equal and it is not the users, since we can only make copyleft forks.

<comment><USER17> Or you could contribute back to the copyleft project (without copyright assignment or relicensing grants) and then you're all on equal terms again: nobody can make proprietary forks.

<comment><USER15> Why should i take the freedom of making proprietary forks away from people?

My goal with open sourcing my software are to make the (software) world just a little better, i do that by writing the best software i can and hope that as many people possible use it, if i write the best ftp library in the world and you need a ftp library for your proprietary program i hope you use mine instead of an inferior implementation.

In my world view i do not loss anything by you making a proprietary forks of my work (i still have my version of my work with my license) but you and your users are getting a better product.

<comment><USER17> If your priority is to improve the quality of the software that people use, I don't think you should use copyleft.

If you think that quality is important, but that as important as that is that users should have control over the software they use, as part of the control they should have over their own lives, then I think a copyleft license is a good tool to help achieve that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't believe Mr. Kuhn is especially aware of how LLVM is developed. I am a regular contributor to the project (> 1000+ commits) and it is simply not the case that one can contribute code in this way.

The LLVM project makes it's stance on patents quite clear [1].

[1] [http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents](http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents)

<comment><USER19> Where does he claim that you can't contribute code to LLVM?

His claim is that Apple ships a LLVM that is different from what you can get as source code (thanks to a lack of copyleft). See the saga of the two aarch64 backends...

<comment><USER18> He writes:

> Apple's announcement remained completely silent on patents, and we should > expect the chosen non-copyleft license will not contain a patent grant.

<comment><USER19> They may not release Swift into llvm. Given that it's just a frontend, it can live on opensource.apple.com without too much maintenance pain.

<comment><USER18> There are many reasons why it's unlikely to live at opensource.apple.com, here are some of them:

First off, some frontend features are only feasible by changing LLVM itself. This is uncommon but ultimately not rare at all, this is where IR features like musttail, inalloca, safestack and segmented stacks originated. It is unlikely that swift will never need such a change.

Secondly, it would directly contradict what Chris Lattner announced at WWDC: They are going to accept contributions (both ideas and code) from others.

Finally, a frontend which generates LLVM IR has a very tight dependency on LLVM itself. LLVM IR is allowed to freely evolve which, in turn, causes APIs to change or disappear. It is much easier to deal with this if your code lives on llvm.org because the community is obliged to make sure your code continues to work. People fix polly, lldb, clang, etc. if their change to LLVM broke them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sold on the inherent good of copyleft licenses. The author seems to think that funding development of permissively licensed free software is, in fact, a bad thing. I'm sure that seems obviously true to some people.

If Apple is a "wily opponent" of open source, then maybe we need more such opponents?

(Also, I'm not following the argument that Apple is open sourcing Swift to try and beat Android. Nor do I think the Android platform deserves as much of a pass as the author gives it.)

</comment><comment><USER21> Chris Lattner fought many years (I believe he started working on Swift 5 years ago) to eventually bring Swift to the open source world. It's not a "tactical stunt" to implement Apple's evil plan to lure people away from Android/Linux. Believe it or not, there are people inside Apple who really want feedback and contributions from the community to improve their language.

<comment><USER22> > Believe it or not, there are people inside Apple who really want feedback > and contributions from the community to improve their language.

That's not hard to believe. But far more important whether those people are the ones ultimately calling the shots.

<comment><USER23> What an amazingly entitled post. Why would outside contributors call the shots? Its Apple's project; not yours.

<comment><USER22> You misread. I don't expect outside contributors to call the shots. b00gizm referred to "people inside Apple who really want feedback and contributions from the community to improve their language" and I suggested that those inside contributors might not have the power to allow effective outside feedback and contributions.

Incidentally, if Swift is to be widely adopted outside the Apple ecosystem, it'll help hugely if it becomes a community project, not "Apple's project".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This kind of texts always reminds me of political/religious pamphlets.

If you love freedom so much why don't you just let people release their software under a license they seem appropriate and you release your software under copyleft?

If Apple's not your friend don't play with them. Don't try to force them into a friendship.

<comment><USER5> It's about educating developers to make an informed decision. I don't know why that's supposed to be religious.

<comment><USER3> I guess it's the abstract, evangelical nature of it that makes it comparable to religion in some ways.

The implicit assumption you're making is that developers are _not_ making an informed decision already. I reckon that's not the case, and the developers _are_ informed – they just don't care.

Arguments about long-term, abstract concepts like enduring freedom of software, or the risk of patent litigation for using non-copyleft software, are valuable to have. But these things have a limited impact in the short- term, day-to-day work of developers.

<comment><USER25> "the developers are informed – they just don't care"

We can't take that for granted. I for one found the article very useful and informing, raising my awareness about this next Apple stunt.

<comment><USER26> Except, nearly the entire article is based on speculation. Speculation doesn't raise awareness, it simply makes you think you're informed. In reality, you're just accepting someone else's biased opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems a little extreme.

"To me, Apple's not-yet-executed move to liberate some of the Swift 2.0 code seems a tactical stunt to win over developers who currently prefer the relatively more open nature of the Android/Linux platform."

They said why this was the case -- Swift 2.0 isn't finished yet -- but have pledged to open-source the entire thing.

<comment><USER28> Bradley is pretty extreme :)

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have sentinels out on the fringes, like RMS and Bradley, to remind us not to get lost. We don't have to go where they are, but we can at least navigate by them.

Having said that, there is a detail here which Bradley is omitting. Specifically, that is that Apple is not anti-copyleft, what Apple is (and what many other corporations are), is anti-GPLv3.

Apple shipped Samba for a very long time. They could have replaced it at any point, but they didn't need to. It was Samba switching to GPLv3 that pushed Apple into writing its own SMB implementation.

Now, it's possible that these things are unrelated, but I believe I am correct in stating that Apple has never shipped GPLv3 software, and anything that has switched to v3, simply gets replaced or held back at its last v2 release (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990) ). The most likely explanation is that they are not prepared to be bound by the patent/tivoisation clauses.

The deeper question is why these v3 terms are unacceptable. IANAL, but I have worked at places where there are pretty flexible policies around using/distributing Free Software, and it's not at all uncommon that blanket policies apply to v2 licensed software, but any and all use of v3 (or indeed AGPL) software require specific individual review by Legal to ensure that you aren't placing the company in an actionable position. That's a pretty heavy time/effort burden to place on the (ideally nimble) process of developing and shipping software, it's also a cost burden.

Personally, I love the GPLv2, I think it's a masterstroke of a license. I don't use it very much anymore, but I'm very glad that exists. I think v3 goes to far, and I think AGPL goes _way_ too far.

I tend to think that there are strategic projects which should be under v3, to protect the wider Free Software community from being unreasonably locked out of their own future, however, it seems fairly clear to me that overall, v3 has hurt copyleft more than helped it.

<comment><USER29> If it's not too much trouble, could you please this part:

>Personally, I love the GPLv2, I think it's a masterstroke of a license. I don't use it very much anymore, but I'm very glad that exists. I think v3 goes to far, and I think AGPL goes way too far.

I am really not familiar with licenses and I have a feeling the legal text won't make much sense to me either if I treid reading it by my self

<comment><USER30> Short summary (from memory, so might be a little faulty):

GPLv3 = GPLv2 + you can't sue any users/distributors for violating your patents + you grant an implicit license to all your relevant patents to your users + you must protect users from patents that might be covering code you contribute

For companies with patents and lots of patents they are afraid of losing their ability to sue for patent violations. I'm unclear whether the license you grant is just for the GPLed code or just in general. And in general it's unknown how all this plays out in court, so most lawyers (and thus companies) avoid v3 like the plague.

AGPL = GPL + must distribute even if you just provide an internet accessible service.

The idea being that the GPL only applies to distribution, so if I modify some GPL software but never distribute it (because I just run it on a server I control) I never have to GPL my changes. The AGPL says you have to distribute/open source your changes even if you don't distribute if the modified software is accessible over the network to users.

<comment><USER31> I think of it as an insurance policy. If I release my server side code as agpl, I know that anyone who uses it also has to share the code in their servers has to share it with their users.

In my simple mind, open source is a developer construct while free software is a user construct. Thank you for bringing a user's perspective in explaining GPL.

<comment><USER28> FWIW, I tend to substitute the word "user" there, for "software".

I see permissive Open Source licenses as giving developers all the freedom, and copyleft licenses as giving the software itself, all the freedom.

I choose this distinction only because some users are developers, and a copyleft license specifically restricts them from doing some things (i.e. closed source forks), thus restricting their absolute freedom. Instead, the software itself is promoted to the receiver of ultimate freedom, because its basic rights are enforced through all its generations/forks/integrations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This isn't a compelling argument for anyone like me who doesn't think copyleft licensing is some grand virtue. If they haven't violated the licenses of software they're using, I don't see a problem. They're under no obligation to open anything at all to the public, and shouldn't be.

<comment><USER28> FWIW, I don't think Bradley is claiming that they are under any obligation here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just to take the wind out of the sails of the first paragraph:

[http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents](http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents)

LLVM has a developer patent policy, and Apple will adhere to it the same as anyone else or the code won't be part of LLVM. Chris Lattner knows this. LLVM has a foundation with directors that aren't Apple.

So yeah, there goes that argument.

As for the rest - Bradley acts like the free software advocates were much better at open development or not throwing stuff over the wall.

Emacs, for a very long time (and other fsf projects the same), had secret pre- tests. If you shared the ftp info with others and they found out, they'd remove your access.

Part of the EGCS/GCC split was precisely over the fact that GCC was not openly developed.

Their projects still aren't all developed in a very open or free manner.

Of course, Bradley instead concentrates on the higher level view of what this will do to programming language development , partially because Free Software has such a poor history at the lower level on this one, and partially, i believe, because the details just don't matter to him if the concept is achieved :P.

The short version of that is: I'd love to see the free software folks get their own house in great order before continuously calling everyone else out.

It's not that they are wrong in a lot of ways (except about the patent stuff), but the _details matter_ , and they have a _very poor history_ on those details. They stand nearly zero chance of convincing anyone when all that happens is to stand on a soapbox and scream about how bad everyone else is. I know y'all want to just compete on ideology, but it isn't going to work. Prove it's not just a better ideology, but it leads to better communities, or better projects, or anything.

Otherwise, it's just another political faction that nobody is going to care about.

</comment><comment><USER34> > we should expect the chosen non-copyleft license will not contain a patent > grant.

How come? Does Apple have a history of licensing open source software and making it unusable with patents? I can't say I'd be surprised, but it would be news to me. Is Webkit a counter-example, I don't think they've chased Google about patents?

</comment><comment><USER35> This seems pretty much to reduce to the old copyleft-vs-liberal license debate (along with a generous sprinkling of fear, uncertainty, and doubt), which doesn't seem worth re-hashing.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't think I'll ever understand the sense of entitlement people who advocate this idea of 'copyleft license or else' seem to have.

There's nothing bad about Apple not using a copyleft license. I'm glad we live in a world where they can pick any license they want. Apple could have kept Swift closed source if they wanted, and I would have been okay with that - while I might have liked for them to make it open source, it's completely up to them what they want to do with it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Are we still having these "They chose a license other than the one I support, so it's not really Open Source software." rants in 2015? I thought we were done with those in the late 90s? Come on.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't blame them after what Google did with Chrome from all the hard work they poured into WebKit. Especially since they later forked it into a separate project.

So while this is a programming language and such an issue is not likely to rise here - I can see why Apple would be very cautious in this case.

<comment><USER39> 1) Forking in open source is not a crime, it is a virtue and fundamental right

2) By "after what Google did with Chrome", do you mean contributing massive amounts of engineering resources to WebKit for several years, exceeding Apple's own WebKit team? Look here: [http://www.kaizou.org/2013/04/why-google- dropped-webkit/](http://www.kaizou.org/2013/04/why-google-dropped-webkit/)

If someone's forking your project, it's usually because productivity/velocity is going down because of either too much political contention, or too much legacy code.

<comment><USER38> Right, for the code base it is good - from Apple's PoV however they lost market-share in a billions-of-dollars market

<comment><USER40> I've never seen any indication that Apple valued their "market share" from Chrome using WebKit in any way, and the people actually working on WebKit for Apple were mostly happy about the fork.

<comment><USER38> Just as a data point, Google paid Mozilla 300 million dollars two years ago to be the default search provider in Firefox. This is definitely a market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Open Source is not "the cooption of Free Software".

Early versions of the BSD License dates back to at least 1988, the GPLv1 was created in 1989. Do whatever you want, or public domain licensing existing long before either.

If anything GPL and the FSF co-opted Free-as-in-Beer software into their own version of Software-that-is-forever-Free, and now have rewritten history to the point that all BSD code is an attack on Freedom.

And this is largely why GPL/FSF is fighting a losing battle these days. Companies view the GPLv3 as toxic, and most of the kids on GitHub don't care and don't understand why their code isn't just BSD-by-default (and the License Anarchy "movement" is a much bigger problem than this losing battle that FSF is picking with Open Source).

<comment><USER42> In 1988, open source was a term for spies that collected intelligence from publicly available sources. If you talked about open source then and pointed to BSD, no one would understand you.

If we want to define when liberty was first a concept, it was around roman empire that started to talk about it as a concept. But that is of course not the first time someone was free. Freedom is as old as humanity, and you can't predate that.

so in order, terms was created in: freedom -> liberty -> free software -> open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Honest question:

The author mentions patents. What patents could their possibly be with Swift? There's a TON of information on compiler theory available. Would Apple have wasted time trying to come up with something new just to patent it?

</comment><comment><USER44> There are a lot of valid criticisms that can be thrown at Apple these days, and maybe they're not "our" friend.

But I find myself thinking more and more that when a company becomes the most valuable private entity in the history of humanity off the back of luxury goods the _vast_ majority of the world can't afford - and in a highly competitive arena too - you really have to assume they know what they're doing when it comes to doing right by themselves. And who can blame them for that?

Apple have won: in business terms, they _define_ success. Standing in judgement of them makes me feel foolish.

<comment><USER45> To paraphrase, and pick a historical group:

"The Romans have won: in empire-building terms, they define success. Standing in judgement of them makes me feel foolish."

Just because they're at the top of the game doesn't make the game itself prone to breaking.

It also doesn't mean that we have to like the game, or believe that it's compatible with standard social moral behavior.

<comment><USER44> I'm not sure it's the same you know. Lands are conquered and retained with politics (i.e. charismatic bullshit) and the application of brute force. It's about suppressing the wills of others whereas winning at commerce in a competitive environment is about understanding and fulfilling them. _That_ , I would argue, is a significantly more challenging task. Many large companies are defined by their size and the advantages it brings, but not so for Apple: lots of companies have the resources to do what they do and yet only Apple ever pulls it off. They really are a different beast.

But I do agree with your other points.

<comment><USER45> >Lands are conquered and retained with politics (i.e. charismatic bullshit) and the application of brute force.

How is this different to how Apple (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc.) play the game?

>It's about suppressing the wills of others whereas winning at commerce in a competitive environment is about understanding and fulfilling them.

This is a wonderful sentiment to approach commerce with, but it's all too easily forgotten when you're already at the top of the game.

To stretch my already two-dimensional metaphor, it's at this point that empires start to stagnate, and eventually fall.

Note: None of this is prediction, or even strong criticism of Apple (They are thriving in an environment they didn't create), merely thoughts :-) I agree that Apple have, in the present climate, defined a new paradigm for commercial success. I just don't agree with the finer points of the paradigm...

<comment><USER44> > How is this different to how Apple (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc.) play the > game?

At what point has coercion come in to putting a iDevice in your hand? Sure we could have _that_ argument about advertising but Apple doesn't do a whole lot of that and the advertisements they do create are hardly designed to manipulate you - not to mention we are comparing them to the Romans here...

> This is a wonderful sentiment to approach commerce with, but it's all too > easily forgotten when you're already at the top of the game. To stretch my > already two-dimensional metaphor, it's at this point that empires start to > stagnate, and eventually fall.

It's not a sentiment, it's the very essence of commerce. If you remove that incentive (and decline to implement an authoritarian regime to organise by force, like communism) then you have nothing but a bunch of former bureaucrats twiddling their thumbs (and likely starving to death.)

Commerce is about trading things you have for things you want: no more and no less. The problems of today are not the fault of freely organised trading by independent actors - that, instead, is the thing that brought us out of the stone age - but by the truly pain-in-the-arse implementation details of making this "system" moral and fair (define those terms however you will.) The reason I've air-quoted "system", btw, is because it is no such thing. If the apocalypse comes and the political/financial system falls, and you find yourself holed up in some basement with a stash of weaponry but no food you'll see that commerce is as natural as breathing. We have literally studied magpies and chimps making what we would call _business decisions_. Commerce is not evil, the system we've built around it is - I think this is the paradigm you have issue with, and it's something you ultimately need to take up with the political system.

Apple's success is owed to being good at this fundamental notion of trade, instead of gaming the system to their advantage (how many Fortune 500's would fall with a fraction of the competition Apple faces?) In order to fall one of four things would have to happen: 1) the entire system turns against them; 2) they stop being good at being Apple; 3) someone else learns how to do as they do or; 4) their actions ancillary to the product they provide me (like OPs points) become so offensive that they outweigh the benefits of being an Apple customer for a significant proportion of the consumer base. Personally, I see none of these as being particularly realistic or becoming so anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> IMO non-copyleft opensource licenses are better for technology push as they lower the barriers for the closedsource industry to embrace and extend the technology.

This might also be the case with Apple and Swift.

</comment><comment><USER47> No Company is really our "friend".

</comment><comment><USER48> I agree with the title of this, but not much else.

I have nothing against apple or swift, but the way I see it, there's no good reason to only target iOS and ignore android and windows. So Swift has no utility for me at all. Proprietary languages are the worst sort of vendor lock-in, and I have no interest in participating, especially considering that apple has historically not been particularly great to developers.

</comment><comment><USER49> It is an ok article. I checked the license of LLVM though:

[http://llvm.org/releases/2.8/LICENSE.TXT](http://llvm.org/releases/2.8/LICENSE.TXT)

[http://llvm.org/docs/FAQ.html#does-the-university-of- illinoi...](http://llvm.org/docs/FAQ.html#does-the-university-of-illinois- open-source-license-really-qualify-as-an-open-source-license)

If there is something very specific to Apple and they want to keep the copyright after writing that module in LLVM, we should respect their decision. There are several companies using copyright licenses or not open sourcing anything they are working on. Compare to them this entire LLVM situation is a success story from the free software point of view. LLVM became the default toolchain and compiler for many project because of its high quality and meaningful error messages (GCC anyone?). I can live without Swift, but I definitely need LLVM going forward.

</comment><comment><USER50>
      > But, their anti-copyleft witch hunt goes back much further.
      > It began when Richard Stallman himself famously led
      > the world's first GPL enforcement effort against NeXT

Actually it began some five years earlier, when Stallman refused to allow patches for Macintosh support into gcc.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is premature. Wait and see on Swift2.0. Seems knee-jerk reaction. I mean, "Apple is not our friend"? No for-profit is our friend. Stating the obvious doesn't reinforce the point made in the editorial that the author fears programmers will be bamboozled by Apple possibly not following through on their promises.

</comment><comment><USER52> > Apple explicitly stated though that such released software will not be > copylefted. (Apple's pathological hatred of copyleft is reasonably well > documented.)

Very few new compilers/runtimes are open-sourced; this seems like a bizarre objection, and one that would cover a hell of a lot of other languages.

</comment><comment><USER53> I think it's worth noting that this was originally titled "Apple is not our friend". Sheesh.

</comment><comment><USER54> "Fortuitously, Apple eventually discovered a technically brilliant (but sadly non-copylefted) research programming language and compiler system called LLVM."

What does he mean by that ?

Did LLVM already exist in various pieces and apple "discovered" it by putting them together ?

Or is he purposely using the word "discover" to suggest that you can't invent a programming language (since programming is all reducible to math) and that new languages are merely "discovered" ?

<comment><USER55> They discovered that the University of Illinois had been working on a compiler back-end called LLVM, and that being permissively licensed they could use it as a shortcut to making a proprietary compiler without putting in all the work.

<comment><USER56> By being permissively licensed, it was free from all the garbage and ideological baggage that GCC has, so they could use it in meaningful ways besides being just a compiler. Like using it to do analysis on code in the IDE.

<comment><USER55> That's because LLVM have those features, not because it has that license. A program designed to do analysis on code in the IDE will still do it even if the program is proprietary, which is the inevitable consequence of promoting permissive licenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This reads like a very paranoid post.

</comment><comment><USER58> This has been hashed out before in better ways, but I'm going to take a stab at simplifying the issue at hand for modern and future computing.

The developer wants freedom and so does the user. Most of us are both developers and users.

Closed code or non-foss code is geared to give developers freedom, but at the cost of user freedom. FOSS licenses such as GPLv123/LGPL favor user freedom, but at the cost of developer freedom.

For me, the bottom line is that I believe, given the trajectory of computing, FOSS is closer to protecting actual freedom of both developers and users than any alternative.

I think a good thought experiment is to imagine we are a bit further in the future, and now brain-computer interfaces are prevalent. I often joke with my boss that he would be an early adapter of "Apple-brain", but the point is that I would never plug in a brain-computer interface without having the four freedoms on it.

There is a glaring issue at hand here though, with FOSS, that I think fails to address this issue: namely "ou should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way."

I don't think that goes far enough. Due to our legal system, I don't only want the ability to modify my brain-computer, but I also want the ability to make sure no one but me has access to that particular source code. Generally FOSS licenses would protect me from someone copying my brain code if they failed to adhere to the FOSS license, but it does nothing to protect what I would consider proprietary brain-code.

Is your computer as it is not already an extension of your brain to some extent?

Do you have full control of it, or at least the ability to take control of it?

If no is the answer, I consider that a weakness.

Freedom comes with a price, and in this case the primary cost of freedom is a lack of features, and time and effort necessary to get a functional set of features. eg. in reality, I think I really ought to be compiling everything from source (Gentoo, etc) and checking hashes/checksums and reviewing code (maybe in an automatic way).

We all make tradeoffs, but as the future progresses, I believe very strongly that those who embrace pieces of proprietary software now will be at a large disadvantage later, and that includes companies.

Sure, Apple has the freedom to determine their licensing schemes, but do keep in mind that it affects a huge number of users (eg, actual people, instead of a company), and many users will embrace it, but I don't have any issues with FOSS proponents calling out the facts whenever a company with so large a userbase degrades user freedom, because no matter how you want to defend Apple, that's what they do.

<comment><USER55> Proprietary software doesn't give the developers any freedom beyond what they already have by virtue of being the copyright holders to their code.

<comment><USER58> Even then, you can still do that with FOSS code so what's the need? The Mozilla/Icecat(weasel) saga is a good example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> > Apple's dogged pursuit for non-copyleft replacements for copylefted software > is far from new. For example, Apple has worked to create replacements for > Samba so they need not ship Samba in OSX.

That is not Apple pursuing non-copyleft software. That is Apple pursuing non- GPLv3 software. If Samba had stayed GPLv2, I doubt Apple would have replaced it.

> But, their anti-copyleft witch hunt goes back much further. It began when > Richard Stallman himself famously led the world's first GPL enforcement > effort against NeXT, and Objective-C was liberated.

He makes it sound like it was some kind of highly adversarial situation, but here is how Stallman describes it [1]:

       The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute
       a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them.
       Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me
       at the time that it was, following reasoning like what
       you are using; but since the result was very undesirable
       for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.

       What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges
       would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would
       be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether
       it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.

       So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not
       allowed by the GPL.

       The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective
       C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C
       parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the
       GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed,
       they made it free.

> But, that whole time, Apple was carefully plotting its escape from the > copyleft world.

This is just nonsense. If NeXT/Apple had been so determined to get away from copyleft, they would have changed their Objective-C compiler from being part of GCC to being a completely separate program that took in Objective-C and translated it to plain C.

> Fortuitously, Apple eventually discovered a technically brilliant (but sadly > non-copylefted) research programming language and compiler system called > LLVM. Since then, Apple has sunk millions of dollars into making LLVM > better. On the surface, that seems like a win for software freedom, until > you look at the bigger picture: their goal is to end copyleft compilers.

Two problems here. First, as mentioned above if Apple was so determined against copyleft compilers, they would have made Objective-C a front end that output C (similar to Stroustrup's cfront for C++).

Second, he is overlooking the fact that GCC was not _technically_ able to meet Apple's needs. For example, Core Image needs an optimizing JIT compiler that can take a chain of image filters and turn it into a single efficient filter for execution on the GPU or CPU (whichever will be faster on the particular system for the particular effects). XCode needs to parse C/C++/Objective-C code in the editor and in the debugger. In short Apple needed a modular compiler system, designed to work as a compiler toolkit from which you can pick and choose the parts needed for a particular application, and designed to be easy to interface with outside tools.

GCC was _explicitly_ designed to not be that, and Stallman would reject changes that would make it easier to use it that way. GCC has opened up a bit to modularization and interfacing with outside tools since then, but that was directly due to competition from LLVM/Clang.

> Their goal is to pick and choose when and how programming language software > is liberated.

The author's mistake here is in thinking that Apple _has_ a goal in this area. It is far more likely that whether or not programming language software is liberated is completely orthogonal to anything Apple cares about. They are open sourcing Swift because Chris Lattner wanted to, and their lawyers did not see any problem with that.

[1] [http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...](http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why- CLISP-is-under-GPL)

</comment><comment><USER60> To be fair, you don't have to use LLVM or Swift, if you don't want to - <USER2> are other compilers and languages out there, some already cross platform (hello C++).

I understand the unhappiness though that so called techies and developers these days do not question anything anymore. They just take what they are spoon-fed and ask for more of the same.

</comment><comment><USER61> Not convinced by the editorialised submission title here. Would be preferable to use the blogpost's title, "Why Greet Apple's Swift 2.0 With Open Arms?".

<comment><USER62> Since the answer to the blog post title is, in the author's opinion, obviously "We shouldn't", that is, in fact, a terrible title.

The submission title is not poorly editorialized, it's pretty much exactly the author's opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> They should have left the title "Apple is not our friend" because that is easier to upvote without reading.

</comment><comment><USER64> BFF.

</comment><comment><USER65> yellow background .. next article.

</comment><comment><USER66> I have to agree. It used to be Apple who was claiming Unix's traditions. Now they use promises of a future release as PR pieces to combat existing software. (This was a Microsoft strategy several decades ago.)

<comment><USER28> That's such a defensive position to take. Who/what is Apple combatting by announcing that Swift will go open source? It's just one more language in a huge sea of options.

It's expected that any language, if it is to be taken seriously outside its host ecosystem, should be available in an Open Source or Free Software form. Why should Swift be any different?

<comment><USER66> It is different, right now. No source code for Swift.

It's really simple: quit claiming to be open source, or actually ship the code.

<comment><USER28> They didn't claim it _is_ open source, they said it's _going to be_.

So, again, who is Apple combatting by announcing their intention to open source a language?

<comment><USER67> No one, but the free software peeps always need to get their panties in a bunch about SOMETHING to proactively defend their dogma.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I'm often pointing out in my recent talks how complex and treacherous the > Open Source and Free Software political climate became in the last decade.

The climate would be a lot more relaxed if the open source community picked spokespersons who are less fanatical and a bit more level headed than the current crop of leaders (among which rms, esr and the author of this strongly biased article).

<comment><USER15> Or just that the "free" software people stopped attacking the open Source people all the time.

<comment><USER68> I'd recommend watching Bradley's LCA 2015 talk, especially the slide 11 where he's talking about the aggressive anti-copyleft stance of today's Apache Software Foundation (in contrast to the ASF of a decade ago, as discussed near the beginning of the talk).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ItFjEG3LaA#t=19m50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ItFjEG3LaA#t=19m50s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> "That's already happening with LLVM, anyway; Apple already ships a no-source- available fork of LLVM."

In the old days we used to call this "bait and switch". That being said, I dont necessarily thing it's a bad thing. Corporations don't exist for philanthropy, they are motivated to bring better and viable products to the market.</comment>


The man who is pushing to filter the Internet in Australia - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gl7X6peh-w

<comment><USER2> It scares me when people with power over things have very little understanding of those things.</comment>


After Years Of Drilling, Antarctic Lake Will Be Reached - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12275979

<comment><USER2> Let's hope it turns out better than this: <http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm>

(Sorry, but I think it's almost obligatory to link _A Colder War_ every time this story comes up.)

<comment><USER3> What a lovely story to read right before bed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That article is over a year old (January 2011). Here's a newer one from 18 January 2012:

[http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/01/all- eyes-o...](http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/01/all-eyes-on- antarctic-drillers.html)

As a matter of fact, based on their drilling rate, they should have reached it by now.

<comment><USER5> They were 50 meters away last year. January 2012 they were 29. Looks like they still have another year or two to go.

<comment><USER6> There is a recent Washington Post article that says they are on the verge of breaking thru.

I hope they discover some form of life in the lake. It would be amazing to discover what the evolutionary outcomes would be for organisms in such an isolated harsh environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad that the Russian Government did not bail out of this project in the end, and instead decided to see it through. I only wish more tax dollars were spent towards research, rather than fighting.

</comment><comment><USER7> > the team came up with new, ecologically safe methods of probing the lake

Let's hope that these will work. 'Technical difficulties' reported make it look like the equipment may not have enough precision to keep it clean.

<comment><USER8> What makes you say that?

<comment><USER7> Please refer to the original article and search for 'But the work has not been going very smoothly'. Also, check out the link posted by smoody and search for 'nerve-wracking moment for the drillers'. We don't want antifreeze and other stuff to get into the clear water underneath, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are they actually _drilling_? As opposed to melting the ice and removing the water. Especially since the ice is near its melting point at their current depth as per article.

<comment><USER9> Yes they are drilling, because drilling results in ice cores that are scientifically useful (provide context).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I only wonder whether humanity will be able to resist the urge of selling it as a bottled water at some point...

</comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only one who read "huge round [ice] monocrystals of a metre or more in diameter and as hard as glass." and immediately thought "ice-9"?

[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_Cradle>]

</comment><comment><USER12> you might be interested in this HD Documentary [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&lis...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&list=PL5E237D7816405729&v=maQhn96AhuI)

</comment><comment><USER13> My interest was piqued by the mention of "space radar."

</comment><comment><USER14> Release the Kraken!

</comment><comment><USER15> Hope they won't find any _Thing_ they're not looking for.

(<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/> and 2011 prequel <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0905372/>)</comment>


U.S. Navy Asked You to "Hack Our Ship," Strengthens Cyber Defense - <AUTHOR> https://edgylabs.com/2017/03/17/navy-hack-our-ship/ <comment><USER2> "a simulated system built ... to resemble fleet systems"

Is hacking against a simulated system that merely "resembles" the original rather than exactly duplicates it the same as hacking against the actual real system?

Probably not, and if so, is there much real value to such an exercise.

<comment><USER3> It's probably the real software control system for the ship they probably just don't have an actual rail gun at the end of the FireRailGun() function. At least I hope they don't.

<comment><USER4> The way they phrase it is suspect though. It's not "the system deployed in a test environment", it's "a _simulated_ system built ... to _resemble_ fleet systems""

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this the same ship they purchased the super-extended Windows XP support for?

<comment><USER6> _cringe_ I hope this is a joke and that they are running something like OpenBSD.

<comment><USER7> It's not a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can beat anyone at chess. Just agree to play on my chessboard, with my rules, and only the pieces I allow you to have.

These sorts of contests are often more about generating marketing material for the developer than they are about actual pen-testing.

</comment><comment><USER9> I suppose it's interesting that the event was held. But what about an outcome? Surely a tally of exploits found can't be a secret, can it? Can someone at least disclose whether it was nonzero?

<comment><USER3> I am almost certain the details of the specific vulnerabilities would be classified. You probably had to sign some kind of NDA to even participate if I had to guess.</comment></comment>