The same way that Fitzcarraldo stole the labor of the Amazon Indians when they moved the ship over the mountain in order to profit from the rubber.
Previously when I licensed my code with a liberal license I got something back, credit, contributions, connections, job opportunities, etc. The AI companies stole my labor, then they demanded I pay them, and finally they took my job.
I'm not them but I will answer from my viewpoint, as someone who has learned to appreciate the efficiency of AI coding.
First, my only interaction with a waymo was while driving in a low traffic location and it started with me having to be extra evasive with it's cautious style shifting into it deciding to pass me despite my safe but assertive driving normal stance.
Second, lots of people (myself included) remember the talk 5-7 years ago around autonomous cars and how the leaders of such companies were talking of futures where nobody (but the ultra rich, of course) would actually own a car and everyone would just use these autonomous car services.
Where that breaks down is how the surveillance state makes the average person worry how every trip could be tracked and used against them somehow or outright denied...
But also everyone sees how once vendors have a captive market they get squeezed.
I think most people don't mind paying for software, they just mind situations like having to rent software forever (subscriptions), or software companies being ran by people who are only focused on increasing revenue at the expense of actual making good/better software.
I think subscriptions are fair if you want updates, which for anything security related you do. The alternative (from decades ago) is to re-buy it every few years.
This isn't about cost. If these projects, like bitwarden, were run at cost the price would be negligible. Instead you see software companies with like 80% margins (or even higher). Not to mention that if the price was reduced to near cost then you'd get more users which would even further decrease the cost.
I’m not sure why people focus so much on costs as a driver of prices. They provide a floor on prices (past which it’s unprofitable). But prices are set based on demand and competition. And here there is no “lock in” or monopoly, it’s fairly easy to move between several password managers.
> Yeah... as a US citizen and taxpayer I think I'd like that $4 billion back.
It was never yours in the first place. It was their money they kept, not money given to them by the government. I don’t know why this distinction is so difficult for people.
Your tax burden is a responsibility to society, and not paying your share is benefiting from systems without carrying your own weight, effectively stealing from the system.
> I don’t know why this distinction is so difficult for people.
It's only a distinction if you don't understand what the purpose of taxes are.
Corpos are inherently government creations. It's utterly fallacious to apply individualist libertarian thinking to them. This is not a case of a noble individual suffering the drag of a government they'd rather distance themselves from! Rather what we have here is an artificially-designated group that only exists because of the government, enthusiastically wielding the power of government for their own benefit, but then choosing a position that the outsized benefits they receive from that system are still not enough to contribute back.
I said corpos specifically, not businesses. I don't disagree with anything you've said, but I don't really see how it's relevant to what I said?
Maybe it could be a stronger way of saying what I said? Pointing out that government wouldn't be taxing us in the first place without businesses willing it into existence?
But this feels a bit too reductive in that it dilutes the motivation to business in general rather than specific businesses.
It’s kind of funny that all of the complaints about optionality apply equally to Vulkan. Google even created the same profile solution with “Android Vulkan Profiles (AVP)”.
I suspect Vulkan suffers from the same design by committee problem, which similarly caused it to miss seemingly basic features in the base spec that then need to be filled in with extensions and also made it too difficult for developers to want to move too.
Did you read the actual article? Regarding the CEO sanctioning it, it says: "It was classic P.R. jujitsu—absorbing the language of dissent to neutralize it."
Not saying that isn't correct, but that article is from one perspective. Even if there was actually an earnest attempt by the CEO, she could still choose to view what happened this way.
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