Sometimes posts like this are just value-signaling. I hear a lot of cynicism and "just you wait, the other shoe will drop" comments along those lines.
But combined with the other projects Anthropic has pursued (e.g. around understanding bias and explaining "how the model is thinking as it is") and decisions it has made, I'm happy with the course they're plotting. They seem consistently upstanding, thoughtful, and respectful. I want to commend them and earnestly say: Keep up the good work!
You might think you can, for a while. Been there, done that. But you probably can not do so sustainably in most cases. Even if you could, would you really be better off building vs. buying? Outsourcing development, operations, and maintenance is almost always the better choice, letting you focus on the things you do uniquely, differentiably, or meaningfully better.
"We have this awesome internal version of Docs that we're responsible for fixing, upgrading, and doing support for" is not the flex "AI can code anything!" aficionados think it is. Especially when you also have similar internal versions of Sheets, Jira, Slack, GitHub, Linux, Postgres, and 100 other tools.
Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
I fail to imagine a single bit of business software that cannot be achieved with open source software, outside of specific proprietary processes. But your average office technology work, I see being very plausible to move to open source. There is definitely going to be a breadth of quality across the tools, but the outputs can all be the same I believe. Even on a personal level, it's worth cultivating self-reliance on tools you control. But at a national scale it feels perhaps existential, worth what learning pains there may be. You also cultivate local software industries.
> the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change
it's simple economics. When US services have to increase their pricese because of trumps tarrifs and these increases are higher than the cost of change, they'll do it. we're almost there
That's Dan Frye's article, and it is um, a little Dan Frye-centric. He was a legitimately important contributor to IBM's technology management team around Linux and open source, especially as and after IBM made the turn.
But it reads as if he called the shot and piloted the turn. That is not my recollection or understanding. Other folks contributed as much or more to driving the Linux/open source pivot. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the late Scott Handy, _et al_. It's IBM, so there were a ton of folks involved and contributing.
My source: I was an industry analyst and consultant in the server / system software space at the time, and I was in at least a few of the rooms where it happened.
This seems very consistent with the refactoring techniques taught by Sandi Metz (https://sandimetz.com/99bottles). After taking her course, I successfully applied those techniques to good ends and outcomes.
Not sure "refactor in context" is the tool for every single last refactoring job in the universe. Some plumbing changes may be large or systematic enough that they need to be separately planned and applied, especially as explaining "oh I changed the fundamental way we do things, just in passing" can be a hard PR to present. OTOH, since adopting the "in context" approach I have had many fewer refactoring attempts abandoned, and refactoring seems much more logical and purposeful. So it works IME.
The complexity and frustration are in no way accidental. A carefully designed, obfuscated, and Byzantined process designed for exactly this effect.
> You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. [...] You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer.
Exactly so. Parental controls, privacy settings, permission to show ads and collect infinite tracking data… The machine is working exactly as intended. Maybe there are sentiments that "the parents should have some control" and maybe there are some laws about protecting children or protecting consumer privacy. But hey, what if actually using any of those mechanisms was mind-bendingly difficult and annoying? What if your control were only available downstairs, in the unlighted cellar, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." We'd still be in compliance, right? Heh heh. Yeah. That's the ticket!
Reminds me when Facebook added “privacy” controls, that were virtually impossible to find, difficult to understand, and confusing to give a false sense of security.
It paved the way for a lot more than that. At a time open source in general, and Linux in particular, did not have much corporate buy-in, IBM signaled "we back this" and "we're investing in this" in substantial ways that corporate IT executives could hear and act upon. That was a pre-cloud, pre-hyperscaler era when "enterprise IT" was the generally understood "high end" of the market, and IBM ruled that arena. IBM backing Linux and open source paved the way for a large swath of the industry—customers, software vendors, channel/distribution partners, yadda yadda—to do likewise.
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