Companies increasingly no longer even care about income.
They care about what boosts investor confidence.
So even if implementing a policy lowers operative income, if the growth in stock value offsets this, aka. number-go-up == true, the policy is implemented.
It's almost as if making companies responsible for performance of their stock backfired to the tune of "a measure that becomes the goal ceases to be a good measure".
The irony is, the PE of lots of tech companies implies 30+ years to earn back your money. Some of these companies enshittify at a rate higher than being in existence within 30 years. So I am curious how this will end up.
30 years doesn't matter; 90 days does. If you can make enough money back over that period by enshittifying the company, you do it, even if that means selling the thing whole.
Technlogy? That would likely result in a US market crash the likes of which has never been seen before. Look at what percentage of the stock market is the magnificent 7. Now imagine what would happen to that if US tech giants were no longer allowed to sell their products/services in the EU. The market is fragile as it is with the AI bubble going on.
Trade? That cuts both ways, and the US economy and cost-of-living crisis doesn't give them lots of wriggle room.
Products? China will be all to happy to step into whatever market is thus competition-free, not to mention the impact this would have on US businesses.
Eased travel and trade, but not full membership voting rights, etc. So basically, an extensive trade and economics agreement, with options to intensify relationships later on.
Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation.
The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an overreliance on centralized services even though most such services are relatively easy to host yourself.
I run my own DevOps server based entirely on OSS. Is it github? No. Does it what I need it to do? Absolutely. Do I get 99.999% uptime? No, but when it's down or slow, I can fix it. When the corporate platform is down, I can only wait.
And "network effects" are not a good argument. Open Source was wildly successful long before centraliced DevOps platforms.
And in hindsight, the added friction of getting in touch with projects before being able to send them any code, was a benefit not a disadvantage. Because it acted as a barrier of entry that disincentivized alot of subpar code from hitting these projects in the first place.
The value these centralized services provide is the centralization itself - that makes things easy to find. Remember the web before Altavista? Finding anything was detective work, guessing domains, following links through multiple pages, digging in newsgroups, asking around, and so on.
Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
Now, if we could do something like GitHub on top of a network such as Mastodon, then we would have something that's centralized enough to be useful and distributed enough to be indestructible.
> Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
None of that depends on a centralized provider. I have all the features you listed on my self-hosted platform as well.
Is public opinion important to an industry whos future depends on datacenters being built for hundreds of billions of dollars, while the people all around them, whos utilities get more and more expensive in no small part because of datacenter buildouts, experience a constant cost of living crisis...
> Economies of scale -> more energy = bigger electric plants = cheaper energy.
Problem is; power plants are not something that can be spun up with a kubectl invocation.
Power plants need to be built. This process takes YEARS, and in some cases over a decade. And that's just the plants themselves. The grid also has to be built out to be able to handle the new load.
And while this potentially +10year process is ongoing, the current supply is gobbled up, and prices for consumers skyrocket.
Yes, eventuelly, market forces may solve the issue. By then however, it will already be too late for many areas, with residents being priced out of a basic utility.
Or worse, the markets may not solve the issue at all.
Because; all this building out of electrical gear and power plants, requires very specific resources and talent. Whta if the markets decide that these resources are much better allocated (at least from the PoV of company shareholders), in building power generation capacity exclusively for datacenters, and the consumer market is simply ignored?
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos
I'm pretty sure, shortly after the motorized vehicle was made commercialy available, there were only a "handful of remotely meaningful" people and companies who stopped using horses.
Do tell: How many horses are around on todays streets?
What exactly is the car equivalent in this analogy? Codeberg is not a car if you're saying GitHub is the horse. Just doesn't really make sense to compare the two like that...
Turns out, sometimes shedding "functionality" is really shedding cruft that holds the core functionality back.
Is this the case for Codeberg vs. Github? I don't know, and I'm not gonna base my argument on unverfieable predictions of the future.
So we'll have to wait and see. But it sure looks to me like many of the prime arguments for github boil down to "well, it's big and has lots of stuff".
Agreed, if there was something actually better to switch to then I'd be interested. But seems unlikely for that to happen now - it's easier than ever to build a new github, at least the app itself but i doubt someone's gonna bother with the business effort needed to actually build it up as a reliable, trustworthy option that you know will be around for a while, which is a process that takes years when you know you're going to get disrupted. It would probably have to be open source to get early adopters to use it but somehow be nicer to use than GitHub, and there's basically no money to be made
When cars started replacing horses, they didn’t have more features. They just didn’t get sick or temperamental, and they didn’t shit all over the streets.
Going more than 20 miles an hour and not dying of heat exhaustion (or because your oats are too dry) are pretty big features.
But my point was that it’s a bad analogy. People are opting out of GitHub despite the alternatives having fewer features. You can read that as an ideological choice or as a YAGNI one. If it’s ideological, then there’s no competitive or feature angle at all; people are doing it because it seems right to them.
(To be clear, I have no problem with this. I think GitHub only gets better after public pressure, as we’ve seen with the last N cycles of product atrophy.)
They care about what boosts investor confidence.
So even if implementing a policy lowers operative income, if the growth in stock value offsets this, aka. number-go-up == true, the policy is implemented.
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