I don’t necessarily read it that way. Keybase is 100% functional and has worked well for a long time. Zoom needs people who know how to make modern client software and chat if they want to compete with the Slacks and Teams, etc. You can’t even screen share on wayland... it’s that bad. If keybase ultimately gets secure video, and zoom a security architecture overhaul, how is that a bad thing?
Well, it's pretty clearly an aquihire. Zoom gets a team of highly skilled cryptographers and Internet protocol experts. Good for them. But that means the team that created Keybase as an innovate PKI store won't be working on that anymore. That's not Zoom's business, and probably won't be, as Keybase themselves never figured out how to turn it into a business.
Keybase seems like something that should be small, isolated, FOSS, supported by a foundation, etc. They could have built a business _around_ Keybase I'd imagine, but all they managed to do with this is invalidate Keybase and make people like myself, who feared their business motivations, feel vindicated for being paranoid.
I'll never blame anyone for wanting to make money, to make a business, etc. But if you make a product that walks talks and acts like a FOSS project, but keep it to center your business around... I'll always be longing for a real, true FOSS replacement.
In this case a good looking FOSS alternative came out a few months ago iirc. Though for the life of me I can't remember the name.
As someone who works at an open-source-focused business, I respectfully disagree. Unlike proprietary software, open source software doesn't depend on the broken window fallacy. As a result, it's really hard to make open source profitable. There's lots of different avenues to get there, and I don't like to fault someone for their efforts if the bulk of their work goes towards improving open source software, as I think Keybase did.
Sure! The idea is that each proprietary project is wasting effort implementing their own clones of everyone else's software. To use your example, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Yandex etc etc are all developing their own search engines. Instead they could all be contributing to one search engine to push the state of search engine software forward, instead of all spinning their wheels re-doing what everyone else is doing. How many devs are employed doing what someone else in some other company has already done? That's the broken window: someone else has already done the work, but it must be wastefully re-done because of the license. There's a lot of room for profit in all that extra waste.
Aside from whether this matches the typical meaning of "broken window fallacy," I think the substance of what you're saying doesn't match reality.
Open source is famous for fostering a bunch of different approaches to the same problem, and slightly different forks of the same concept. That's the "bazaar" in the famous metaphor, as opposed to the "cathedral" of monolithic, hierarchical, linear proprietary development within a closed-source company.
"Everyone working on the same thing" only works well when there is broad agreement on what that thing should be, and strong governance to resolve disputes. National highway systems, militaries, and power grids are good examples.
I don't think search engines are a good example of where this would work; it's not clear in advance what will make a given search engine better. Thus we benefit from a variety of competing approaches, essentially to expand the space in which we're searching for the optimum.
That's not what the broken window fallacy is though. It references the idea that breaking a window generates economic activity which is good for everyone.
Open source software is (I would argue) even more driven to fragmentation by political, ideological, and personality conflict driven squabbles than proprietary software, as there is no profit motive to also satisfy.
Also, the broken window thing asserts that small amounts of criminal activity lead to larger amounts of criminal activity via signaling that being bad or neglectful is OK, which is both not proven and irrelevant to software writers being prone to reinvent the wheel for whatever reasons they have.
You're describing the broken windows theory. The broken window fallacy is the claim that destruction or waste is good for the economy because the cleanup generates economic activity (with the attendant multipliers). It's a fallacy because it leaves out that the original spender (by the owner of the broken window), on average, displaced other economic activity.
While I'm no fan of these companies, I'm not convinced by that particular argument for FOSS either. Imagine the world where we would be always iterating on one lineage/model of refrigerator, each automobile type etc. instead of many companies rebuilding basic stuff. I don't believe we would be better off. Not all progress can be driven by consensus and iteration, some needs to be done by competition, divergence and outright discontinuing old approaches.
I think you would be right about the greater good being served by everyone being aligned on the same search engine ONLY IF we understood search engines so well that we knew there to be only one mathematically optimal way to build search engines.
Since we don't understand search engines that well, there is a LOT of value in the exploration over the space of search engines that these different companies represent.
The broken window fallacy argument is that those speaking of the benefits of the broken window are mistaking maintenance cost for generated value. That doesn't seem to be the case here. This is society implicitly investing in exploration over exploitation.
Well, in reality there wouldn't be one optimal product, there would be many, for the reason that you said -and for human reasons.
However they would still be able to borrow good bits from each other and gain insight on how things could be done differently, so arguably the end result would be a win. From a technical standpoint that is -I think where it gets messy is when we try to factor in the business implications.
Possibly, but in this case I didn't expect them to make Keybase profitable, if anything I expect the opposite. I expect Keybase to be a FOSS, foundation for profitable extensions that the company builds and sells.
Arguably I think they agree with me, about the extensions at least. As seen by their seemingly random directions of feature extensions that Keybase was prone to. My issue is not that they chose random features to try to make profitable, but rather that the core premise, a public keystore, was tied so closely to a for profit company.
It would be like losing Git because Github went under. (Though, terrible example because Git works without a centralized repo, but it's just the first company <-> FOSS relationship that came to mind lol.)
Keybase was a centralized key storage with value-add services such as file storage and chat.
That was absolutely comparable to github, as you could've just gone back to manually syncing pubkeys and encrypting msgs. If github went away, you'd be without a lot of value-add services as well such as wiki, issues user management etc
Realistically speaking, nobody is going to do that... And tbh, it was already dead in the water when they added crypto currencies... Just took a while for their money to run out.
The actual difference is that there are enough competing products for github, not for keybase however, as that is just too niche
I mean, there's a fatal flaw in the broken window fallacy anyway:
>
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.[1]
Capitalism is about acquiring capital, i.e. money. There's no such evidence that people with money actually spend it in ways other than investment, and the sole purpose of that isn't to donate to companies that need it, it's to profit off it and essentially hoard more capital. Sure, poor people with either very little or no capital spend that capital on necessities, and thus drive the economy, but there's no evidence that people with large amounts of capital spend that on anything at all, there's more evidence that they hoard it and seek only to acquire more capital. The entire system is built to favour those people.
If you have to pay to replace a window that should have lasted, say, ten more years, that's money you now cannot spend on improving your factory somehow.
It is still economic activity (and the glazier doesn't mind the work) but it's remedial rather than generative. (The glazier that repairs the window could have been installing a new one in a new factory, eh?)
We're getting way off topic here, but you have a horribly misguided premise here. A typical shopkeeper is not in the .1% 'cash hoarding' class. Small businesses are mostly run by people with average resources, and their capital is typically spent on their business and personal needs.
That feels like strict oposit of the falacy claim, which would hold in case of perfectly stable and suppied currency is employed. Still would be rational to invest research, diversify against theft etc.
How was their product ever marketed that way? They have open source clients because that security table stakes. They’re a solution to crypto anarchy because they help link your crypto identities to your social ones. None of that has changed. You talk like all valid software is free of corporate ownership/sponsorship. Why is zoom’s money somehow worse than e.g. softbank’s.
Oh I didn't mean to imply it was, maybe my "walks talks" bit was unfair. Rather I merely meant that Keybase, like Keys.pub, seems like a great isolated tool for the internet. Something exceptionally well suited for a foundation.
keys.pub doesn't have the single most useful feature Keybase has: The ability to verifiably establish a secure channel with anyone given their Twitter/Github/whatever username.
Their homepage advertises 'keys pull username@github' as an example. Is the missing piece you describe here simply the command 'keys chat username@github'?
I'm not very familiar with the service, but AFAIK they don't. It would be great if they added it.
EDIT: It looks like it might, from the front page, I will try it out to make sure. If it does, that'll be great!
EDIT 2: It sort of does, but it's on a per-key basis, not an entire identity. You can publish proof on Twitter/Github/whatever, but it's only for one specific key, and it's one key per service, which means you can't only have one identity and multiple services.
The biggest challenge with acquihiring is retention. Allowing the acquired team to continue what they were doing is the only somewhat foolproof strategy to deal with it. It's a question of pocket depth and expectations. How much will the new team contribute to the "home" product? If expectations are too high chances are that much of the team won't stay and the acquisition will turn out to be a waste of money. With lower expectations however, continuing to fund the project in question can be bargain for getting a pool of in-house consultants to occasionally tap into for the "home" product, if they are really as good.
And even if retention wasn't a problem at all, skilled people are not inherently skilled, they need to keep challenging themselves in their area of expertise to stay sharp. If the "home" product was failing to foster in-house expertise before then chances are high that it's a problem based on culture and priorities and experts injected from outside would quickly lose their edge. Keep them on the project they became experts on and they stay experts.
Retention isn’t going to be a problem in this market. Hiring in general has almost disappeared. And if you get hospitalized with coronavirus without health insurance, it will almost certainly lead to bankruptcy. It’s too risky not to have a job right now.
I don’t think hiring has disappeared - I got contacted by four recruiters just yesterday alone asking me to apply to vacancies they’re trying to hire for.
I wouldn’t quit my job (and I’m not looking anyway), but there’s plenty of hiring going on.
My experiences with acquihires have not been good.
People went to work for this company based on the domain, the people, or the culture. With the acquihire they change the domain first, and the culture about a year in. Then the people start to leave, and it's just a job, and one you didn't even apply for.
On my worst days it felt like I was sold like cattle, and I would have seen more upside by hiring on someplace else.
Who gives a fuck about Wayland, honestly? It seems like it was designed by people who didn't like the few good things about X and wanted something to further fracture the Linux desktop. Well, they got it.
> Zoom needs people who know how to make modern client software
It's the best video client available on Windows / Mac and works acceptably on Linux, what exactly needs to be more "modern" about it? Slack's video call thing is way less featureful, and Teams is still the abortion that is Lync / Skype for Business under the hood which is and always will be shit-tier.
> chat
I don't want my video app to be my chat app. There's any number of reasons why separation there is a good thing. I can start a Zoom call from Slack in 1 second, what more do I really need on that front?
Wayland was designed by people who didn't like the features of X that almost nobody used (X forwarding, for example). And X is still around for those obscure use cases, while Wayland can serve almost everyone with a much simpler and cleaner system.
Now, why Canonical decided to go off and write Mir instead of collaborating on Wayland development, I have no idea.
> people who didn't like the few good things about X
Since these were also pretty much the only people who were putting effort into maintaining X, I think it's reasonable that they decided to replace it instead.
The history of X is a history of forks. But we've not seen another X fork appear to compete against Wayland. Instead we see the people who are writing Wayland continuing to retrofit the new technologies they're able to bring back, back to X.
If Keybase acquired Zoom (haha), then, sure. This is a PR move for a public company. They'll probably gut Keybase, move their Chinese server generated AES128 keys to AES256 keys generated by you and uploaded to their Chinese server, then call it a day.
I can't think of a single instance where acquisition of a smaller company like this resulted in an improved version of the original product. How many of us are running RHL? Skype is now close to Microsoft spyware that's impossible to remove from a Windows installation. Facebook purchasing Whatsapp, another service that formerly stressed encryption, resulted in things like plaintext backups of your texts on Facebook servers being aggressively promoted as soon as you loaded the app.
It's pretty much always cheaper to gut the original product, ignore the problems with your software, and enjoy the enhanced price of your shares while effectively spending no more money than you had for the original acquisition. As far as I can tell, Keybase has never had a business model or constant source of revenue.
> Facebook purchasing Whatsapp, another service that formerly stressed encryption, resulted in things like plaintext backups of your texts on Facebook servers being aggressively promoted as soon as you loaded the app.
Ia that the case? AFAIK WhatsApp gained proper end to end encryption after being bought by Facebook and pushes for backups to Google (and maybe iCloud?) servers.
Wikipedia writes:
> WhatsApp was initially criticized for its lack of encryption, sending information as plaintext. Encryption was first added in May 2012. In 2016, WhatsApp was widely praised for the addition of end-to-end encryption
Whatsapp announced encryption to the world in 2012. OWS helped secure their app further after the 2014 acquisition by FB, but encryption was something stressed by Koum and Acton from the get-go. Integration of E2EE into Whatsapp/FB Messaging is one of the few examples of Zuck being on the right side of things.
Long term it ended up pretty good, with Koum and Acton taking their acquisition money bags and pouring them into FOSS projects like FreeBSD and the Signal Foundation. Maybe malgorithms will do the same.
> pushes for backups to Google (and maybe iCloud?) servers.
Yeah, I was incorrect. They backup to Google servers. Not sure if that's better or worse. :)
Since then, FB has offered willingness to cooperate with foreign governments to break encryption. I guess we will see what happens with the EARN IT Act.
Zoom uses a proprietary gnome API / hack to do it I believe. It works on Gnome only. Note that with pipewire, wayland screensharing already works on Chrome/Firefox (for all of the video chat apps), and it will come to electron eventually. I imagine in a year or two screensharing on wayland will become seamless for most things.
If you know how to make that work I’m all ears. I run Debian testing, wayland, gnome. I tried to screen share yesterday and got a popup about how its not supported. Maybe mu zoom client is out-of-date?
Zoom works without a hitch on Ubuntu here. Even plays nicely with the tiling WM with multiple workspaces (somehow, a thumbnail window follows you through as you flip through workspaces).
Zoom works great on Linux, it's a proper native app and the quality is excellent. Screensharing is notoriously tricky on Wayland and has been a shifting target that is just now starting to settle, I'm sure it'll eventually work.
Well, my personal experience running the zoom client on Ubuntu was very satisfying. It worked out of the box, just a deb to install. I am on kubuntu 18.04LTS X11 though, not wayland (which I am glad because on 16.04 I was often victim of that stupid copy/pasting bug freezing firefox or the whole gnome env.)
