There is an interesting analogy to India too, which had a sclerotic, state-dominated economic system for 40+ years. India had far less of a dispora than China, but far more than Russia. And India's economic reforms have been half-hearted, and results have been in between China and Russia.
In the name of freedom, what the MySQL flavor of GPL has achieved is to give special powers of dual-licensing to the "original author" - all animals are equal, some animals are more equal than the others. The MySQL business model is entirely based on this special power they reserved for themselves. Stallman's defense of it (which is not new) is precisely why I have always been wary of using GPL code and am a passionate believer in BSD/MIT license approach to software freedom.
The time has come for a reevaluation of what constitutes real open source. I believe GPL should be excluded from it, and the MySQL business model is the classic example.
To those who answer "Linux", keep in mind that Torvalds unilaterally declared that applications that run on top of Linux (calling Linux via the standard libraries) are exempt from GPL. This is in effect LGPL, not GPL.
MySQL specifically takes the opposite tack: any application that uses the database using standard libraries comes under GPL, for distribution purposes.
keep in mind that Torvalds unilaterally declared that applications that run on top of Linux are exempt from GPL.
That text is just there to allay FUD, it's not a necessary part of the license in any way.
This is in effect LGPL, not GPL.
No it is not, not in any way, shape, or form. If you distribute something that dynamically links with the kernel, the GPL applies to you in full force.
To the kernel, applications running in userspace are data. They may link with libc to make syscalls, but that just means they throw interrupts that the kernel catches. Your userspace programs aren't derivative works of the kernel any more than your documents are derivative works of the last application you used to edit them.
I think the real debate here is that value in the internet is moving relentlessly away from content producers towards content aggregators. Even a big newspaper site doesn't have the diversity that you find in an aggregator like Google News; likewise, no tech blog can compete with the diversity of news in Hacker News. I visit TechMeme and Hacker News far more than I visit any single blog, for example. TechMeme makes far more money than any professional tech blogger too.
Aggregators tend to build much more value to themselves quickly by riding on other people's content. Yet, aggregators are worth nothing without the underlying content. This irks many content producers, particularly the professional ones whose output accounts of the bulk of the traffic that aggregators end up sending. This trend of professionally produced content accounting for the bulk of the links is evident even in Hacker News.
If these trends continue, giant aggregators could end up controlling much of the content. Yahoo already produces a lot of content, and licenses content for Yahoo News (which is fitting considering Yahoo News has more traffic than any news site in the world). Google News, Digg etc. could follow.
This is the future I suspect Murdoch does not like, because it appears from his perspective to be third parties building value out of his content, without compensating him. Legally, I am not sure he has a claim - if there is a lawsuit on this, it will reach the Supreme Court, that's for sure.
Exactly. I don't think Murdoch is actually upset that Google drives people to his sites, what bugs him is that they go to Google first.
When you read a story in a newspaper, you almost automatically consume other content in that paper, including ads. Why pick up another paper to read more news when it's already in your hands? To a lesser extent the same is true for cable news, you watch a brief segment and you are bombarded with "coming up next" teasers and flashy graphics, pretty anchors, etc., all designed to keep you on that channel (watching ads).
The web is way less sticky than even television, sure you could flip channels but you lose context, and you might have to keep flipping to find something interesting, broadcast is a push medium. Contrast this with the web page: what is the easiest thing to do after reading the linked story? Search around the new site (that you may not be familiar with) or hit the back button and resume what you were doing: Pulling down stories you want to read, instead of waiting to see if something interesting comes up.
I think Murdoch gets the power of the aggregator, I don't think he understands that he has always pushed content to consumers. (Yes a lot of work goes into creating a brand that attracts these consumers to the paper/network but once they are there they have content pushed to them.) The web is a pull medium.
Billions were spent on the "portal wars" of the 90's, and everyone who participated lost to a page with a text box and 2 buttons.
You might be a fantastic writer, but without a good editor, and (in the case of one-offs like books) probably a good publisher, nobody will see it, or know it.
The analogy of editor/publisher to aggregators/search engines seems pretty fair. If nobody deems your content worth aggregating to HN, maybe it isn't? People who read HN trust it the same way I imagine people who have read the NY Times or National Geographic their whole life trust it.
When the web first started appearing as a news and editorial destination, it seems that people were quick to proclaim the death of curated content, because with infinite space and no need for physical resources, the constraints of binding your words together in 80 stapled pages of dead tree were history -- everything can just link to everything else, and when that fails, search! Turns out that the problem was never that a magazine could only be so many pages long, but that people only have so much time to be bothered with content they want to see.
Online the content and the editorial dept don't need to share a building -- in some cases its probably still better if they do, and in others its probably better that they're se separate as possible. I don't think there's any less value on content, or on editorial curation of what content gets in front of people. Sites like HN, Digg, Amazon and Hulu are popular destinations because they offer tailored and curated gateways to content people want. The curators have always been the bosses of the content creators, but now that they don't have to live under the same roof -- now that anyone can curate anyone else's content, as long as their curation/editorial skills are deemed good enough by the public to get them enough readers/viewers -- the balance of power has gone a bit wacky.
When Hulu's CEO called the TV networks "content providers" in that well-linked blog post a little whie back, few people batted an eye, but that was a huge slap in the face to those guys. If you're just the content provider, that means, on the org chart of the consumable content world, that Hulu is your boss -- they're your editor, your publisher, curating your content and choosing what lives and what dies. Hulu is supposed to be their dorky portal for cheapskate college students and bored secretaries! Why are they calling the shots now??
It's tiring to see people like Murdoch bellowing at top volume about their content being stolen when the content is the one thing people are still clamoring to consume by any means necessary. It's the editor's desk that's under attack and that's what's really freaking them out.
When I was in college, I wanted it all - wanted to prove theorems, found companies, join politics and so on. As I got older, I realized that just getting deeply focused on one thing gives you all manner of creative opportunities. Pick one area, and get in deeper and deeper - that would be my advice.
This is a great article, but keep in mind that the numbers are illustrative of one type of company. Mint was dealing with financial information, so they had to get "serious" fast and that means spending on things that, say, a Facebook or Twitter would not have had to spend. They project $30/per user for user acquisition (if I read that right), which again is very different for different kinds of companies, and different business models. Extremely high value niche companies would pay hundreds of dollars per user. On the other side Twitter being a mass player, would spend far, far less. Financial sites are valuable, so $30 seems like a good deal.
Typically you don't refer to acquisition cost in terms of $/user/year. The $30 was referring to revenue/user/year. That doesn't preclude your point that they had to approach user acquisition much differently than Twitter or Facebook.
I am afraid this is the predictable consequence of the Fed orchestrated monster credit bubble. These private equity players, through investment banking and other financial intermediaries are able to borrow close to the low Fed-orchestrated rate, while the companies they buy could not access the same cheap money, without which there is no basis for these deals. It was the "Age of the Financier" and every such age ended in mass misery. There is a reason all major religions prohibit usury, and in most traditional societies, making money on money is viewed with discomfort. After all, as the biblical story has it, Jesus chased the money changers from the temple.
The past 25+ years have been a mass redistribution of wealth towards the financial class, discouraging real capital accumulation in favor of playing games with money. This is not a free market at work, as some of these fraudulent "Wall Street Capitalists" would have you believe. Without an ever-accommodating Fed, , they would have been wiped out a long time ago.
I attended a presentation he made some time ago, and came away really impressed. He has a remarkably clear vision, understands what not to do as much as what to do, and seems to know his own strengths and weaknesses. I agree - he is a remarkable CEO.
I attended a presentation by him I think two years ago at Startup Camp. I was rather unimpressed. He arrived and confessed he really hadn't given it much though, he hadn't prepared at all, and so launched into 45 minutes of rambling. Basically all his advice could be summed with, "Just do what I did."
Obviously, the company has come a long way since then, and I doubt someone as smart as him wouldn't have learned a lot during that time.
I hope that sometime soon I can see him again so I can change my impression.
I would even sum up his advice as, "Do exactly the opposite of what these other smart people like Mitch Kapor have been telling you to do today."
Of course, as you mentioned, he arrived just in time for his talk, so he didn't even know that he was directly contradicting the advice of previous speakers.
He also scoffed at any form of testing when an audience member asked.
I was beyond unimpressed. Hopefully he redeems himself this year.
The reason this "upside" notion is so pernicious is that it's fed by powerful biases. We read about the successes. Even the failures we hear about, we're reading about them by and large because they were "successful".
You hit the nail on the head. I know 4 very talented engineers who have been in silicon valley for 12+ years each. I have tried to recruit all of them at various times, but they have always been swimming in great offers, in good times and bad, so they are good. Between them, they have worked in at least 10 start-ups. While none of them are starving, no one got rich either. They have lived frugally, so they have a decent pile saved up, but that was done the old fashioned way, not through hitting the lottery.
