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Comment by Febra33

14 days ago

> Let's not confuse the company with the country

What's wrong with China? They're wonderful in the OSS ecosystem.

I didn't want to be politically correct, but also not insensitive. Many countries produce great things, but if we measure these countries rigerously, just a few stand out. Unfortunately from here on it get's messy, political, unsubstantiated or backed by data that is inherently biased due to selection criteria and weight.

It's very difficult to be truly unbiased and neutral and it's not my goal, I just think it's a common thought, that needs to be challenged. To associate products/results of scientists, quants, engineers and companies they are employed with an entire Nation is inherently simplistic.

In that case, why did the CIA/NSA develop TOR and made it OSS? If the governments in the UK/France/Turkey are so brutally against encryption, why does the USA release safe encryption products?

If the world were absolute, we would absolutely be doomed and I hope to be part of a world, where freedom of thought, responsibility of each, constructive cooperation and a mesh of companies can work and produce value from and with each other permissionlessly. A world where Copyright/Patents are not needed anymore, because a stronger framework supports the individual contributor and also companies. Leftist, Right and Centrists views how an economy should look like are flawed, because they introduce idealogies to a mathematical non-linear partially closed but mostly open system.

Every idealistic concept shouldn't be believed, but explored. To hate one system over another one is also flawed, because it doesn't produce data and forces hypothesis testing without consequentially following conclusions. Economy is too complex for a man to design. It shouldn't be put into a canvas of restricted operations, but circuits would need to be developed locally. If we empower small communities and allow changes to be made quicker with less bureaucracy, this seemingly grand introduction of chaos leads to emergence of a larger stability of the whole. We are soo far away from that man..

  • No one's saying that you should take an absolute standpoint. I'm just asking, what's wrong with China since you made that comment as if China is bad for some reason.

It varies on a company to company basis. BOOX, for instance, are notorious GPL violators.

There's also significant alpha in releasing open weights models. You get to slow down the market leaders to make sure they don't have runaway success. It reduces moats, slows funding, creates a wealth of competition, reduces margin. It's a really smart move if you want to make sure there's a future where you can compete with Google, OpenAI, etc. There's even a chance it makes those companies bleed a little. The value chain moves to differently shaped companies (tools, infra) leaving space for consumer and product to not necessarily be won by the "labs" companies.

  • If you look at releasing "everything" from the perspective of a quant and purely so, then the objective to dominate a metric relevant to the quant is obviously the motive. But it's impossible to prove and a very strong assumption with little to no data. If DeepSeek's parent company traded on the data and release of DeepSeek with quant models that target affected firms with shorts before release, then that's a whole new level of WOW and honestly great funds do that. But this is a too big and bold of a move to underpin motive.

    But believing a man could achieve such a feat alone is inspiring to be frank.