Comment by johnnyanmac
2 days ago
>but simply stating disagreement isn't substantive.
I gave an example. And I was thinking of genuine features and responsibilities for a competitive OS, not "value creation" (I don't base my OS usage on how much shareholder value it generates). The capabilities of an OS in 1996 and 2026 are massively different.
You gave an example of Linux having value, which is not contested and not relevant. You did not give any examples showing the existence of an exponential here. Moreover, the value being discussed is long-term geopolitical leverage resulting from a country's sovereign technology capability that remains unperturbed under heavily adversarial conditions, not shareholder value. In fact, it is a direct corollary of my claims that the two concepts of value are not equivalent, and that is precisely the trap being set and the gap being exploited.
>long-term geopolitical leverage resulting from a country's sovereign technology capability
Do I really need to explain in this community how Linux went from some underground freeware to the most used OS in the world? How is that not "sovereign technology capability".
If a machine uses software in any way shape or form, it's about 70% likely Linux powers it. Doesn't matter what industry or topic it is. America only remained a superpower this long because it was an early adopter of modern compute and shaped much of its GDP around software powering every industry.
The only thing not sovereign about it is that many technologies are technically holed up in private companies, that the US government contracts. But I don't know how you can say the growth hasn't been exponential.
I feel we're nitpicking over minutae at this point so I'll cut it off here.
You are free to bow out. However, we are decidedly not nitpicking over minutiae. I don't think you have understood this thread, and that's leading you to make very confident assertions that are individually correct but just not relevant.
There's a kernel of a good idea in what you just wrote: open infrastructure can be part of a nation's sovereign technology stack. That's true, and Linux is indeed an example of it. But that has little to do with anything I claimed.
Linux is fundamentally not relevant because investing more in it does not confer exponentially increasing geopolitical leverage to a single nation uniquely above all others. Next-generation frontier AI, however, appears to have that property: if possessed by one nation, that sovereign production capability appears so far to confer exponentially increasing international leverage.