> "I share my specs today with you, you'll share your specs tomorrow with me"
This is how Silicon Valley worked, back when the silicon was actually made there. My impression is that Google's obsessive culture of secrecy (necessary because it grew up in an environment where loose lips really did sink ships) is the strongest influence in destroying that culture of information-sharing, although of course NDAs, interface copyright lawsuits, DRM, and software patents have also taken their toll.
California's century-old legal limitations on what rights employees can sign away to employers have also been very helpful.
So it's not surprising that technological development is happening today in a place where employers' ability to own their employees' minds is more limited — the innovation is done by the engineers, after all, not the investors, so shifting the power balance in favor of the investors will damage your region's competitiveness.
I'm interested to hear about the abuse and impoverishment.
> I'm interested to hear about the abuse and impoverishment.
Disclaimer: I've only been in China for a week so far, so what I can tell is just what I see (besides what everyone hears in Western media, that is) and it may be biased.
Shenzhen is a city of many contrasts. I work in a relatively modern office building and live in a not-totally-crap hotel. I travel to work via taxis which seem to be staffed by poor people trying to make a living. Forget about Uber here.
When I get out of the hotel, I can turn left and find myself next to KFC, Starbucks and a big shopping mall full of expensive-looking clothes. Everything is plastered with ads like you wouldn't believe. Or I can turn right and find myself on a poor street that is flooded with trash and occupied by tons of people selling absolutely everything - meat, fruits, phones, barber services. Those people look impoverished and from what I can tell, pretty much sit there 24h/day 7 days a week trying to sell something to someone. They are all incredibly friendly, but you can feel the lack of perspective for a better life; it's heartbreaking. There's a family of street food vendors making fried pasta with various meats; a father, a mother and a son. I'm buying food from them pretty much every day. They're extremely proficient at what they do (and they use up scary amounts of propane for that), but you can see that they'll be doing it for the rest of their lives.
There's a big construction zone next to a metro station nearby. They'll probably be building skyscrapers, like a lot of others that are currently in progress. The zone is fenced off with 2m high concrete walls. I managed to take a look through a crack, and what I saw was something akin to a labour camp. Some metal sheds, minimum sanitation, lots of people cramped together. I've been told they're workers from local villages. They looked hungry and impoverished. They don't seem to have any safety equipment.
There's a fucking Starbucks and a KFC and lots of people with smartphones few hundred meters downstreet. And a modern, high-tech metro station on the other side of the wall.
Then there are electronics markets. Tons of fancy stuff. Everything you could imagine. Sold by people cramped together in small spaces that look like they couldn't afford what they're selling. Basically third world selling first-world products.
It's really unnerving that you can have a place that is so amazing and yet so sad at the same time, with nothing but an occasional concrete wall separating the two pictures.
Here in Buenos Aires we have a lot of entrenched poverty too, in slums that are often only tens of meters from rich areas. What I wonder most about is: what is the relationship between the poverty and the prosperity? Are the people in the "labour camp" able to go out and shop for meat, fruits, and barber services? Can they go get another job? Or are they in some kind of debt bondage? Have they been forced out of their homes by the electronics industries, or are they sending money to their parents and grandparents back in the village? Are the street food vendors and desperate taxi drivers better off than they were before the electronics industry came along, or are they finding themselves unable to pay the escalating bribes and taxes, forced off the land their families farmed, and occasionally beat up by police for scaring rich teenagers? What was their life like five or ten years ago, and what do they expect it to be like five or ten years from now? Can they walk to the KFC, or will the police pick them up as if they were Maciej Ceglowski walking around in the wrong neighborhood http://www.idlewords.com/2006/08/i_spy.htm or a black person walking around in a white neighborhood in the US?
Why is there only trash on the poor street? Do people not throw trash on the ground on the rich street, or is there a municipal street sweeping service that takes care of that? If so, why doesn't it clean the poor street? What's up with the lack of safety equipment? I'm happy to live in a country where I can still enjoy fast merry-go-rounds, but safety equipment in construction work is super important for preventing accidental death.
The derivative and the causality are more important than the current state.
I wish I could answer your questions. I keep asking them myself. I want to talk about it with someone local, but it's incredibly hard to find someone speaking English here outside work (and incredibly awkward to ask those questions at work), and my Chinese currently is limited to "hello", "thank you" and "goodbye" (I try to learn some as fast as I can; I only had a week's notice I'll be flying here so there wasn't time to prepare).
My Polish co-worker who is here with me and has been here before tells me of a girl working here who somehow escaped the poor villages far away from the metropolis and ended up working as a software tester. He says that he tried to talk with her about life, but that her English proficiency is limited to the technical matters; she can't express herself in English if asked about non-work topics, probably due to lack of general vocabulary.
I'll be happy to post something if I learn the answers to those questions.
How weird to think about only knowing English at that level. Even when I learned another language, it was conversational. I hadn't really given it a lot of thought about if you only knew the technical words. I can see how that would be difficult to work with, but it's hard to imagine.
I'm also interested to learn more if you come across any answers? Will you post it on your website or something? I feel like I'll miss it if it is posted on HN.
I'm noting down to update both you and 'kragen after I write something up. I might post it on my blog or do a Tell HN; we'll see after I actually have something to write about :). You can also shoot me an e-mail (mine in the profile) so that I know how to notify you directly.
Last time I visited there were two guys with jackhammers taking up half of the concrete stairway to a McDonald's while it was still packed and busy: no safety equipment or barriers. I lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years. Shenzhen is great, but the air pollution is a holdup for anyone looking to relocate there (or Hong Kong). Otherwise it's a maker's paradise.
Apple was usually pretty bad (though remember, the Apple I and Apple ][ were demonstrated at Homebrew before Apple even existed as a company), but in my experience, Google is a whole different level of omerta. Don't get me wrong, there are great things about both Apple and Google, but I think the secrecy thing is super corrosive.
(I guess I should confess that my objectivity can probably be called into question here: I have lots of friends who work or have worked at Apple, Google, or both, and as far as I know, none who have worked at a company that either of them crushed. Unless you count OLPC.)
I don't know that OLPC has been crushed, it had never had a capitalistic mission. The shareholders back home aren't demanding a particular volume is met.
OLPC crushed itself. FLOSS fans were clamouring to develop for it, seeing it as a way to bring emerging minds into the OSS mindset. It created a lot of buzz. Then OLPC jumped into bed with Microsoft, and the FLOSS geeks were driven away, with no similar group of developers to replace them. OLPC made a massive miscalculation, and never regained the buzz they had back then.
Microsoft had nothing to do with OLPC's downfall. It had everything to do with failed project management, and at the highest levels, failed leadership. Expectations (on national levels) were not managed correctly, strange omissions in implementation (such as even rudimentary technical support) crippled uptake, and in the end participating nations had to work with volunteers to get anything done. The volunteer effort continues.
Eventually the organization was mismanaged into oblivion; there is currently some while-label vulture in possession of the commercial brand, and the non-profit arm has progressed rapidly into irrelevance.
As bad as things got (and are), OLPC never shipped a single machine running Windows -- if there are any out there, the participating school program installed it. As for FLOSS fans, mostly they made a lot of noise on blogs without ever having actually been involved with the program. If they had, they would have known that OLPC didn't spend a dime on Microsoft support; MS was allowed to send engineers to develop support within OpenFirmware for loading Windows, should the recipient nation desire it.
Strange, I remember going to linux conferences, of which the OLPC talks were heavily attended; competitions to win one were heavily patronised; colleagues going for the G1G1 program. There was a ton of interest in this low-cost, open-source laptop project. I remember the "for the children" argument for why they were partnering with Microsoft. The FLOSS community was pretty vocal in asking please don't do this, but OLPC ignored them. The buzz died, and the media moved on as a result. It didn't matter that MS never shipped in great numbers[1]; the damage was done.
It was mismanaged, absolutely, and the proposed MS partnership wasn't the only nail in the coffin. But with my own eyes I've seen a lot more interest than "noise on blogs". With that silly move, OLPC lost a pool of enthusiastic, free developers and media buzz. It also caused the OLPC chief of software to resign.
Given that you disparage the FLOSS complaints as just "noise on blogs", it's clear you didn't read the complaints. It had little to do with dimes moving from OLPC to MS. The issue was OLPC letting MS use them as a conduit to train new users in 'the windows way' - that MS was effectively going to co-opt OLPC as a loss-leader program. How far would OLPC go with MS? Why bother developing when they're so intent on providing XP on a clearly underspecced machine for it? And how could a sluggish OS actually be a decision 'for the kids'? How else would OLPC break their previously loud promises? The license fees really had nothing to do with the FLOSS community largely abandoning interest in the project.
[1] You're wrong about Windows never shipping. Windows-only machines never shipped, but dual-boot Windows machines did.
And I remember being personally involved in the OLPC project, which was not driven by linux conferences. The G1G1 program was a massive albatross that generated almost nothing but bad PR. Nobody 'partnered with' Microsoft. The project never lacked developers (until it began to run aground due to the mismanagement).
I not only read the complaints, I made many of them myself. I disparaged noise on blogs as noise on blogs; the FLOSS community as a whole is fine but was not a major factor in the development of the project. This was not because they were unwilling; it was because the senior leadership made an executive decision not to engage with that community.
I understand that many people in the world confused OLPC's mission with that of free software. But the cold hard fact is that nobody really ever gave a shit about software licensing; the goal was to get computers to kids, and then try to set up a sustainable pedagogical practice around them. I'm not really interested in the completely tangential issue of whether you think Windows XP is sufficiently performant for this task -- the point is that FLOSS was never the point. It was an era where anyone's use of GNU software was considered to be some kind of philosophical statement on the validity of GNU, sure, but this was never the intention at the executive level. It was gratis software that was easy to customize. The decisions involved were primarily pragmatic. Any 'loud promises' you felt betrayed by are merely further examples of the wildly terrible expectations mismanagement perpetrated by the leadership.
I remember when the FLOSS community abandoned OLPC. It didn't make a damn bit of difference. But I'd be interested in which countries received Windows loadouts -- I don't recall ever seeing a single support issue regarding it, which makes me think you may be mistaken.
Uruguay. This blog article clearly states that every OLPC runs linux, and also clearly states that some shipped with windows. Not many - they went to pilot programs and they weren't taken up largely because of that non-performance you hand-wave away - but they were shipped.
> Nobody 'partnered with' Microsoft.
Getting super-cheap licenses and Microsoft to customise their OS for your hardware is 'partnering with' Microsoft.
> the point is that FLOSS was never the point
I knew this, as did a lot of the FLOSS advocates. The point was that MS was still seen as the Evil Empire at the time. The geeks were interested both in the low-cost laptop and the idea of spreading FLOSS instead of MS's stranglehold. And they were naturally excited about OLPC's strong promises. And when OLPC went back on their promises... as I say above, why bother continuing to work on the machine? What other promises will they break?
While you characterise the FLOSS argument by the more frothy fringe's statements of betrayal, what I saw was more "what's the point?". What's the point of doing work we believe in if they're not going to stick to their statements? Especially for the people who were far more interested in the machine than the kids - the concern that if OLPC switched to MS, hardware might be used that wasn't supported by linux.
> Any 'loud promises' you felt betrayed by are merely further examples of the wildly terrible expectations mismanagement perpetrated by the leadership.
What a strange argument. You chide me for having a particular opinion, and then state the same thing that I'm arguing. You should be a spin doctor.
By the way, I was a Windows guy then, working in Windows support until 2009. I wasn't a FLOSS advocate, though I am now. Colleagues were into FLOSS, and I went along to conferences to hang out with them. I personally didn't feel betrayed, I just thought it was a stupid thing to do, and I noticed the buzz in both the tech and mainstream media evaporate with the FLOSS movement's disillusionment (which is a better description of the overall feeling than 'betrayal', I think).
However, it appears that we both agree that from the GP's original comment, it wasn't Apple or Google that crushed OLPC - OLPC crushed itself.
I agree that OLPC crushed itself, but I think that had more to do with CIA associations (in the minds of possible client nations, even if not in reality) and with the kind of paternalistic "we know what is good for your children" attitude, combined with the "sign up the whole country or we won't sell you a single machine" avoidable problem with adoptability, and plenty of promising what they could never deliver (promises which, unfortunately, were repeated mouth to mouth throughout the FLOSS community). By the time they sold their users down the river to Microsoft, they were already years late and an enormous disappointment.
So, the $100 laptop is real. It just isn't very FLOSS-friendly or made by OLPC. Instead, the mainstream $100 laptop is an Android tablet or cellphone, or maybe an iPad or iPhone. It's Apple and Google's fault that those machines are so user-hostile and dangerous, but it's not their fault that OLPC failed to provide a user-friendly, safe alternative.
This is how Silicon Valley worked, back when the silicon was actually made there. My impression is that Google's obsessive culture of secrecy (necessary because it grew up in an environment where loose lips really did sink ships) is the strongest influence in destroying that culture of information-sharing, although of course NDAs, interface copyright lawsuits, DRM, and software patents have also taken their toll.
California's century-old legal limitations on what rights employees can sign away to employers have also been very helpful.
So it's not surprising that technological development is happening today in a place where employers' ability to own their employees' minds is more limited — the innovation is done by the engineers, after all, not the investors, so shifting the power balance in favor of the investors will damage your region's competitiveness.
I'm interested to hear about the abuse and impoverishment.