The days are getting shorter, the shopping (physical and virtual) is ramping up, Mariah Carey is playing everywhere on loudspeakers, and that means…it’s time for top ten lists. Here are my most memorable software events of 2023. I offer only six, given the government takes 40% of whatever I make.
Red Hat’s License Change That Wasn’t. In June 2023, Red Hat continued on a course to try to limit access to its RHEL software distro. But of course it can’t do that, because…GPL. Red Hat changed its customer agreement, which was widely reported as prohibiting distribution of software–though that was not quite accurate. Many large commercial open source companies that get bought (as was Red Hat, by IBM in 2019), try to increase profit margins by limiting access to open source. They imagine they can convert the downstream “freeloaders” to paying customers. That kind of scheme usually doesn’t work to increase profits, or even sales. But it does work to alienate the community! Red Hat’s unpopular changes to CENTOS enabled alternative distros like Rocky Linux. See my video here.
The Unity Meltdown. In September, 2023, Unity made a change to its pricing model, resulting in death threats and a general indie developer outcry. Then the CEO left, then they fired a bunch of devs. Unity still remains one of the two big dogs in the game engine space, but these missteps pave the way for open source alternatives like Godot. See my video here.
OpenAI’s Revival. November, 2023. I seem to remember this story about a guy who died and rose three days later. But Sam Altman needed about five. Maybe the less said about this debacle the better, given it’s dominated the news ever since Thanksgiving. One day, the entire tech world woke up to realize that it’s genAI darling unicorn, OpenAI, is really a non-profit run by AI-doomers (or guardians of humanity, depending on your viewpoint). Microsoft nearly accomplished the world’s biggest reverse-acquihire, but then the AI-doomers were kicked off the board. Sam and the AI-boomers will take the company forward, but OpenAI is still saddled with a weird corporate structure, and a lot of technical debt. I’m looking forward to seeing other companies eat OpenAI’s lunch in 2024. See my video here.
17 Lawsuits About GenAI. Good heavens, it’s exhausting just to list them, much less explain how nonsensical most of them are. Most of these will fail, if the judges actually follow existing copyright law. If content generators what to prohibit machines from reading their books/music/pictures, they need to get congress to change the law. Pro tip: when it comes to copyright, congress usually does whatever the media industry wants.
Feds’ Continuing Vendetta Against Tech (Including Crypto). The US government is still going after crypto. SBF of FTX was convicted. CZ of Binance pled guilty of money laundering. The SEC threatened to sue Coinbase unless it stopped trading all crypto other than Bitcoin. (Coinbase declined.) But there’s more. The Feds continue to file (mostly unsuccessful) lawsuits against tech giants claiming novel antitrust theories. See my videos on SBF and antitrust here.
What Didn’t Happen: Open Source AI. We still don’t have a definition of open source AI, and efforts to define it are stalled by the disarray of the open source community. Meanwhile, OpenAI and others are trying to set a narrative that openness is not necessary. Now *that’s* scary. (This was the subject of my TED Talk in September, but it’s still not published yet. I will update this blog post when (or if) it comes out. An article with similar substance is here.)
Happy new year, everyone!
The video for this post is here.
