HN: Zoom Acquires Keybase

Notes

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Keybase seems like something that should be small, isolated, FOSS, supported by a

foundation, etc. They could have built a business _around_ Keybase I'd imagine,

but all they managed to do with this is invalidate Keybase and make people like

myself, who feared their business motivations, feel vindicated for being

paranoid.

I'll never blame anyone for wanting to make money, to make a business, etc. But

if you make a product that walks talks and acts like a FOSS project, but keep it

to center your business around... I'll always be longing for a real, true FOSS

replacement.

In this case a good looking FOSS alternative came out a few months ago iirc.

Though for the life of me I can't remember the name.

edit: https://keys.pub/ - though I will still miss KBFS

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Very interesting point about being vindicated for paranoia about their business

model.

The follow up comment though makes an excellent point about the [[id:70bf9c97-c8e3-4c26-8de1-3ef1f8db0cfa][Broken Window

Fallacy]] as it related to developing open source software.

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Unlike proprietary software, open source software doesn't depend on the broken

window fallacy. As a result, it's really hard to make open source profitable.

There's lots of different avenues to get there, and I don't like to fault

someone for their efforts if the bulk of their work goes towards improving open

source software, as I think Keybase did.

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#+BEGIN_QUOTE @coldpie on Broken Window Fallacy in software

The idea is that each proprietary project is wasting effort implementing their

own clones of everyone else's software.

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