If you're interested in X for its own sake, you are very unlikely to want to turn that into a business. Unless you're also interested in business and money for their own sakes - both of which should trigger very justified cynicism, because there are far more effective ways to make the world a better place than by getting extremely rich after an IPO.
I disagree. There are many problems that can only be solved by a self-funding organization which sells its solutions to consumers - aka a business.
Suppose I would like to build entertaining, educational toys for children. Should I do it as a hobbyist? No. If I seriously want many children to benefit, I will have to get the toys to them, and producing them will take money. Should I get a grant from a charity? No: only children can judge whether a toy is fun, and if I ask charities to be the judge I will end up optimizing the toys to appeal to the charities, not the children. (The same applies to becoming a charity myself, or to asking for a government grant.) Instead, I should sell toys to children and their parents. That way, I may be able to tell whether I have succeeded in my goal.
The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
The list of businesspeople who are genuinely interested in what they do is long. It ranges from Steve Wozniak down to your local bookshop owner. Paul Graham claims that the best businesspeople are always interested.
> The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
True, but many of the markets we have are neither free nor fair. And even if they were, we should exercise caution before concluding that what is discovered is a need. Markets are equally capable of exploiting wants, socially conditioned propensities, addictions, manifestations of the subconscious, etc.
Even developments which appear unambiguously good can lead to unexpected side effects and easily overlooked externalities.
I want to sell the world on the idea of Capabilities Based Security... which means no product, nothing to profit from, which means no help from Silicon Valley at all. 8(
No matter how earnest, or driven... if there's no profit in it, nobody there cares.
I dunno, do you have any friends with deep pockets and chaotic energy?
In seriousness, no clue. Forking the financial system, which crypto is arguably intended to do, seems hard enough. Forking the kernel (as I understand you propose) seems even harder; you can't rely on traction from anyone with spare hardware, you'd need voluntary opt-in from established players, right?
I'd never heard of capabilities until I followed your comment to your blog, though, so thanks.
Forking the kernel won't help. There needs to be a new security model... Genode is a step in that direction... I've been waiting for them to get something to the point where I can get it working well enough to be a daily driver.
It's possible someone could get the drivers going on a Raspberry Pi 4, which would be close enough. I think it'll happen next year some time.
Would you mind helping me understand your idea better, then? I gleaned my (mistaken) assumption from your Capabilities Digest:
> The principle of least privilege is the solution to this whole mess, but it has to be applied from the kernel all the way up the stack. This is a lot of forking work to do.[0]
Forking the Linux kernel would just result in another monolithic Linux kernel, with all the drivers all tied in.
There are microkernels, which is the specific thing Linus Torvalds didn't want to do when he started Linux. In capability based systems, not even the drivers have access to everything. Any given process is giving a list of capabilities, like file handles to resources, and those are the ONLY things that process can access.
Consider a word processor... under Windows, Linux, etc the application calls a system dialog box to select the directory/file name, the uses that name to open a handle to the files, because the assumption is that any program you run should have full access to all of your stuff.
The fork of that word processor in a capabilities based OS would call the OS, and the OS would show you a similar dialog box, but the OS would then return the file capability to the word processor... it wouldn't be able to access anything else.
Consider the Linux model as handing over your wallet at a checkout, and the Capabilities model as handing over exact change. People are used to handling actual money and thinking in terms of risk like that... thus they would do well in a capabilities based system, and from their perspective not a lot has changed.
From the application programmer perspective, opening/saving files is a bit different, but everything else stays the same. The big plus is that no matter how bad any application crashes, due to bug or deliberate fuzzing, etc... it can't be used to take over the system, like it could in Linux.
We could stop having to worry about security when writing applications, and only worry about it in systems programming, where it belongs.
Genode runs on a variety of microkernels, the nice thing about them is they only do a very few things, so adapting to a new one shouldn't be hard, nor dangerous.
I do a lot of things simply to do the thing for its own sake and I've gotten a lot of feedback that people "value" the wonderful things I do out of the goodness of my heart. And I was homeless for years and hearing that shit about how much everyone "appreciated" how much I "cared" and all this shit while mostly not giving me money for it.
The assumption that people should do things for free is an assumption that they have vast resources to spend on benefiting others with no expectation of getting any of that back. Or that they should serve as slave labor out of "virtue."
Having done the latter, let me tell you it sucks. In the extreme.
If you want the world to be healthy, you need to find ways to do good works that pay your bills and you need to find ways to engage in symbiotic relationships where benefiting others comes back to you. The word for that is generally business.
I would like to keep working on the same things I've worked on for years but turn it into an actual business that pays my bills. There is nothing I want more desperately than to do X for its own sake and somehow also live in comfort because I do good things in this shitty world full of shitty people who all want something for free and are happy to take freebies literally from a homeless woman if they can get away with it.
If you're interested in X for its own sake, you're quite likely to want to do it for a living. This is true even of things like music and art. Not saying you _will_ be able to do it for a living, but it is normal that if you're interested in X for its own sake, you would at least investigate whether you could make that your full time job.
Now, in regards to things like an IPO specifically, I think it would depend on whether or not you need a lot of other people to help you get X done. If you need to hire a lot of other people, then you might need an investment in order to do that if you cannot rely on getting that many volunteers. And in that case, to get the investment, there probably has to be the prospect of an IPO.
My observed experience is that trying to get grants for something, is not materially easier or less political than trying to get investments to fund it.
Fully disagree. Making a living doing what I find truly interesting is perhaps one of the greatest blessings to me in life. One of the better ways to do that is to turn it into a business, or at least a nice self-employment gig.
I believe it's possible to be very interested in business and money and still end up with an ethically credible result.
The problem is that we(in the broader sense of the working world) don't treat those concepts as an "artistic medium" to which additional principles and ideas are needed to structure and shape the outcomes, rather, we just use them as scorekeeping for a nebulous measure of life success, which results in founders laboring hard over the business equivalent of a fart joke, because they're only aiming to min-max response for effort.
The measure of what's an "impactful" business is socially constructed within the arbitrage of what we could potentially strive for against what societal conditions currently allow. Entrepreneurs, as a group, are always testing the boundaries of that arbitrage. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but it's hard to find balance in the arrangement because they aren't able to do their study in private: part of the deal is that they demand access to significant resources to make it happen, and that occasional violations get overlooked in the name of progress. In a time like now when the population is mostly asking for relief measures, it looks indulgent, and sometimes it is.
