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A Venture Capital firm says techies need to get along with government:
From Airbnb to Uber, some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies have been fighting regulators since their inception. Now, one of the tech industry’s most respected venture capital firms wants to help both sides of the battle make nice with each other.
Andreessen Horowitz announced today that it’s launching a new policy and regulatory affairs unit, and that it has appointed Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s former general counsel, to lead the shop. Ullyot, who worked at both the White House and the Department of Justice before coming to the Valley, will be tasked with helping the firm’s portfolio companies see eye to eye with the government regulators with whom they’re increasingly butting heads.
Well, what do techies say, agree with the VC or string them up by their toes and poke them with sticks? Inquiring minds want to know...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kaszz on Friday April 17 2015, @11:53AM
Techies deal with the natural world. The natural world only have place for truth or your gadgets stop working because they are immersed in nature and Techies ought to know that groupthink is flawed, thus you need privacy. So there's a fundamental mismatch with the organizations that is into the lying and screwing sector. So there might be formal cooperation but there's no ground for anything solid and if there were, something else is going to be lost which have long term effects.
So VC wants his investments objects to play nice with government to have less hiccups in his path to profit. And Techies want secure funding. Government wants to get their way etc. So sure a kind of symbiosis can be established. But it will always be flawed and inheritable instable.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @01:17PM
So VC wants his investments objects to play nice with government to have less hiccups in his path to profit
I think you hit the nail on the head. There is no better way to a path of profits than a gov mandated monopoly. It makes barriers to entry high for your competitors. You get locked in regions to price fix.
From a money investment idea it is a sound idea. From a crunchy 'lets help the world' idea, not so much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @03:33AM
Yea, that's why sexist techies get banned from opensource.
Should sexist opensource developers have their projects censored or removed?
Recently an opensource game release story was removed due to the game developer's open sexism(0) and harrasment(1) of women in tech.
A story posted by the editor of the popular Phoronix linux news site about a release of an Open Source videogame was later manually removed(2). The reason cited was the game developer's unacceptable views on social issues such as gender equality (3).
The release story was titled "Xonotic-Forked ChaosEsqueAnthology Sees New Release - Phoronix" and can be accessed via the google cache(4).
With the recent inclusion of a code of conduct(5) for those wishing to contribute to the Linux Kernel some questions now need to be asked and answered about the inclusion of code from people who are known to engage in or promote socially unacceptable attitudes or harrasments of those whom the free-software movement would prefer to attract in their place:
* Are the social or political views of an author of free software relevant to that software's inherent quality?
* Should the beliefs of an opensource developer weigh when when evaluating whether a piece of opensource software is worthy of any publicity or public notice?
* Should men with unpopular or "forbidden" views be excised from the opensource movement and "not allowed" to contribute, in a manner similar to that which is done in employment?
* Has the free/opensource software movement changed in these respects since its founding? If so is this a positive change?
* Should there be gatekeepers to opensource that decide who may and who may not contribute. Should abusive developers be "blackballed" to maintain proper social order and controls?
and
* What are the consequences of not doing this
Citations:
(0) Past related incident: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1310 [ibiblio.org]
(1) http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Debian_and_LinuxChix_harassment_by_MikeeUSA [wikia.com]
(2) Removed story URL: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ChaosEsqueAnthology-Rel-51 [phoronix.com]
(3) http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?115776-Xonotic-Forked-ChaosEsqueAnthology-Sees-New-Release/page2 [phoronix.com]
"Fortunately, the article has been removed now."
"Thanks everybody for speaking up."
(4) https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JeCIgSFrBlgJ:http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page%3Dnews_item%26px%3DChaosEsqueAnthology-Rel-51%2Bchaosesque&gbv=1&tbs=qdr:w&hl=en&&ct=clnk [googleusercontent.com]
(5) Linux "Code of Conflict"