I think that recent initiative by YC under sam to invest in startups that may herald breakthroughs in sustainable fission is a great start. This should lead to a healthy competition which so far has been missing since it used to be a government only venture for a long time.
Shouldn't it be "Twitter is building open source software"? Pointing out the obvious since most of the software companies are built on open source software but only a few build one.
There is nothing wrong with "copying" kernel. This is what the open source is aimed at: Infectious growth. In fact that was the right and smart thing to do.
Interesting times. There is no doubt that the legal punches thrown at Android have been anti-competitive and kills innovation instead of what there were meant to protect. For example reportedly Microsoft earns more from Android than selling Windows phone: http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-is-making-2bn-a-year-on-andro.... If the patents were that useful for innovation, Microsoft would have been ahead of Google by miles.
Is ad the only means a free product can survive at scale like Google, Facebook and Twitter? Free services (of good quality of bad) entice users to use their service and trap them into their cage for advertisers to peek at.
This is an amazing feat with Rust being a modern open alternative to C! So far many have tried and failed. Rust developers have learned well and Rust seems to be on right track.
This approach is the key to get things right on mobile. Because of its roots, common web development focuses on desktop first and mobile second. This usually means that we do: `loadContent(); if mobile: loadMobileContent();`. Instead we should build for mobile first and load desktop content when we encounter one: `loadContent(); if desktop: loadDesktopContent();`
While the goals are similar, the ways differ. With perosona, the focus is on emails as the identifier. In case of OpenID, the identity provider may or may not have used email id as identifier.
Email has been the identity backbone for a long time. Persona supports multiple emails. This makes maintaining multiple identities even easier. A great alternative to identity trackers.