>>Don’t just take my word for it though, look the word up in any of the numerous online dictionaries :)
>>You then run the risk of excluding developing economies
"Patronizing: apparently kind or helpful but betraying a feeling of superiority; condescending"
I see. So, let us back up a little to your first statement. Why is the risk of excluding developing economies a problem (for the developing economy), again? I will be very happy to take back my assumption about what you implied there, provided you can give me an explanation for why it is a "risk" and who actually bears the risk.
>>Facebook is an edge case because that’s a problem in every country
It is not an edge case if it leads to making assumptions which are clearly bad for our future. Because Facebook isn't getting any real punishment, people are only going to say "Nothing happened to Facebook. Why should the other companies worry about lying to governments/ lying to customers/ privacy issues/ data collection / retargeting / lookalike audience" etc.
>>However that still doesn’t prove your claim that every western company exists in developing counties specifically to further your economic strife (which is the accusation you’re levelling against the west)
I am not sure why you feel that way. Specifically, what I am saying is that I don't like people starting off with statements such as "you then run the risk of excluding developing economies" as if that is automatically a bad thing for the developing economies.
So Facebook provided free internet to Myanmar, and it was better than the "cheaper local equivalent" because it was actually free. Soon all the ISPs in Myanmar were out of business. Facebook was now synonymous with the internet in Myanmar, and suddenly it became a lot easier to influence people into doing pogroms. Now clearly a "western subscription service" successfully competed, and unfortunately, the pogrom did not affect the "western subscription service" in any way while millions of real humans became refugees.
Generally, people's answer to this is something like "yeah, it is too bad the people were such idiots to be provoked into such violence" or in some way blaming the naivete of the local population. But imagine if Facebook was actually asked to pay compensation for every affected person, or to stop business operations in Myanmar altogether. See, you can actually do that with a local company because they have some real skin in the game.
To complete my point, I don't actually give a damn if a "western subscription service" can compete for my business unless I have a way to drag Zuckerberg (figuratively speaking of course, a minion of Zuckerberg will do) to my country for trial and then send him to the local prison if found guilty of some local law. Think of it as "terms of providing service".
>>it sounds like you have a proverbial axe to grind
Indeed I do. It is called "stop patronizing the people of my country".
>>none of your points are even remotely relevant to the conversation
If you feel so, that's OK, although I would obviously like to see a more specific refutation.
As someone who grew up in a developing economy, I find this view extremely patronizing. Usually, what happens is that a local company fills that demand gap.
Also, I think it is good for all parties concerned, because most developing economies will have a big problem becoming developed economies if their people are under constant surveillance from entities who may benefit from their continuation as developing economies.
Case in point: the US dollar is a horrible currency if looked at in isolation - after all, why the heck should the rest of the world pay American kids lots of money to have a great time at college and then turn around and default on their debt? Student loan forgiveness is almost a certainty over the next few years. But people still flock to the US dollar because it is far better than the other places money could go. There may be a hint of conspiracy theory in this, for sure, but it does not require a wild stretch of imagination to expect that the country where Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram is headquartered actually has a real incentive to foment violence in other countries and make their own economy and thus currency look better in comparison.
The upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 had similar consequences, but this could also be a reflection of the different types of audience the two companies serve.
For example, the person who wrote this book is probably never going to post a complaint on social media:
I have sometimes wondered why they don't offer a separate, uncomplicated fixed price (and bounded resource) version - basically like a Heroku - and provide a migration path to their core offerings.
In fact, developers make a loss on the unit productivity of their time by using Microsoft products, but make it up on volume because they use those products forever.
Here is the general FOSS playbook of nearly every Big Tech company.
1 Use FOSS as a way to attract the best talent in addition to the salary. But remember that even a very high salary for a permanently scandalous company like Facebook may not be a good enough incentive, but FOSS will likely push some folks over the fence. ("Yes, I work for Microsoft. But inside Microsoft, I work on FOSS stuff!" - Scott Hanselman).
2 Get a lot of unpaid volunteers looking at and improving your code, not to mention the free documentation and all the free support on the project's GitHub issues.
3 Cherry pick the interesting stuff in the FOSS projects for BigTechCo employees and hand off the more boring plumbing work to the unpaid volunteers, thus massively increasing total FOSS output. This can often be done by simply ignoring the boring stuff for a while since it is quite clear that FOSS devotees abhor the code vacuum.
4 Back to step 1.
Yes, FOSS seems to be perpetuating the tech monopoly.
When WhatsApp improved its popularity by claiming "privacy is important, no ads" etc and then did a U turn it was actually noteworthy and newsworthy.
I don't think Oculus ever made such claims. They were happy to "sell out" [1]. If anything, they seem to be proud members of the Facebook cult [2].
If you bought the Oculus, you knew exactly what you were getting.
Also, a side note: I just suppose that everyone who supports Facebook at this point benefit from Facebook's profits in some way (e.g. FB employees, FB ecosystem consultants, close partners such as Microsoft etc) and automatically discount their opinions about Facebook.
Actually the comments indicate that the "controversy" seems to be imagined by many people. By the way, I don't know anything about Joost, so he may not be innocent. But the article is an excellent example of an inability to distinguish between consensual but obnoxious stuff and clearly non-consensual behavior.
Also read the comment by Jenny Halasz, it seems very telling: "I had the audacity to start a thread on twitter where I suggested that perhaps we should ask the women involved if they were being harassed before we leveled accusations at the supposed harasser.
For my trouble, I got called a woman hater, an enabler, and plenty of other terrible things (now conveniently deleted by the people who said those awful things: Cohen, Rayner, a handle by the name of callis1987, and Forden)"
>>You then run the risk of excluding developing economies
"Patronizing: apparently kind or helpful but betraying a feeling of superiority; condescending"
I see. So, let us back up a little to your first statement. Why is the risk of excluding developing economies a problem (for the developing economy), again? I will be very happy to take back my assumption about what you implied there, provided you can give me an explanation for why it is a "risk" and who actually bears the risk.
>>Facebook is an edge case because that’s a problem in every country
It is not an edge case if it leads to making assumptions which are clearly bad for our future. Because Facebook isn't getting any real punishment, people are only going to say "Nothing happened to Facebook. Why should the other companies worry about lying to governments/ lying to customers/ privacy issues/ data collection / retargeting / lookalike audience" etc.
>>However that still doesn’t prove your claim that every western company exists in developing counties specifically to further your economic strife (which is the accusation you’re levelling against the west)
I am not sure why you feel that way. Specifically, what I am saying is that I don't like people starting off with statements such as "you then run the risk of excluding developing economies" as if that is automatically a bad thing for the developing economies.