'Big Short' Investor Michael Burry Says OpenAI Is Headed for 'Netscape Fate'
businessinsider.comThe narrative that OpenAI could easily be a next Netscape/Yahoo/Myspace/RIM/Napster had been on the table since ChatGPT first broke into fame. Some could see that, and many refused to.
For whatever reason, the myth that being a "first mover" is critically advantageous seems to persist among technologists, even while our industry hosts so many examples of first movers exhausting themselves to clear the brush of exploratory research and market-finding only for some later entrant to confidently gallop through that now cleared path on horseback.
AFIK Netscape became open sourced, so Mozilla happened, so Firefox happened so Chrome happened.
That's why open sourcing commercial products is silly and ALWAYS gonna bankrupt you!
Is there any open sourced product that is actually main bread winner of the company developing it? Well Mozilla does it with Firefox still, but that is single customer just so that they can argue that they do not have monopoly and to drive traffic to their own product. But thinking of other examples. And I am here excluding those sold to someone else or are funded by other parts of business.
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Redhat?
Got bought by IBM. Still, selling support for larger Linux feels slightly different for me.
Netscape open sourced to try and head off Internet Explorer as a 'last throw of the dice'? Chrome based originally on WebKit from Safari which was forked off KHTML from KDE's konqueror, came along years later.