OpenAI won a lot of good favor for the generous Codex subscription and the efficiency of their models, but now that many people have switched over from Claude, they think they can leverage their position to peddle a stream of unnecessary products, and crack down on the generous limits[1] that brought everyone to Codex in the first place.
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
Nerds suck. They are smelly, have bad posture, manners, never leave their rooms and are generally unappealing.
They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.
Not all Nerds are the same. I've been attacked for questioning why some companies still use Oracle, when most of the ones I've worked at either migrated off Oracle or were in the process of doing so.
A lot of people in tech buy every bit into cargo culting and following what they've heard is popular or "what everyone does", without much justification or understanding.
Case in point: all the people who still loudly say everyone should jump from Oracle owned MySQL to MariaDB, in spite of MariaDB Inc doing practically everything the original MariaDB fork was meant to "protect" users from at the hands of Oracle.
I'm not saying oracle isn't a huge faceless corporation that wants nothing but money. I'm saying that tech people are IME better at following trends than doing real research themselves.
This mostly copied parts from my comment elsewhere (<a href="https://lobste.rs/s/u1ypx5/stop_using_mysql_2026_it_is_not_true_open#c_wg8ffn" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs/s/u1ypx5/stop_using_mysql_2026_it_is_not_t...)
Since the day Oracle bought Sun, we've heard how Oracle is going to kill MySQL, and/or make all its features "enterprise" only.
Both companies have middleware layers for directing queries, but:
- MySQL Proxy/MySQL Router are both GPL2
- MariaDB MaxScale is BSL (it's a product of MariaDB the company, not MariaDB the foundation)
Codership Oy was a company that produced Galera, a plugin for multi-master replication. It was available for the community editions of Oracle MySQL, MariaDB, and integrated via Percona in their build of MySQL to make Percona XtraDB Cluster aka PXC.
MariaDB the company bought Codership Oy last year. Very soon after this happened, the website for Galera started redirecting to MariaDB the company's Enterprise Cluster page with zero mention of the open source project they'd just bought.
Not long after that, they stopped making Galera available for Oracle MySQL, and even removed it from the MariaDB community edition builds. It was to only be available via MariaDB Enterprise edition. They have subsequently taken a minute backstop on the MariaDB Community edition scenario, but it sounds very much like it's "we won't rip it out right now", and essentially the Community edition is likely to have to (try to) support its own internal fork of Galera to keep the functionality.
This is similar to the scenario Percona is now in - supporting their own version of Galera for PXC. The difference is they're a consulting company and have revenue and paid staff to do so. MariaDB the foundation is essentially joined at the hip with MariaDB the company for resources, but they apparently have very different goals.
Literally the only thing the foundation "produces" is the community edition of MariaDB... and they send people for the documentation of said product to MariaDB the company's website. Last year MariaDB the foundation agreed to define and recognise a "Primary Code Contributor" for the project... and it's MariaDB the company.
> A lot of people in tech buy every bit into cargo culting and following what they've heard is popular or "what everyone does", without much justification or understanding.
johnfahey · · focus · HN ↗
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
[1] <a href="https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713
torginus · · focus · HN ↗
They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.
Plus there is only so many of them.
giancarlostoro · · focus · HN ↗
Not all Nerds are the same. I've been attacked for questioning why some companies still use Oracle, when most of the ones I've worked at either migrated off Oracle or were in the process of doing so.
dpoloncsak · · focus · HN ↗
stephenr · · focus · HN ↗
Case in point: all the people who still loudly say everyone should jump from Oracle owned MySQL to MariaDB, in spite of MariaDB Inc doing practically everything the original MariaDB fork was meant to "protect" users from at the hands of Oracle.
I'm not saying oracle isn't a huge faceless corporation that wants nothing but money. I'm saying that tech people are IME better at following trends than doing real research themselves.
riffraff · · focus · HN ↗
stephenr · · focus · HN ↗
Since the day Oracle bought Sun, we've heard how Oracle is going to kill MySQL, and/or make all its features "enterprise" only.
Both companies have middleware layers for directing queries, but:
- MySQL Proxy/MySQL Router are both GPL2 - MariaDB MaxScale is BSL (it's a product of MariaDB the company, not MariaDB the foundation)
Codership Oy was a company that produced Galera, a plugin for multi-master replication. It was available for the community editions of Oracle MySQL, MariaDB, and integrated via Percona in their build of MySQL to make Percona XtraDB Cluster aka PXC.
MariaDB the company bought Codership Oy last year. Very soon after this happened, the website for Galera started redirecting to MariaDB the company's Enterprise Cluster page with zero mention of the open source project they'd just bought.
Not long after that, they stopped making Galera available for Oracle MySQL, and even removed it from the MariaDB community edition builds. It was to only be available via MariaDB Enterprise edition. They have subsequently taken a minute backstop on the MariaDB Community edition scenario, but it sounds very much like it's "we won't rip it out right now", and essentially the Community edition is likely to have to (try to) support its own internal fork of Galera to keep the functionality.
This is similar to the scenario Percona is now in - supporting their own version of Galera for PXC. The difference is they're a consulting company and have revenue and paid staff to do so. MariaDB the foundation is essentially joined at the hip with MariaDB the company for resources, but they apparently have very different goals.
Literally the only thing the foundation "produces" is the community edition of MariaDB... and they send people for the documentation of said product to MariaDB the company's website. Last year MariaDB the foundation agreed to define and recognise a "Primary Code Contributor" for the project... and it's MariaDB the company.
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
Google Chrome enters the chat.