Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

Whirling_Cloudburst@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 927 points –
Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED
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The blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.

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I was working for a place that was the market leader in a certain niche of simulation software. Their simulation was about 10x more efficient than their competitors. However, that version of the software is strictly off limits for the public, and made a version which they sold with a sleep statement so that it was only 1.1x faster than the next best solution. That way they could remain market leaders any time the competitors released a better version. Even though many systems rely on growing simulations to simulate bigger scenarios that could help save lives.

Just an example of capitalism impeding progress.

Open source software solves that kind of hidden bullshit.

Exactly why I left that company.

Specifically free (libre) licences, as permissive licences allow corporations to improve/adapt the software without contributing back to the community.

I only work on software with GPL compatible licences now.

And open source software is explicitly anti-capitalist.

free software is. open source is an attempt to sell free software out to capitalist interest.

eric raymond and the OSI are not good.

There are many forms of free and/or open source software.

but open source isn't anticapitalist

Yeah, I guess the original statement was too broad, but any FOSS using a GPL license effectively is. I guess not anti-capitalist though, but un-capitalist. It doesn't try to remove capitalism, it tries to be seperate from it.