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Comment by jacobsladder | Hacker News Reader

Then why do you admire them? Would you also admire them if you were their investor? Dropbox management is obligated by law to act in the best interests of their shareholders, i.e. to make them as much profit as possible.

It's more likely that they have released it because of some profit-seeking interest. They are not charity.

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> Dropbox management is obligated by law to act in the best interests of their shareholders, i.e. to make them as much profit as possible.

Can you cite the law which you believe makes that obligation?

The reason you can't is because it's not actually a legal requirement and the reason is obvious: it's hard to say what the best interest is over all but the shortest time frame:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule

Dropbox's management might argue that they benefit more from open-source than they're giving away, that this kind of favorable attention will help them hire the top engineers who make far larger contributions to their bottom-line, that the pricing models are complex enough that this just doesn't matter very much, etc. Absent evidence that they're acting in bad faith, it's almost impossible to say in advance whether those arguments are right or wrong.

"Dropbox management is obligated by law to act in the best interests of their shareholders, i.e. to make them as much profit as possible." - no they are not.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor...

Even if that was their obligation (which it's not, as others have pointed out), there's no reason to believe that keeping the algorithm proprietary would be more profitable. They're not handing a critical capability to their competitors (competing with Dropbox isn't fundamentally about cheap storage). They don't have the infrastructure to licence the algorithm (who should they licence it to? For how much? Under which terms? Those are not simple questions to answer.)

Releasing it freely allows it to work its way into browsers, allowing Dropbox to serve up the smaller images directly to users, saving money on bandwidth. It allows other users to contribute improvements. It markets Dropbox as a desirable place to work for engineers.

Not obviously less profitable that the opposite.

I admire them because they certainly considered the pros and cons of doing so, and decided that they feel secure enough in their market position and prefer to give this back to the open source community

Pretty much every modern company safes tremendous amounts of money from open source (Linux and upwards in the stack), and so the OSS community should rightly be considered a STAKEholder.

The share vs stakeholder obsession in the space of large companies and corporations represents a lot that's wrong with our current markets.

Also, the only upside to open sourcing this is getting other involved in development. I just tested on 10k images, and the promise both on compression rate and bit parity after decompression holds true.

Seems to be a pretty stable product, so the that motivation is probably only miniscule.

There's also the upside of attracting other talented developers to come work at Dropbox if Lepton is representative of the kind of project they might be working on.

They are a private company, they can actually ask their shareholders how they wish them to act.

Does it make a difference? Can't public companies do the same at shareholder meetings, or declare what the intentions of the company are before going public? For (a poor) example, Google declared at IPO they would never pay dividends.

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