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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

For the past few years, the main developers of PyTorch have been working at Facebook with the copyright on the code assigned to Facebook. For years before that, though, it was developed by people working at other companies. It's open source of course so typically this doesn't matter all too much. But you can see the history reflected in the LICENSE file: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/LICENSE

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Tbh, I was trying to avoid projects by FB for ethical reasons, but I guess I have to give up on that now (for a while at least) since one of my projects depends on pytorch.

For what it's worth, Facebook doesn't make any money when you use PyTorch, nor does it help any of their business goals to have more people use PyTorch. If I were you I would just use the open source projects you want to and not worry about it.

I appreciate your suggestion, but that's not how I think it works. The use of open-source projects of a company directly supports the "R&D machine" of that company, by acknowledging the output of the researchers. The reason is that many researchers would not work for a company if there was no possibility of publication and acknowledgement. So by avoiding these projects, I implicitly vote for these researchers to work for companies with better ethical standards.

You may want to avoid quite a few large websites then, lest you end up executing code that Facebook employees wrote (React).

This misses the point. If you want to understand my reasoning, then read this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18125829

It doesn't miss the point at all. If you don't want to support this supposed implicit "R&D" machine, don't support websites that support it. Why wouldn't the support be transitive?

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