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Comment by MangoCoffee | Hacker News Reader

i found Mitchell's answer to someone's question regarding why buy a open source software company, very interesting.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2118017893921436019?a=bCZdMwC...

code/coding isn't valuable. the problem solving skill is what set a good and bad engineer apart.

Lately (last 10 years or so) these have tended to be acqui-hires, which is probably what Open AI was doing, either to acquire people with specific skills and subject matter expertise, or to deny it to your rivals.

Not sure about this specific instance, but there are other useful artifacts in open source companies too, since they usually have an enterprise support, hosting and/or gated premium feature upsell business model. This means they have customer data such as usage patterns, contact info of purchasing decision-makers, and technical points of contact in other businesses plus sometimes a cache of UGC from their hosted offerings. Keep the hosted offering running for a bit after acquisition and throw in a sly change of the user agreement and it’s all yours for the taking.

For those too lazy to open the Twitter/X link:

    > @0xTMK: Why do companies acquire open source software companies if everyone can already access the repos?
    > @mitchellh: Because code by itself isn't valuable. Coding is the easy part.

So... acqui-hire? No hate on that, but this team must be wildly talented.

That question isn't really applicable to this situation, since https://code.storage is the company's main product. It has a business model, customers, and revenue. The open source libraries are tangential.

if code by itself isnt valuable, why are companies reportedly trying to increase their code output with ai while letting people go or letting their skills rot? which is it, is code valuable or isnt it?

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