Nat Friedman: belief

Transcript context

…Would 25-year-old Nat be surprised with how well open source worked and how pervasive it is? Yeah, I think that's true. I think we all have this image when we're young that these institutions are these implacable edifices that are evil and all powerful and are able to substantially orchestrate the world with master plans. Sometimes that is a little bit true, but they're very vulnerable to these new ideas and new forces and new communications media and stuff like that. Right now I think our institutions overall look relatively weak. And certainly they're weaker than I thought they were back then. Honestly, I thought Microsoft could stop open source. I thought that was a possibility. They can do some patent move and there's a master plan to ring fence open source in. And, you know, that didn't end up in the case. In fact when Microsoft bought GitHub, we pledged all of our patent portfolio to open source. That was one of the things that we did as part of it. That was a poetic moment for me, having been on the other side of patent discussions in the past, to be a part and be instrumental in Microsoft making that pledge. That was quite crazy. Oh, that's really interesting. It wasn't that there was some business or strategic reason. More so it was just like an idea whose time had come.…

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