To summarize, they rejected Nvidia's offer because they didn't want one outsized investor who could sway decisions. And "the company was also able to turn down Nvidia due to its stable finances. Hugging Face operates a 'freemium' business model. Three per cent of customers, usually large corporations, pay for additional features such as more storage space and the ability to set up private repositories."
Yes, it is not a black or white thing, more a spectrum. But for many people, including me, just naming the categories is very clarifying, even eye opening, akin to beginning to know an alien civilization. It allows you to consider a different point of view, a way of interacting, taking decisions and actions very different to what you are used to.
One common drawback of GM crops is the monopolistic nature of their seeds. They come with a license and a cost to use, you cannot save seeds and use them later. So it seems like a threat to the sovereignty of a Country.
The article briefly mentions that initially some seeds are given with royalty free licenses, but for how long?
Re 2: on this software engineering forum, the following example will help.
If you have core dependency goes rogue, and you have to switch to an alternate library with similar features, is that a free switch? Think of how many thousands of hours of work are often needed? How many businesses have gone under because of such issues?
Growing a particular variety requires a lot of knowledge gained by each individual farmer from experience. You can't just go back to an old variety for free. It may take several years for yields to go back to previous levels and by then the farmer may have gone under.
Farmers change seeds all the time. One I know tells me that a great variety will terrible in 3 more years, though I'm not clear why. In any case they all are planting several varities ever year - four different ones in a field isn't uncommon - with harvest data to track the difference (different soils need different seeds). Test plots where they do many different side by side are somewhat common. they are always trying different options to see what works to do more. Plus predictions on weather mean different seeds.
Ok but going back to the library analogy, GMO bans are like the government banning react.js because they're convinced angularjs (or jquery) is good enough and facebook might go rogue. Shouldn't it be up to individual farmers to decide?
i experimented with it, i’m a fan of the concept. Ironically the bit i thought id like most (swap jinja extends shenanigans for just composing functions or callables more generally) is the bit that i didnt warm to. I dont really know why, on paper it ticks boxes for me. In practice i felt slow.
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