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uludagyesterday at 4:19 PM1 replyview on HN

> With enough time, any sufficiently large company can implement their own version of any software that anyone else has written. They usually won't write their own version if a high quality opensource version exists with a permissible license.

Is this a true assertion? If you define sufficiently large company to be Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. then sure, of course they can. That's an extremely high bar though and I would bet that even then, these companies would have to pick and choose their battles.


Replies

Expurpleyesterday at 6:57 PM

Rewriting "any software" is an extremely high bar to begin with. I think, we can agree that smaller utilities and libraries can be rewritten by anyone.

Another comment [1] even references the "Bram's Law". It basically says that any piece of software that's easy to rewrite will be rewritten countless times (and most rewrites are going to be bad)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606219