alt Hacker News> Corporations can't embrace-extend-extinguish open source. This is because the source is always available. Sure they can use that knowledge to build a new, more popular, thing, but the existing source never goes away. It represents an un-enclosable commons.
Some counter-examples:
* git is now mostly github
* khtml is now mostly chrome
* linux is now more android and chromeos than linux. Anyhow, the plain kernel is deeply corporate.
You can still fork those project. But it would be mostly meaningless to do so.
But this doesn't really contradict the idea, in my view. Our existing property framework is built around physical goods that experience scarcity. The cost of code duplication is zero and it is (barring catastrophe) indestructible. Today you can browse the git codebase in the same way as 2 decades prior or hence.
All the knowledge in those codebases is preserved for all time, freely available to anyone. They have been built upon in ways that don't necessarily give back but that wasn't a destructive event.
Aside: Though if I remember correctly git and Linux are GPL so they create categories of thought-crime under copyleft if a judge holds your code to be too influenced by them. How influenced is too much? You better have enough money for lawyers to find out.