alt Hacker NewsI argue that the natural winner-take-all dynamics of the marketplace are not beneficial to the the mission of free and open source software. In fact, having no safeguard against large organisations making money this way is actually hugely detrimental to the mission by enabling these companies to ensnare unsuspecting users in a web of both their own proprietary software as well as all that free and open source software has to offer.
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The base-stealing that comes with the throwing out the term “winner-take-all” is astounding. People claim this all the time on HN without any shred of evidence that it is the case.
The history of technology and markets show this just isn’t true on any significant timescale.
Winner-take-all dynamics of the marketplace need to be regulated away with anti-trust law and funding for startups.
I mean in this specific case we're not talking about AWS or any other large company. We're talking about someone wanting to offer Bear.app hosting in the vein of managed Wordpress. This is good for Open Source. Having multiple commercial entities working off of and invested in the same codebase is exactly what Open Source envisions.
It does take some mental discipline to actually believe in the movement and not view someone using your software to start a business as them "stealing your work." Such a thing doesn't make sense in OSS, you gave it away freely. It's a good thing, the competition is healthy. You don't have to believe, closed-source proprietary software is much easier to run a business off of as evidenced by most businesses operating that way. There's no shame in it. The FOSS folks are the free love "we don't believe in intellectual property mann" hippies of the software world.
> enabling these companies to ensnare unsuspecting users in a web of both their own proprietary software as well as all that free and open source software has to offer.
That’s why the AGPL exists.