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cyanydeeztoday at 1:32 PM3 repliesview on HN

Walmart pulling up top a small town, opening a single business, paying everyone minimum wage is not 'competition is good'.

Just try a little bit of understanding.


Replies

rpdillontoday at 1:53 PM

This feels close to "felony contempt of business model".

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...

We are supportive of 3rd party ink cartridges, and there's little concern for the business model of the printer manufacturers. We instead care about the rights of the folks using the printers.

With Postgres, no one bats an eye that there are thousands of hosting companies providing Postgres as an offering, and they give nothing back to the project. Same with Apache, Nextcloud, Linux, Nginx, Sqlite, and thousands of other pieces of open-source software. Are folks against hosting companies like https://yunohost.org/?

It's only when (1) the software is open-source, and (2) the entity behind it doesn't know how to sustain itself with open-source, that we suddenly change positions and view the project as a victim. This doesn't happen with printers, it doesn't happen with other open source software. I'm not even against a change in the license, but claiming that AWS is evil for doing this doesn't track.

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tonyedgecombetoday at 1:50 PM

Maybe it is for the consumer. When Aldi opened in my nearest town my food bill dropped by 20%.

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surajrmaltoday at 1:51 PM

Arguably the town is at fault for choosing to permit Walmart to open in their town in that analogy. If you want to control the negative externalities of capitalism you can't just expect to not provide regulations and hope things will work out.

Even if it weren't AWS, someone else with enough determination could use the same open source code to create a compelling alternative taking away business from the original authors. Trying to use social norms to make people not do that is not effective. You need mechanisms that can be enforced via legal procedures to be effective.