alt Hacker NewsI, personally, don't feel that "making money by doing business in a particular market" should be a right it is illegal to waive.
If it were inalienable, things like regional distribution agreements would be void, since you could sign away your ability to sell in a certain country and then compete with your distributor anyway.
Let's keep some perspective here - there is no "inalienable right to sell apps to smartphone users via a private commercial storefront".
Replies
Imagine the landlord of a library were to close the store just because someone complained that the library was selling stolen books. Would you consider this acceptable? And we are talking about a landlord that basically own the city here.
I don't know in this particular case of Luanti, but this could be people's livelihood we are talking about, there should be some sort of legal due process.
It really feels like middle-ages kind of justice.
All rights should be inalienable, simply because if they are not then all corporations will put "you waive all your rights" into their standard legal boilerplate.
The consequences do not matter. Voiding regional distribution agreements is a small price to pay for actually having rights.
I think this take holds up very poorly when the reality boils down to:
"Government policy and critical services have made it so there are functionally two markets for mobile software, each owned by the manufacturers and developers of the mobile OS and hardware"
This isn't like physical sales, where I can open up a store anywhere. This also isn't like classic software sales for windows/mac desktops, where I can sell you a program from any website or physical store.
---
Functionally - this is like these private companies revoking your business license at their whim. I don't find it a tenable position.
at the same time google is moving to forbid other app stores so...
> Let's keep some perspective here - there is no "inalienable right to sell apps to smartphone users via a private commercial storefront".
This is unacceptable in a world where governments and businesses are increasingly gating services behind those same marketplaces.
Something’s got to give here. We can’t allow people to create a captive, gatekept marketplace and then create/allow significant pressure that herds people into that same marketplace.
IMO, break up all the gatekeepers using antitrust and require that critical infrastructure and businesses (government, banking, utilities, payments, etc) allow alternate access paths that don’t require a smartphone.