Comment by Skunkleton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Skunkleton | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you could make a strong argument that open source actually aids tech monopolies. Consider some business that needs <foo> to work. They can use OSS, buy, or build. If they buy, they share their profits with some other company, and they have to do that for the duration of their use of <foo>. If they build <foo> as proprietary software then they are stuck with keeping expertise in that software. If <foo> is instead OSS, then they can either directly use that component, or make some initial investment in that component, and then use it with minimal further overheads.

If you are building, then it better be your core competence. If you buy, then as you become larger and more successful, buying will be more and more expensive. Its hard to make your suppliers exclusive, and competition will be somewhat maintained.

The Linux Kernel is a great example. There used to be a ton of kernels to choose from maintained and developed by small businesses, but over time Linux was chosen as a good free option. Companies would then put relatively minor investments into customizing or maintaining Linux, avoiding needing a proprietary kernel. After 20 or so years of this, there is almost no money to be made as a small operating systems vendor.

If they are the primary maintainer of <foo> then that's no different than building it in house and it becomes "open source" in the way that Android is, where they throw the code over the wall once a in a while but don't develop it in public. This only helps them in the sense that it prevents a competing ecosystem, by making the one they control free-as-in-beer. But that is something they do, not something you do. Whether or not you produce some other free software yourself isn't going to change it.

If they're using some common community-developed free software, that's good, because they contribute to it without controlling it, and then anyone else can use it too and it's one less component of the stack that someone else has to build or buy in order to compete with them.

I'm not sure how that drives monopolies though. All you've explained is how it lowers the barriers to market, but it does so for all companies, competitors included.

It lowers the barrier to market for the end consumer product, but all of the stuff in between is gone. No more compiler vendors, or xml libraries, etc.

Are you implying that's a bad thing? Your argument sounds an awful lot like, "but all of those middlemen are gone", which is generally considered to be a good thing that results in a more efficient market overall.

Is there some benefit to having compiler vendors or xml libraries guarded by paywalls? This is non-obvious to me. The days before the FSF and gcc were considered "dark ages" to programmers, being locked in to a small set of proprietary of compiler vendors and toolchains, fragmentation everywhere with poor portability and poor hardware compatibility. Yet you paint this as somehow a good thing and I'm struggling to see why.

I'm also still not seeing how the openness helps establish tech monopolies, which was the main point I took issue with.

I agree, to an extent: I think OSS commoditized the substrate of modern technology: OS, libraries, languages, etc, which made the higher-level stuff more valuable (Christensen's law). With commodity platforms, most of the value was left in the end product (i.e. the user-facing bits) and at that point market dynamics favored natural monopolies --the more customers a service had, the better it got, the more customers it got. Which is another reason user-facing OSS apps/services have mostly failed miserably.

It's deeply ironic that in the end OSS, that lovely near-communist idea helped create what is probably the most successful capitalistic business models of all time... but, the fact that these monopolies are still there and unregulated and unharmed, that's probably a US-specific political failure and cannot be fixed with technological hacks and definitely not by one of their core enablers (OSS).

> … and cannot be fixed with technological hacks and definitely not by one of their core enablers

Well said. Hopefully the US Government will start being harder on monopolies in some meaningful way.

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