Hacker News Reader

Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

>Actually, he's 100% correct.

No. You agree with their end point. How they got there is not factual.

I don't understand your second paragraph. Why should I care about proprietary software competition? And how are they building these free software moats that stop other people?

>Also, public roads are a bad metaphor for software: there isn't a market for public roads, and software can always be innovated upon

My use was very narrow, the ability for bad actors to use infrastructure doesn't put the infrastructure at fault. That said, roads have a market and allow innovation.

View on HN

"Why should I care about proprietary software competition?"

Because without it we all pay much higher prices than we normally would, and we get sub-par quality/innovation. Unless you're somehow intimating that proprietary software can be completely eliminated, but I don't think that's the case. I don't think that such views are grounded in reality.

"And how are they building these free software moats that stop other people?"

I think this has been demonstrated pretty clearly over the last 10-15 years: they use open source to direct the industry in ways that are beneficial to them, regardless of whether they are good for everyone else. And, it is often the case that there are serious issues for anyone that would want to compete against them in a specific area of software because they're now competing against "free". It forces companies to diversify into areas where they have little expertise, just to be able to compete. So, instead of a company being a developer tools company, they're now something else that also happens to give away developer tools. In the end, it favors large corporations over smaller enterprises in an industry that has traditionally been one with very low startup costs and lots of opportunity.

>Because without it we all pay much higher prices than we normally would, and we get sub-par quality/innovation. Unless you're somehow intimating that proprietary software can be completely eliminated, but I don't think that's the case. I don't think that such views are grounded in reality.

There has been no shortage of quality and innovative free software. I see no reason that restrictions on a users rights would encourage innovation or a quality product.

Reading the rest of your post, you also seem to view free software as primarily about price. The picture you paint sounds more like what Internet Explorer did to browsers than any free software I can think of.

> So, instead of a company being a developer tools company, they're now something else that also happens to give away developer tools

Or you can take the existing developer tools and improve and extend them. Having access to a large amount of your competitors resources allows you to more easily compete on an even field.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com