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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I realize that the idea of “Commoditizing Your Complements” has gained new life lately on HN, but let’s give credit where it’s due - Joel Spolsky in 2002.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

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The first four words of the linked Gwern article are "Joel Spolsky in 2002". In fact he gives him credit 3 times!

Yes but why not link to the original (which is also more readable)

Sure, but Spolsky didn’t invent the concept. The idea is probably hundreds of years old.

Well this is like an inverse for that strategy. If your core product is OSS you aren’t commoditizing its complements, but rather trying to build and charge for those complements (such as hosting or management services, consulting, etc) because you can’t charge for the product itself.

For a profit seeking corporation, your core product is the product that makes you money.

Roku sells hardware, but the CEO has said in no uncertain terms that their core product is aggregating user data to sell to advertisers. That they don’t consider themselves a hardware company.

IBM was also big into open source to sell mainframes and services.

Credit for what?

For “commoditize your complements” strategy, which was probably popularized by Stratechery but GP found earlier piece by Joel Spolsky about the same idea.

So credit for a phrase? Neither invented the actual strategy.

Well, Einstein didn't invent Relativity but he gets credit for describing it.....

So every discussion involving relativity has to mention Einstein even when it's not germane?

Everyone keeps linking to the Gwem.net website instead of using the primary source.

If Albert Einstein had a blog post about relativity, I would rather read that than someone’s interpretation....

He wrote books about it, have you read them?

Well actually....

The Gwern post is better: it starts by linking, quoting, and summarizing the Spolsky post, but then goes on to give many more examples.

He did invent it. Our scientific models are just that: models that can make accurate predictions.

There is a lot of value in distilling some amorphous concept or unclear practice into a simple rule that makes sense and frames it in a template, making it easy to both recognize and implement.

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