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> It is pretty clearly free riding to take the creative output of another company, repackage it for money and release nothing in return.

I completely agree and I think you found the perfect word for it: free-riding. As you note, anti-competitive has a specialized meaning. My comment was simply that free-riding is not, on its own, considered an anti-competitive business practice.

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Oracle has been free riding red hat with unbreakable Linux, for years. Then red hat got bought for 30 billions. When you are confident about you ability to outsmart the competition and keep your customers, you don't have to use those new semi-open licenses. They are a legal risk for anyone who copies or reuses the code.

It is anti-competitive as big players give the sw away at a loss that they make up elsewhere by the nature of being huge. I increasingly think so much so to the extent of regulation should disallow massive platform providers to be both the compute marketplace and the sw on top: they need to pick. Feels like when the EU went after MS for similar company squashing antics. Competing with free/unprofitable is anticompetitive.

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