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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

If the early pioneers of Computers & Internet thought the same way we wouldn't be even having this conversation. I think they made conscious decisions to keep computing out of total control by capitalism.

Unfortunately we've failed them & ourself with our consumer decisions.

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Uh, not really. Usually quite the opposite actually. For instance, Linux, the modern land of free/open computing, comes to us from Unix... which was made by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, two early pioneers of OSs... who worked for Bell Labs, owned by AT&T (and maybe shared with Western Electric? I forget).

Computers back then were far too expensive for them to be anything but reliant on capitalism. It was only with the commoditization of hardware that free and open computing really even became an option.

True, but Bell labs is hardly an example of normal capitalism. As I understand it, AT&T during the Bell labs era was more like the East India Company, or a PRC-style state-controlled corporation, or Pacific Gas and Electric.

(I find that this is an under-explored option in discussions of socialism-vs-anarchism-vs-capitalism these days. State-controlled corporations seems to have a very good track record. But I haven't seriously studied this.)

I believe they were actually prohibited from entering the computer market.

I disagree. The landscape has changed significantly since the 80s. A locked down platform makes a lot more business sense now than it did back then (unfortunately). Its not like computing company pioneers were so ideological that they turned down $$$$ for freedom. Nor is it like there weren't more closed platforms back then, the closed off platforms just got outcompeted.

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