Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

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This is Capitalist logic, and more specifically - an argument for the concentration of capital in the computing/IT sector.

We, software developers and users - people and small organizations - should adopt the opposite slogan:

Built, Don't Buy.

When we build, we improve our knowledge and understanding of systems. We help affect them, through engagement with their developers or through modification and forking. When the challenges and overhead of building exceed our abilities - this will drive us to:

1. Strive for better-fitting software - easier to use, deploy, build and maintain; and

2. Cooperate and collaborate with related organizations and communities/groups of developers and enthusiasts, either to share knowledge on how to get things done more easily, or to distribute the load of work between many parties, each of which can't do it on their own.

Even if a lot of FOSS contribution these days are made at for-profit corporations - the above is key to the future of both software freedom and social freedom.

I like this comment a lot. It's new perspective here. Of course capitalism is great. The US is only 25% of China's population and still we produce well. China copied of lot of capitalism. Silicon valley is hard to replicate in other countries. But we Americans (I'm one at an American company) do have a penchant for confusing R&D and longer term investment distorting it through the lens of a short term bean counting dollar mentality. Usually in the medium to longer term is the loss of customers and market credibility by anemic products of crappy quality. And as far as that goes hasn't this been talked into the ground through the 1990s under the broad topics of SPC and TQM? I could mention pithy quotes from Iacocca, Ishikawa, Deming, Drucker and so on but I wont. To compete world wide usually requires deep knowledge in teams, organizations that lead to client centered services that require mature processes and engineering talent to build. You cannot buy that. That deep knowledge helps demarcate build vs buy.

Let me mention one story here to make the point in the small. During the 80s/90s HP did selectively less OEM work. They bought Fujitsu wave soldering and pick n place machines. That is something like 1million per line. That kind of equipment comes with a serious stack of user manuals. HP threw those out and provided their own set with training. Why? Any fool can plunk down money. Smart OEMs needed a way to get their line engineers to "know how the line thinks" and to move jobs in and out of the line smoothly in an integrated process with attention to spc, quality and metrics tracking. Yes they bought but not by going ignorant.

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