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Comment by nullifidian | Hacker News Reader

An alternative take, which I'm sure won't be popular, is that now, with an interpretation taken to the extreme, a megаcorporation can basically steal your (let's say a small startup's) platform (in case you refuse to sell it for ethical or some other reasons), by re-implementing it and investing much more resources which you don't have, to make it more attractive to customers.

I'm ok with either decision, but, depending on how this precedent going to be interpreted, it could have far reaching consequences, maybe unintentional/undesired ones too.

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I think that's always been a threat. If a large business decides to target an area you develop a system for, you're basically out of luck unless you have some novel IP that's difficult to replicate. You really have to have something niche, patent it, etc. otherwise you just roll the dice that massive entity X doesn't steamroll your livelihood out of business.

Well, before this decision in a situation like this you would at least be able to retain your existing customers who are already invested in your platform, due to API incompatibilities etc, but with the ability to painlessly re-implement platforms the large business would take your existing customers too, and reuse the platform momentum that you've built.

So companies would have to compete on pricing, availability, customer service etc etc instead of by being first to create lock in?

Seems like a net benefit to me :-)

It stifles innovation and rewards big business. Why risk developing something if it will be taken from you? A winner-take-all kind of situation. It leaves little room for the platform's authors to generate revenue other then hiring themselves to said big business, and probably at depressed rates.

Because you can always outcompete them?

No, it is not a first class ticket to unicorn valuation, but it is trivially easy to differentiate

- from Google by just providing any kind of customer service to all paying customers

- from AWS and GCP just by allowing on premise solutions

- from Facebook by not reliably failing to protect and/or actively exploit your customers all the time

- etc

Need proof? See Slack, WhatsApp and Instagram (before the acquisition), Basecamp etc etc.

>An alternative take, which I'm sure won't be popular, is that now, with an interpretation taken to the extreme, a megаcorporation can basically steal your (let's say a small startup's) platform (in case you refuse to sell it for ethical or some other reasons), by re-implementing it and investing much more resources which you don't have, to make it more attractive to customers.

GNU/Linux, a free reimplementation of AT&T's Unix interfaces, is largely why commercial Unix isn't really a thing any more.

Yes, but the situation is a bit different -- the majority of UNIX rights owners were actually promoting open standards through initiatives like POSIX, X/Open, so the re-implementation did not violate the copyright. As far as I know SCO's suits were not about interfaces of any kind, and the Linux kernel uses C standard library and other posix compliant libraries as an interface.

Thats what patents are for. API is like designing your own custom plug to your device. You can't copyright that plug design, you can patent it its novel and new.

And if you are opposed to algorithmic/software patents it would be an unpleasant choice to make. Also, copyright is probably (I'm not sure) easier/cheaper to litigate, because it's much more evident when something is copied, compared to divinating whether something violates a patent or not.

Happens today, like AWS Elasticache and AWS Aurora. I do think you're right in that it will make those decisions easier. Particularly for AGPL/GPL things. Now they can be reasonably sure that cloning the end user facing API bit is "fair use".

Ho you mean Amazon AWS?

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