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Comment by lordkrandel | Hacker News Reader

I think you're completely wrong. If there was no opensource, we would have an ActiveX internet with Silverlight and DCOM+ and still struggling between different software renderers in a world without Chromium. I mean that the open source has opened up what the software world is and what it can be. Every opensource software enables (keyword) the paid software world to cooperate. All these jobs you see are there because there is Linux, Angular, Javascript, Python, Go and all their opensource library companions. Also Microsoft understood that, it's time you also do.

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While I agree he's wrong about open source's economic effect, there are plenty of areas where open standards have succeeded in creating interoperability without open source, the obvious example being in computer hardware -- think about USB, WiFi, etc.

I think the OP is right about the economic effect. Companies selling their most powerful machine with limiters you must pay to remove dropped the overall benefits of computers to society, but society paid those companies more money for less total benefit as a result of users with higher need for it having to pay more than users with barely a need.

Similarly in software, you can't buy an OS on a per system basis for anywhere near the portion of its cost to produce and keep competitive. The large number of jobs customizing free software exist but they would also exist in a world where there were many competitive profitable stacks bellow them, and they would be buying or creating more expensive middleware instead of expecting anything not specific to their niche to come for free in the next OS release.

We also wouldn't keep getting hired to keep rewriting web sites, etc. using the latest frameworks

Oh, we would be using Flash and Actionscript. Much better indeed, huh? :D

I don’t find the browser example particularly compelling. In the case that Firefox/Chrome would have been closed source (but free to use), the web browser history might have been largely similar. Flash/ActiveX/Silverlight would still have lost even if they were open source.

History is not made with "if"s. Closed source alternative browsers existed, and failed. Open source and Open core browser dominated the space, and that's it.

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