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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

I sure wish I lived in a world where anti-competitive regulators weren't a joke.

What exactly do you think is anti-competitive about offering an open source product as a service?

Being in a position where you can copy anything and crush competition is a problem.

In terms of antitrust, I believe that if you could prove that Amazon forked and offered the service with the intent to crush the competition, it would be downright illegal. A current case is Meta: back then, Zuckerberg was happily writing (internally) that Facebook needed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram and Snapchat to prevent them from ever competing. This is anti-competitive.

This post explains it well: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taki...

Companies that build themselves on selling open source software put themselves in the position where anyone else can copy them and compete with them on price, and price alone. This is clearly the disadvantage of open source. It brings plenty of advantages, which is why people do it - but you can't have only the advantages and no disadvantages of open source.

Open sourcing your product is a risky investment, and as with all risky investments, it might pay out, or it might not.

As I said before, I believe that using permissive licences is a bad idea. I have seen multiple projects choosing a permissive licence as a way to compete against an already established copyleft project, just because it's easier to get adopted by companies. I find it unfair but also a bit stupid: by using a permissive licence, they allow anyone to compete with them with a proprietary fork.

Still, there is an antitrust question (that is slightly orthogonal): if TooBigTech can offer a similar product at a loss (e.g. for free) until they capture the market, then that's a problem. And they can only do it because they are too big, and that is an antitrust issue IMO.

They can't "copy anything".

They can only copy what they're explicitly legally allowed to.

Elastic explicitly allowed AWS to copy and use their source code, then whined about it.

I meant they have the resources to copy any product in a way that will crush the competition.

As in, they can build an alternative to an open source project, offer it for free (i.e. at a loss) for years until they capture the market, and then start enshittifying. This is an antitrust problem.

> Elastic explicitly allowed AWS to copy and use their source code, then whined about it.

Yeah at the very least they should have started with a copyleft licence.

Ah I see what you mean. Yes, agree. But that's orthogonal to OSS and like you say is a reg issue.

Its really hard to make an argument that someone is selling under market to try to corner it when the alternative is free as well.

Well if there is a company paying salaries from it, it's not exactly free.

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