Hacker News Reader

Comment by dedup | Hacker News Reader

> Even if some company were to make a closed source fork, who cares?

They can add sufficiently popular functionality to said closed source fork and make the open source original a) obsolete and b) incompatible with the combined ecosystem, and thus deprive the users of a feasible free option.

View on HN

If the closed fork functionality is superior enough to make the original de facto obsolete then the users have already collectively decided that the tradeoff is worth it.

And if the original can't compete it means the additional functionality was only going to exist because the financial model of the closed fork could pay for it.

> If the closed fork functionality is superior enough to make the original de facto obsolete then the users have already collectively decided that the tradeoff is worth it.

Users cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about these kinds of things for the same reason that corporations cannot be trusted to be environmental stewards and children cannot be trusted to select a dinner menu or file taxes.

Just because users don't make the same choices you do, doesn't mean those choices are invalid.

users can only choose what is available. the license greatly affects the options that a user can choose from.

> And if the original can't compete it means the additional functionality was only going to exist because the financial model of the closed fork could pay for it.

This completely disregards the fact that the "financial model of the closed fork" explicitly chose to build upon the permissively licensed original.

If the company chooses to build upon free software, they should be obligated to give back to the community from which they leech. Otherwise, they should just build their own thing from scratch with all the money they've hoarded, and keep it closed.

You know what would be even better? If the new functionality was open.

The original can't compete because the original author used a permissive license. Do you want to make yourself not compete?

at the expense of the original developer whose work was taken advantage of without giving anything back or paying it forward.

That's not the only reason it would become the defacto standard, and it's naive to claim so.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Users can get a bundled version that slowly breaks compatibility forcing vendors to align with the closed source version.

It would indeed be naive to make that claim, so it's a good thing that's not what I did.

> If the closed fork functionality is superior enough to make the original de facto obsolete then the users have already collectively decided that the tradeoff is worth it.

I'm afraid you did. Users are lazy, and IE and Java on Windows are great examples.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com