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Comment by Expurple | Hacker News Reader

Do you consider open-sourcing the software a necessary precondition for making the world better?

In other words, can a company make the world better by making proprietary software? In my opinion, that's obviously true. (Although I too dislike Apple specifically)

Your approach forces every company to redo the work, even the "good" ones. In fact, that probably makes the situation worse, because it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back. If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment, we would have one, the users would be able to switch, and would directly benefit from this

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> can a company make the world better by making proprietary software?

If you assume a company that does not have any profit driven incentive to be anti-competitive and less accessible to some people, yes. But that's like assuming dictatorship can work if the dictator is just wise and benevolent enough. It's nice to think about but not viable in reality.

> it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back

You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong.

> If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment

This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary, which is what any profit driven company is incentivized to do. In other words, you need GPL for this scenario to be even theoretically possible.

> You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong.

But, in my scenario specifically, they will be forced to by market forces (to some degree). Being less aggressive is a competitive advantage. In my scenario, the market is going to be flooded with competitors, some of whom are going to use that advantage. Even if some users still prefer the other advantages of proprietary Apple (as they do in reality), at least the users who care can switch and benefit.

> This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary

Sure, you can't clone Apple with literally "zero software investment". They will always have some proprietary parts. What I mean is that, in my scenario, they would have fewer proprietary rewrites (from GPL) and would use common permissive dependencies more often. Thus reducing the amount of proprietary code, and making their stack more uniform, "shallow", and easier to copy. Being easier to copy sounds like a downside that they'd like to avoid, but it's also cheaper, so a tradeoff comes into play.

A good example of this pull towards cheaper maintainance is Microsoft eventually replacing its proprietary web engine with Chromium.

Although, as I've noted in the other comment, that wouldn't happen if Chromium was permissively licensed. It happened because its partially LGPL/MPL, and thus you can't create a proprietary fork (but can still use it in a proprietary browser like the new MS Edge). It seems like somethimes LGPL/MPL have the best survival characteristics

> can a company make the world better by making proprietary software

Of course not

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