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Comment by digdugdirk | Hacker News Reader

While I'd lean more towards plain ol' capitalism as the reason for small market players going under, the final point of the article (discussing patent related legal barriers on existing open source innovation becoming a main strategy of large industry players) is a very important one to keep in mind for people on this site in the hardware startup space:

"This is a story from 3D printing, but all the areas with heavy open hardware development are in Made in China 2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 and its successors. Make sure you keep an eye on the filings around your expertise, it is incomparably much easier to do something now than later."

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> While I'd lean more towards plain ol' capitalism as the reason for small market players going under

He seems to point pretty directly to Chinese subsidies allowing those printers to be sold under cost. That’s not capitalism.

Amazon operated under cost for years to capture the market, how is this any different?

Also partially subsidized by the government, who charged their mom-and-pop brick and mortar competitors sales tax while Amazon avoided subjecting their customers to sales tax for many years. That, plus Amazon's ability to operate at a seemingly perpetual loss, was absolutely predatory.

And the government sat on its hands and our representatives loved all the Prime boxes stacked at their doorstep. It has ensh#ttified entire industries that once depended upon retail as their interface with customers.

I think what you meant to say is "that is not an enforced fair and free market" which is much different than capitalism.

The free-market folks talk about something that works in theory as an ideal, but has never actually been put into practice.

It is. Maybe not the capitalism you like.

Not much different that using ChatGPT/any commercial LLM. They are not really profitable. They want to capture the market.

Private companies spending (and potentially wasting) money investors voluntarily gave them because they think it may lead to a big payoff down the road is capitalism.

Companies doing the "same thing" with government handouts (where the ultimate source of the money had no say in the matter) is not.

It's like the difference between companies that hire workers and those that use slave labor. They may have otherwise identical business models, but the later are operating at an unfair advantage.

I don't really see difference.

If we would know the true motivation of the government, then we could make a difference, but until we don't know it exactly, then there really isn't.

It is entirely possible that that government is giving money against shares or future profits.

It gets problematic and different if, for example, let's say the motivation is to use it as political leverage or even installing backdoors and collect user data.

How's it not capitalism? If your definition of capitalism requires governments to either not exist or not act to improve the conditions of their subjects (including companies), you have a definition of capitalism where basically none existing or only failed states have a capitalist system.

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