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Comment by megaloblasto | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling that soon, proprietary software won't be a business moat at all. No mater the complexity of your software, it will be too easy to replicate. That could be a good thing for open source. One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.

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Proprietary software has not been a business moat for decades. The moats are their complements: hardware, networks and protocols (including humans), data and formats.

True, but that hasn't stopped big companies from not open sourcing the crown jewels, just for good measure.

Apple post 2011 has never open sourced their UI toolkits, Google has never open sourced their search engine, etc.

The code for both of these is largely a liability. You cannot market a competitive offering in the OS or search spaces with code alone.

It's so much of a liability that Google and Apple don't dare release it, even 27+ years and 14+ years after the original release.

> One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.

How so? I'm not sure what benefits that bestows the repo owner.

Meta may run the React Native repo, for example, but I'm not sure how that is impacting Microsoft (who use React Native more and more, including deeply embedded in Windows) competitively negatively in any way.

I was thinking along the lines of, for example, a mobile phone company that controls the worlds most popular open source smart phone operating system. In theory, since they are guiding the development of the mobile OS, they should be the first to be able to release hardware that takes advantage of the newest versions of the software. They could tailor their hardware to perfectly fit the future of the software.

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