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Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the Overleaf model.

Am I crazy to think there should be some way to stop this? It's utterly anticompetitive, but ai don't know any country where they bother trying to stop a small company buying/killing its competitors.

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Seems like open source is the way to defeat this. Anyone can easily create a competing service, which they then have to buy out, but the cost of setting up a new one is minimal. Interesting business model that feeds on anti-competitive businesses.

Interestingly, Overleaf is open source [0], although I can't speak to how well the open source version works.

[0] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf

IIRC, it is nerfed out. It is more open core than actual open source, and the paywalled features of the online version are missing.

The competition to Overleaf is just running LaTeX locally, which costs approximately zero dollars and it's faster! But it's a little less convenient for a solo author, and a lot less convenient for a collaboration.

I'm guessing that if you just uploaded a few pages of handwritten text to ChatGPT and asked it to make a font of your handwriting it would do a passably decent job. That might be the way that this business model ends.

You'd think this should encourage people to build carbon-copies of the tools that have been bought out in the hope of being bought out... It's only a sustainable model if it's fringe enough and with low enough purchase amounts to not eventually become an exit strategy for people who might not even have tried otherwise.

I mean there is a solution to this

"Can I buy your company?"

"No."

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