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Comment by booi | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a pretty big difference here. It's not like Github prevents you from building a Github competitor. Or Linear is preventing you from using it to build a Linear competitor.

This is more akin to Windows somehow preventing you from building a new OS.

Or worse yet, sabotaging vs preventing.

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A surprising number of companies do include “you may not use the service we provide you to compete with us” in their terms of service.

(edit)

After a quick search the best example is Atlassian. It would (apparently, IANAL) break terms to plan a JIRA competitor using JIRA.

  > Customer must not (and must not permit anyone else to): [...] (d) use the Products to develop a similar or competing product or service

https://www.atlassian.com/legal/atlassian-customer-agreement

Also Salesforce. Their competitors are explicitly disallowed from using any of their services for any reason.

  > SFDC’s direct competitors are prohibited from accessing the Services, except with SFDC’s prior written consent.

https://www.salesforce.com/en-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/...

Perhaps provide an example or two?

Was the parent comment edited, because it does have a couple of examples in it

Yes, I edited after about 20 minutes to add examples, mea culpa. Will mark the edit.

I remember working for a company that did a lot of business in logistics. We were strictly prohibited from using any Amazon Web Services because several of our very high profile customers didn’t want anything on AWS. The higher ups were thoroughly convinced Amazon would copy it (and I mean, they came out with a product that competed with us, so they weren’t wrong!)

This kind of stuff “but they’ll copy us” is always weird (and wrong). Logistics isn’t some secret sauce. It’s taught in operations degrees across colleges. If a company is worried that all it takes is another company “copying” their IP to supersede them, then you don’t have a company, you have a simple app.

Amazon didn’t “copy” logistics from Apple. But both of them use similar underlying processes and optimizations. They both excel at it, and neither is eating the other’s profits. The same goes for smaller companies. Or the logistics providers like UPS.

> This is more akin to Windows somehow preventing you from building a new OS.

Tangent, but have you tried repartitioning your Windows disk to make room for a new OS? Or tried to configure Windows to let you dualboot? Or get the clock time right if you dualboot? Or let you debug "Secure Boot"?

Windows is outright hostile when it comes to (sharing with) a new OS

Yeah, MS doesn't quite exemplify good-faith competitive spirit, does it?

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