I think it practically would be very challenging to achieve something like this, unless the company is interested in selling the service/product it is probably

I think it practically would be very challenging to achieve something like this, unless the company is interested in selling the service/product it is probably very hard to force them to make a compelling offer to the market. The Walmart bar code reader for example, what was really the inovation/edge there? I guess that is was probably not the physical hardware but rather a deep and complex integration into the internal systems, which would be next to useless for anyone but Walmart. We also see some voluntary licensing of at least software, not seldomly free of charge (and open source). It's probably easier to build something like Facebook today, thanks to frameworks open sourced by Facebook themselves (i.e React). Getting access to hosting at scale is also easier and importantly less capital intensive than before, thanks to the cloud providers, who at least partly, make their internal hosting infra accessible for outsiders. However, it's not like the big players are open sourcing/selling their most important stuff. AirBnb is not successful thanks to their server side javascript rendering library, but them giving it away is nevertheless helpful for someone trying to disrupt them.