Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on mandated inconvenience throu

Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on mandated inconvenience through DRM and other legal actions. Isn't GPL and AGPL Copyleft another form of mandated inconvenience for companies? Come to think of it, many laws are mandated inconvenience with the stated purpose of correcting for some masked externality. So what is an "open source VC funded" company doing? Creating complements and selling those. It's just that there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS. It's not a law of nature that e.g. Redhat should be the best people to provide consultancy on RHEL. The historical record indicates that there are indeed network effects at play with communities of experts. However, the historical record also indicates that such effects on pools of expertise aren't powerful enough to create monopolistic single factions which can lock out all competitors. every company operating as an "OSS startup" has to know from the start that their software can't be charged for directly. All money made from open source really comes down to the application of expertise to do things with software. The ultimate question is whether software expertise itself can be commoditized. (EDIT: Another way to phrase it: Is software an ouroboros? It's a snake eating its own long tail. Software keeps eating itself, but it continues the process by creating sufficient change to allow itself to grow as an industry. As time goes on, there are more experts needed. This then begs the question, "What could possibly cause that to change?")