> On the campaign trail, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently called for the breakup of Amazon, declaring that “you can be an umpire, or you can own a team, but yo

> On the campaign trail, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently called for the breakup of Amazon, declaring that “you can be an umpire, or you can own a team, but you can’t do both at the same time.” She was referring to Amazon’s role as both an e-commerce platform and a vendor — a scheme that lets the company observe market trends and undercut sellers with in-house products at opportune moments. Why should Amazon not be allowed to sell its own products on its own site, but the grocery store is allowed to sell its own branded milk at its own stores, in competition with other milk sellers? The fact that Amazon is rolling open source products into its own offerings isn't anti-competitive: it's a reflection of a key flaw in the open source philosophy. The moat of open source is that it is expensive to maintain and difficult to monetize, thereby disincentivizing unserious forks: but now that Amazon is monetizing it, it's a problem, because their resources are effectively unlimited and they are effectively monetizing it. The potential was always there for anyone to do this, but the difficulty of it meant that no one ever tried.