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So you're inverting a word here, poorly. Competitive and anti-competitive are not antonyms, the latter has a more specialized meaning. The opposite of being an

So you're inverting a word here, poorly. Competitive and anti-competitive are not antonyms, the latter has a more specialized meaning. The opposite of being anti-competitive is not simply competing, it's competing fairly. It is pretty clearly free riding to take the creative output of another company, repackage it for money and contribute little or nothing in return. The world is poorer when this happens because free-riders can freely have business models that "kill the host", that is, don't capture enough value to keep people working on the underlying product. Perhaps the answer is "well it shouldn't have been an open source product then?" and then we all miss out. Meanwhile Amazon celebrates turning off all their Oracle databases. Great! And they make a lot of money off the back of Postgres too. But try asking them for the code that bundles Postgres into a reliable managed database offering. Of course they won't share it. That's their IP.

troydavis 7y ago
> It is pretty clearly free riding to take the creative output of another company, repackage it for money and release nothing in return. I completely agree and I think you found the perfect word for it: free-riding. As you note, anti-competitive has a specialized meaning. My comment was simply that free-riding is not, on its own, considered an anti-competitive business practice.
- lmeyerov 7y ago
  It is anti-competitive as big players give the sw away at a loss that they make up elsewhere by the nature of being huge. I increasingly think so much so to the extent of regulation should disallow massive platform providers to be both the compute marketplace and the sw on top: they need to pick. Feels like when the EU went after MS for similar company squashing antics. Competing with free/unprofitable is anticompetitive.
- grumpydba 7y ago
  Oracle has been free riding red hat with unbreakable Linux, for years. Then red hat got bought for 30 billions. When you are confident about you ability to outsmart the competition and keep your customers, you don't have to use those new semi-open licenses. They are a legal risk for anyone who copies or reuses the code.
jiofih 7y ago
Is the creative output really “from another company” if it’s licensed under permissive OSS terms?

troydavis 7y ago

> It is pretty clearly free riding to take the creative output of another company, repackage it for money and release nothing in return. I completely agree and I think you found the perfect word for it: free-riding. As you note, anti-competitive has a specialized meaning. My comment was simply that free-riding is not, on its own, considered an anti-competitive business practice.

lmeyerov 7y ago
It is anti-competitive as big players give the sw away at a loss that they make up elsewhere by the nature of being huge. I increasingly think so much so to the extent of regulation should disallow massive platform providers to be both the compute marketplace and the sw on top: they need to pick. Feels like when the EU went after MS for similar company squashing antics. Competing with free/unprofitable is anticompetitive.
grumpydba 7y ago
Oracle has been free riding red hat with unbreakable Linux, for years. Then red hat got bought for 30 billions. When you are confident about you ability to outsmart the competition and keep your customers, you don't have to use those new semi-open licenses. They are a legal risk for anyone who copies or reuses the code.

jiofih 7y ago

Is the creative output really “from another company” if it’s licensed under permissive OSS terms?