> If a company is worth its salt, it will offer services on top of existing public knowledge, without creating walled gardens. I contend that every profitable

> If a company is worth its salt, it will offer services on top of existing public knowledge, without creating walled gardens. I contend that every profitable company leveraging public knowledge does offer services (broadly construed) on top of that knowledge, since otherwise no one would pay them. Maybe the minimal example is that in which the only service provided is marketing, but the range of service levels provided in practice runs the gamut. RStudio clearly goes well beyond that minimum. In some cases, the services offered are so valuable that the company can create a walled garden - which reduces the net value of those services to the customer but provides the company with monopolistic pricing power. (It’s not clear to me that RStudio’s products have significant lock-in, for what it’s worth. R has significant lock-in, like any programming language, and RStudio benefits from the lack of competitors creating good R tooling, but that’s not really a walled garden of RStudio’s making.)