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This is just the broken window fallacy. Hobbyists giving away schematics for unbreakable windows are not stealing from your window repair business. Yes, having

This is just the broken window fallacy. Hobbyists giving away schematics for unbreakable windows are not stealing from your window repair business. Yes, having open source competition means you'll have to either build a superior product that customers are willing to pay for, or find another niche. That's a good thing.

didibus 5y ago
> That's a good thing Good has many dimensions. I'm saying that as a developer, FOSS means people don't need to pay you to build those things, only to use them, and that's why FOSS developers themselves don't get properly compensated, because they chose to build it for free. You could say FOSS is a good thing if you talked about computing progress, or barrier of entry for a startup wanting to build an app, or as a great source of example to learn from, etc. As for your comparison, I don't think it holds, because very rarely are FOSS contributors hobbyists, most of them are professionals. So it is much more akin to a professional window engineer giving away free schematics for unbreakable windows, which means that companies manufacturing unbreakable windows no longer need to pay a professional window engineer to make schematics for them.
webmaven 5y ago
> This is just the broken window fallacy. Hobbyists giving away schematics for unbreakable windows are not stealing from your window repair business. Of course, the smart glazier would figure out that giving away the schematics for a window-breaking device is in their interest. Commoditize your complements, as the saying goes.