https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement >the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where compan

https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement >the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist. What red hat is doing is commodotizing their complement, it's nothing more than that. One big example is that I would rather be using an OpenRC init system, but because redhat throws their weight around I need to use a systemd-based distro at work, to work on embedded systems (can't use ~~chroots~~ systemd-nspawn unless the host is also running systemd). By throwing all this shit out for free they're able to destroy any sort of organic competition that might arise. Honestly I wouldn't even be mad, except a big chunk of it enterprise-ey shit and introduce major security issues just from how they're architected. There's good and bad, but the problem is they make it very hard to just take the good and leave the bad. They bundle things together, like the decision to make Gnome depend on systemd, or the way networkd can't really be seperated from systemd, or renaming gummiboot to systemd-boot. They also don't do a good job of disclosing what open source projects they have de-facto control over, and you're likely to find a lot of redhat employees in key positions in projects you didn't realize had anything to do with redhat.