Are you implying that's a bad thing? Your argument sounds an awful lot like, "but all of those middlemen are gone", which is generally considered to be a good t

Are you implying that's a bad thing? Your argument sounds an awful lot like, "but all of those middlemen are gone", which is generally considered to be a good thing that results in a more efficient market overall. Is there some benefit to having compiler vendors or xml libraries guarded by paywalls? This is non-obvious to me. The days before the FSF and gcc were considered "dark ages" to programmers, being locked in to a small set of proprietary of compiler vendors and toolchains, fragmentation everywhere with poor portability and poor hardware compatibility. Yet you paint this as somehow a good thing and I'm struggling to see why. I'm also still not seeing how the openness helps establish tech monopolies, which was the main point I took issue with.