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A big part of this is the value of walled gardens/IP. If laws were changed so IP/data wasn't protectable, then next year there would be lots of people making c
by londons_explore 3y ago
A big part of this is the value of walled gardens/IP.
If laws were changed so IP/data wasn't protectable, then next year there would be lots of people making cloned/modded copies of Facebook. Likewise, there would be lots of people taking Nvidias GPU design and making variations on it.
(this is assuming a world where everything currently closed source is made open source through law changes)
And in both cases, competition would push prices and profit margins to near zero.
- oskarkk 3y agoFor GPUs it could work as you say (except that the incentive for development of expensive and risky technologies would be gone), but I think that wouldn't help that much with things like websites. Most of the value of Facebook is in the network effect. Messenger has more than 1B users and I don't think it's a good app, Telegram is much better IMO (and is also used by almost 1B people in some countries - network effect there), and all Telegram apps are open source - well, backend isn't, but at least you can have modified clones (communicating with Telegram servers) with different features etc. And there is a small open source server implementation made by someone.
- spacebanana7 3y agoFacebook’s value is in the social network, rather than IP/data. Even if the code was all open sourced, the data was portable (e.g like open banking), and the messaging standards were open (like XMPP); the supermajority of users would keep using FB. See the example of gmail.