3 ms·

> We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the platfo

> We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the platform. Why not doing it in the first place, then? > The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else. If the internals are not well-designed and not well-documented, yes. In that case, once again, why bother releasing the source code?

brl 19y ago
> Why not doing it in the first place, then? We don't want to do it at all and probably never would. I'm only mentioning it as something that somebody evaluating risks from the other side might imagine that we could do. > If the internals are not well-designed and not well-documented, yes. In that case, once again, why bother releasing the source code? No, we're not going to deliberately obfuscate anything because that would be against our goals of encouraging as many people as possible to adopt our platform. I think it's not really necessary to create artificial obstacles for us to have an important advantage. Very large systems take time and experience to understand even when they are both well designed and well documented. Linus and Alan Cox have an advantage over newcomers at extending the Linux kernel, right? Hypothetically, if Linus, Alan, and say Rusty Russell got together and created a startup to implement a Linux kernel based idea, would it make sense to compete against them on exactly that idea?
- corentin 19y ago
  It would make sense: while they would spend their time debugging and fine tuning their beloved baby of a kernel you would just use their work and add value on top of it.

3 ms·

> We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the platfo

by corentin 19y ago

brl 19y ago
> Why not doing it in the first place, then? We don't want to do it at all and probably never would. I'm only mentioning it as something that somebody evaluating risks from the other side might imagine that we could do. > If the internals are not well-designed and not well-documented, yes. In that case, once again, why bother releasing the source code? No, we're not going to deliberately obfuscate anything because that would be against our goals of encouraging as many people as possible to adopt our platform. I think it's not really necessary to create artificial obstacles for us to have an important advantage. Very large systems take time and experience to understand even when they are both well designed and well documented. Linus and Alan Cox have an advantage over newcomers at extending the Linux kernel, right? Hypothetically, if Linus, Alan, and say Rusty Russell got together and created a startup to implement a Linux kernel based idea, would it make sense to compete against them on exactly that idea?
- corentin 19y ago
  It would make sense: while they would spend their time debugging and fine tuning their beloved baby of a kernel you would just use their work and add value on top of it.