Pablo Xannybar on Nostr: Yeah because you can't really monopolize FOSS by nature. You don't have exclusive use ...

Yeah because you can't really monopolize FOSS by nature. You don't have exclusive use of the thing you're trying to use to monopolize things.

I'm sure the counterargument to this would be Android, but Google is making it more and more closed in order to secure a monopoly.

Android as an open source project is something anyone from GrapheneOS to Amazon can use to fork their own operating systems.

The same principle applies to any FOSS.

So the main risk of a corp doing FOSS is the (logical and healthy) suspicion that they won't actually stick to FOSS principles in the long term because it doesn't benefit them, with Google being a prime example.

The other side of this coin however is that genuine community run FOSS projects can force big corps to embrace them when they gain a market share. For example, Microsoft has had to increasingly embrace Linux in recent years. I'm sure they really hate doing that because they spent decades trying to force FOSS competitors out of the market and failed. Now they have to play nice to stay relevant.

I guess the only conclusion I can come to is it's a complex issue that can go many ways. Corps getting involved in FOSS can be problematic in many cases, but in many other cases it's neutral or good for the consumer. Depends on the dynamics at play.

But maintaining a monopoly through software that is by definition open for anyone to fork is quite a difficult thing to do - you don't really have a market advantage from adding new functionality since as soon as you do, your competitors can straight up merge your implementation into their own codebase.

But Amethyst isn't a mega corp, it's more analogous to Linux. Linux absolutely has a monopoly over servers for instance, but this isn't problematic because there's a million different distros.