Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
by wpietri on Thursday December 20, 2018 @05:59PM
(#18730012)
Right. I'm not saying open-source developers have to start building in the same way as for profit companies. I'm saying they have to build products that are, from the user perspective, as good as the for-profit ones.
A good example here is Firefox. When it started out, it was better than the competition. Chrome pulled ahead for a while, but Mozilla responded and now it's competitive again. And Firefox has done this while advocating energetically for an open web.
Another one that interests me is WhatsApp. They built a messaging product that was clearly superior to the alternatives. They eventually sold out for billions. But there's no reason they couldn't have done that as a nonprofit. And Signal has shown that a nonprofit can still jump into the space and do good things.
More to the point, there is always going to be some value-added service a profit-seeking enterprise is going to be able to provide over what's freely available. If we built IRC 2.0, then Slack 3.0 will provide what everyone hates about IRC 2.0 and then the dynamics of profit seeking will drive Slack 3.0 to divorce from the free alternative.
We see this pattern over and over and over again. It doesn't happen necessarily because businesses are being ruthless, but because there's always going to be a market space, even in the face of a fantastic free service. That's just how a market economy works.