Re:Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia ...
by wegs on Friday May 15, 2020 @10:08AM
(#23192340)
It's not a safe bet. I've build project under AGPL, and made plenty of money doing it. There are places where open is good business, and there are places where proprietary is good business, and there's everything in between. AGPL was nice since I could be open, which had huge market advantage, but release code which my competitors would /never/ take advantage of. It had, quite literally, zero downsides, and a lot of upsides.
There are projects where I do 100% proprietary too, and a mix. It's a business decision. It's not as stupid as proprietary=profit and open=charity. It's a business calculation in every case.
What you see as "ecosystem lock-in" is properly viewed as software that you pay a premium for as part of your purchase price, above and beyond the pricing of the competitor's hardware. NVIDIA costs more than AMD because they have to employ people to write all that software, and you are "buying" that software when you purchase NVIDIA's product.
Analogously - Amiga has no moral responsibility to let you run AmigaOS on anything except their hardware. This sort of "hardware exclusivity" used to be very common and widely accepted. Today, Apple has no moral responsibility to let you run OS X on anything except their hardware (the existence of underground hackintoshing is irrelevant here). The software is part of what you are buying when you buy the product.