Re:Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commerc...
by pjc50 on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @10:01AM
(#25847173)
I'm not sure about that: in 1989, commercial use of open source was almost nonexistant. "Open Source" in the modern sense didn't exist, there was only GPL which was in practice limited to academic projects and personal use by a small hacker community. Microsoft bestrode the software world like a colossus, and was using its power anticompetitively. The internet was a long way from being mainstream and was in any case extremely slow; a lot of Free Software was being distributed on tapes and floppy disks circulating among user groups.
I don't think FLOSS really started significant levels of commercial use until the "LAMP" stack of the late 90s. Early internet companies picked up on Linux as a cheap alternative to Solaris or HPUX to run Apache. (I'm not sure there were massive commercial competitors on the server side? IIS? ZWS? WebSphere?)
Possibly not until 2010ish that we started to believe that Microsoft's total domination of the software world might be cracking. And of course Microsoft never touched OSS back then.
Re:Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commerc...
by danaris on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @10:26AM
(#25847482)
I mean, I'm not the one who set the bar at 1989! I don't at all disagree that the technology landscape was such that such activity wouldn't have been nearly as broadly viable; I was merely speaking to the corporate landscape. There, while it's true that Microsoft had a lot of power due to its Windows monopoly, there was still a lot more competition and less consolidation across the board than there is today.
Since 1989, we have seen a truly staggering wave of mergers, buyouts, and corporate consolidations of all kinds, creating so many more mega-conglomerates (like Alphabet, the big cable companies, etc) than we had before.
So if you wrote a piece of (good) open source code in 1989, chances were not too bad that it would get picked up and used competitively by a wide range of small-to-medium companies. If you wrote that same piece of code today, the chances are much higher that it would either be ignored altogether, or picked up and used anticompetitively by these megacorporations.