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> How would that happen, exactly? Particularly with the GPL. If an author (company or otherwise) distributes their work, they're required to also provide the source for that work. How that could happen is: Imagine in a world in which a free, open-source operating system is immensely popular, installed on most desktops, devices, servers and embedded systems. Suppose the system's distro ships bundled with some applications (also perfectly open-sourced). If it is difficult to compete with those applications, how does it matter that they are open source? Sure, you can make a fork of the distro which is unbundled, making it easier to replace appliactions. But, oops, hardware vendors don't want to ship the forked distro for whatever reasons. They say, "we install the image that 99% of the world uses. We don't charge anything extra; if you want something else, wipe the HD/flash and do a complete reinstall." In this hypothetical world, would governments step in with anti-trust litigation? (Against what?) For extra confusion points, let's add signing: suppose you can't even add an application to the distro if it doesn't have an approved signature from the upstream. (Isn't that essesentially Firefox started with add-ons?) |
Looks like that hardware market is not very competitive.