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by pxnii 3350 days ago
Let corporations think closed system can help their profit until someone come with an alternative open source system and customers flock over. More startup opportunities for smart tractors.
2 comments

If it works that way, shouldn't we be able to look at an industry and see that happening? I can't think of a good example, though I may not be thinking hard enough.

There are definitely open source alternatives to many many things, but how often are they the ones capturing most of the market?

It needs not to be wholesale open sourced, but dev-friendly, hackable, after market support. Android is a good example. Even some OEMs favor lockdown (looking at you, Samsung), there are dev-friendly OEMs (OnePlus, Google). End users don't need to be tech-savvy, especially farmers, but knowing there is alternative support from community is good enough.
remember linux? centralization is good for conquering, but decentralized forces hold more permanently once they take hold (which can take a long time).
Unless developers of the open system get their life destroyed by patent law suits. Stop believing in the free market fairy tale when there's so many ways available for the corporations to break and stop the basic requirement: competition.
The free market ideal, as I understand it, is something more like physicists saying, "in a perfect vacuum." It is an ideal to be considered, not a destination.
That doesn't seem to keep people from using the assumption in practice though - which leads to lot of "for a perfectly spherical cow" moments...