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by TeMPOraL 578 days ago
But nobody is lending books for money, like people used to lend videotapes. Thar particular type of business has been salted by libraries.

People will pay when it gets them something they value, but the moment someone offers that for free, completion on price of that thing becomes impossible. Instead, competition moves to ancillary aspects of a thing, such as e.g. delivery, or integrations, or lifestyle marketing.

Case in point: neither Amazon nor Audible compete with libraries on just letting you read books - they compete on delivery (ease of access).
1 comments
anilgulecha 577 days ago
I don't know if you meant it (apologies if not) - but libraries, and CC, and FOSS software, and Wikipedia are all good things in humanity. We should aim for more such good things.

"Salted" or not -- it's up to supporters of free markets/capitalism to figure their shit out.

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TeMPOraL 577 days ago
I very much agree that the things you mention are all good things. Condemning them in general is not what I meant, though I can see how my comments could be read that way.

No, my point is more specific: it's that those things play with the free market about as well as NaN plays with floating point math. That by itself isn't bad; the market isn't the best answer to everything. However, in case of F/OSS, I wish people acknowledged that, by destroying the ability to just sell software on a free market (including software components), it's in big part responsible for today's SaaS-ified software reality.

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frm88 575 days ago
> ... by destroying the ability to just sell software on a free market (including software components), it's in big part responsible for today's SaaS-ified software reality.

Could you please elaborate on this or point me to a source where that exact mechanism is explained? Because this runs somewhat opposite to my experiences where FOSS was more of a desperate way to escape proprietary software, particularly OS like IBM with which you would have to wait for fixes from "the market" for days instead of being able to fix it yourself, like this article explains (in vastly superior English to mine): https://cacm.acm.org/practice/free-and-open-source-software-...

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