Vendor lock-in is a thing. Switching costs are a thing. They know this. That's the whole business model. They're expecting that the cost of switching to outweigh the cost of the subscription.

I get that this business model is fashionable amongst wannabe rent-seekers, but it's still antisocial and should be shunned.

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darkwater 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Evaluating the risks of vendor lock-in is a buyer's task, unless it is a protected market or there is a monopoly abuse involved.

In this case, nobody forced (generic) you to use Bitnami's Docker images, you probably just thought "how convenient, always updated and easy to pull, one less thing to worry about". Which is fine, but it's always a bet on what will happen in the future.

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cthor 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, yes. And a person who's pick-pocketed may well do better to protect their pockets. This does not absolve the thief.

Reasonable people can disagree about the degree to which vendor lock-in is antisocial or the degree to which there even is vendor lock-in here. But telling victims of such behavior to just suck it up and price it in only serves to distract from and abet actors abusing positions of power to rent seek and create low trust environments. It's not a systemic solution and it's not a serious engagement with the criticism levied.

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darkwater 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Yes, yes. And a person who's pick-pocketed may well do better to protect their pockets. This does not absolve the thief.

Freedom of roaming without having to worry about pickpockets it's one thing. Deciding that you go with the opensource offering of a company because it's convenient for you is another. I know it's just one example but the entitlement here is _the key_. You are entitled to go to whatever zone of a city and it's not right to blame the victim in that case. You are not entitled to have part of the business decisions of a company you were a "client" without paying a dime or signing any binding contract. You would be entitled to that if they were breaking some opensource license, for example.

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cthor 4 days ago | parent [-]

Just because you want that to be "the key" doesn't make it so. You make that your singular focus and you let antisocial behaviour off the hook. That is your prerogative.

For me, the key is the bait and switch. It's like a drug dealer offering first time customers a discount. It's a good business strategy to get people hooked. Very enterprising. Nonetheless, I would prefer a society without such behaviour.

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geodel 4 days ago | parent [-]

You mean society where I can benefit at cost of other party indefinitely but when other try to stop I berate them for changing conditions which benefited me.

	▲	pas 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		So if you put up a bridge, people start using it, and you one day realize it's too much work to maintain, then it maybe the responsible thing would be to engage with the community, maybe someone will step up to maintain it, not to just blow it up one day without not much of a warning. Sure, in this case the bridge is still there, and it started as a toll-bridge with free lanes. Now the free lanes are closing. Crying orphans will be stranded on one side and their mothers bereaved on the other side, corporations will starve without new updates, millions of innocent businesses will wither away all because they closed the free lane without a consultation first, and with just one month notice. A total cybercide. ... OSI licenses should come with indicators to signal affiliations with a preferred theory of justice, so when the eventual grievance event triggers people will have the correct framing at hand. ... Anyway, as always, https://www.broadcom.com/company/corporate-responsibility is pretty clear on the matter!

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coredog64 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is not rent-seeking: Rent-seeking is leveraging your position to garner economic rents, like putting a toll gate across a highway in which the only value received for the toll is the opening of the gate.

Rent-seeking would be Broadcom saying that you must run a Bitnami image in CloudFoundry or pay a penalty for not doing so. They are in fact doing some work here. We may disagree on whether or not they're being compensated fairly for that work, but that disagreement doesn't turn this into "rent-seeking"

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asmor 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The penalty is the work of migrating away and redoing any integration work on a month's notice. That might seem trivial to a small deployment, but I know some people that use these images everywhere, including in places that aren't immediately obvious.

	▲	natebc 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not to mention a lot of people that are going do be doing this work are the same people also spending the year swapping out hypervisors which is also no small task. Maybe it's just me?

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pas 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

People got used to using a highway that was free. They started doing business moving freight there, or taking jobs and commuting on that nice fast convenient road, and ... now suddenly there's a gate.

Note, the work gets done anyway. The highway is still there. (And marginal cost of more people using it is ... low.)

That said, it's a matter of definition. Usually rent-seeking refers to manipulating public rules, public spending, etc. Here that seems close to impossible. (Broadcom exploit their vendor lock-in business position as much as they want, it's a purely private arrangement, no one is and no one was forced to start using Broadcom's shit.)

...

That said 2.0, rent in "rent-seeking" refers to a part of income (based on Adam Smith's division of income into profit, wage, and economic rent). Where economic rent is payment gained that's not justified by natural costs and market forces. (Of course, good luck coming up with a reliable model for this.) ...

However, here it seems we do know how to come up with the right numbers for profit and rent. Profit was what they were earning before and now ... any extra income is rent that they get by putting the gate down on the free lanes. (And, of course, as people will migrate away we'll see this rent decrease, likely substantially.)

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4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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