Do you think Internet Explorer 6.0 was a good decision?

> That’s a charity, not a business model.

  Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: The pattern of "commoditizing your complement", an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a choke point or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.

  No matter how valuable the original may be and how much one could charge for it, it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere.

  This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields, such as the high rate of releasing open-source contributions by many Internet companies or the intrusion of advertising companies into smartphone manufacturing & web browser development & statistical software & fiber-optic networks & municipal WiFi & radio spectrum auctions & DNS: they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.

Public good isn’t a charity, and a business model that doesn’t contribute to the public good should not be allowed to exist.

The capital motivation isn't the only one that exists. You can say something should be true without having a plan to maximize quarterly revenues.

Even if you consider profit motive, what is the profit motive for corporate contributions to open source? The same applies here.

Good will and trust can ultimately have monetary value, and having a funnel based on open source is a viable play if it leads to a service that is sticky.

“A business that does things that customers actually like is a charity” lmao