How to destroy FOSS from within - Part I
Although I don't set the scope of this blog, from my previous posts it should be obvious that this is a technical blog. I rarely post anything which is non-technical in nature, here; and I plan to keep it that way.But there have been things moving under the radar which, while in itself is not technical in nature, will affect technical people the most, and hit them the hardest. Especially people working in the FOSS, either professionally, or as hobby.
The blog post is too long to write in one go, so I will split this into a few posts.
For many years, I have been under the silly belief that nothing, nothing, short of global-level calamity (the kind that involves extinction of mankind), can stop the FOSS movement. The horse has left the barn; the critical mass has been reached and the reaction cannot be stopped.
The traditional way companies have fought each other is by throwing money for marketing and fire sale; outspending each other until the other cave in and goes bankrupt. Alternatively, they can swallow each other ("merge and acquire"); and once merged they just kill the "business line" or "the brand".
But they can't fight FOSS like that. Most FOSS companies survive on support. You can acquire them (e.g. MySQL), and then kill them; but one can easily spring up the next day (e.g. MariaDB). You cannot use fire sale on software licensing continuously, because the price of FOSS software licensing is eventually $0, and you can't compete with "free", well, not forever.
I still remember the days that a certain proprietary software company threw their flailing arms up in the air in exasperation, for not being able to compete against FOSS. The only thing they could do was bad-mouth FOSS and keep talking about "quality", and "amateur", and "unprofessional" when it was obvious their own products and conducts was none the better either.
So I was a believer that money cannot stop FOSS.
And how wrong I turned out to be.
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