Comment by horsawlarway
4 years ago
I disagree with you... sort of.
I think there's some truth that code has value, and there is some risk that making it available can cut into profits (See: Redis, Mongo, etc, changing course after open offerings became available on AWS/Azure/GCP).
But I think the much larger truth is that most of the value provided by companies (and most of what they charge for) is not "lines of excellent code" but rather the operating expertise of keeping a complicated system stable and available.
For example - All of the companies you listed do have widely available, open source offerings (Android, VS-Code, Mono, Swift, Webkit, etc).
The value wasn't in the code, the value was in the ecosystem around it.
I think this is true in more cases than folks expect. The Windows source code was leaked, but I don't see any companies scrambling to compete with MS by building on that code.
I think even if most of Google's repo was made public - the valuable part was the team that supports the infrastructure behind it, not the lines of code themselves (or at least, they make up a smaller portion of the value)
> I think there's some truth that code has value, and there is some risk that making it available can cut into profits (See: Redis, Mongo, etc, changing course after open offerings became available on AWS/Azure/GCP).
An example like that is only valid if you argue that there was a reasonable chance that the company could have 1) developed a comparable closed source version of the product and 2) somehow prevented a competitive open source version of that product from existing and being used by competitors.
Well I don't disagree with that either. Only that I must point out that libre washing a company with an open source product here/there doesn't really count. Sure android is open, but google isn't using it to make money directly, instead it feeds into the closed source ad/marketplace offerings.
If they opened that code, or apple opened up the entire iOS stack its quite likely they would have competitors that as you point out lowered the value of their primary offerings.
A google with a half dozen competent ad/search companies would look very different than the one that can afford to give away a large part of their product portfolio.
So, there is value in operating a "service" buisness, but there is even more value in operating a service business that has high barriers to entry. One way to erect those barriers is with hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering time spent on "source code" be that the code actually doing the searches/etc or the code being used to manage the clusters its running on.