> They are both performing actions that profit maximize given their situation.
That really rings like moral relativism. Even 15 years ago when we were still talking about "GPGPU" and OpenCL seemed like a serious competitor to Cuda, NVidia was much less open than AMD. Sure you can argue that they are "just" profit maximising, turns out it's quite detrimental to all of us...
If what you're saying is that we shouldn't be naive when dealing with for-profit companies and expect good gestures, I agree. But some are more evil than others.
It isn’t moral relativism. It’s just economic sense. In both cases.
There is no moral requirement to be open source.
Being closed is not fraud, coercion, theft, dishonest, anti-competitive, …
(On the other hand, being open, in situations where closed would be more profitable, is taking the moral high ground.
Open provides better value for the customer, user, and community.)
Aside from moralizing, the economic puzzle is: How to align the economic incentives of businesses with the real long term community value of openness. While also providing greater resources to successful innovators to incentivize and compound there best efforts.
(Note that copyright has been the solution to this problem for cultural artifacts. And patents try to do this for tech, but with more problems and much less success.)
That really rings like moral relativism. Even 15 years ago when we were still talking about "GPGPU" and OpenCL seemed like a serious competitor to Cuda, NVidia was much less open than AMD. Sure you can argue that they are "just" profit maximising, turns out it's quite detrimental to all of us...
If what you're saying is that we shouldn't be naive when dealing with for-profit companies and expect good gestures, I agree. But some are more evil than others.