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> Why are you assuming M2 would even exist in the first place if Apple knew they had to share it with everyone?

Why would GNU C exist if Stallman was forced to share it with everyone?

Yes, it's not the same, but regardless it shows the invalidity of your question.

Sometimes companies do stuff for the greater good of advancing technology. See all the AI stuff that Google is giving away.




> but regardless it shows the invalidity of your question

I'm sorry but I really don't see how...

> See all the AI stuff that Google is giving away

I assume they were doing that because they could not monetize it directly yet and believed that by making their research publicly available they would accelerate overall development and benefit more long-term from that than if they kept it secret. Additionally that also increases their public standing, allows them to attract high level talent and deprives funding from any of your potential competitors since they have not yet monopolized any highly profitable markers and simply can't afford to compete with you. Which is great, when it can work like that's how it should work when it can.

Apple (and similar companies have) no such incentives. Apple developed their own processors to differentiate their products and to increase their sales while maintaining high margins. If they had to share their designs with everyone else why would they do that? Makes no sense. You just take whatever is available off the shelf (Intel or ARM etc.) and focus on differentiating your product some other way.

Other companies with very different business model might be able to design just as good chips or better chips, who knows if all chip designs were completely free.. It certainly would not make much sense for a company like Apple to invest into that as much as they did.

I think overall it's pretty simple, even if we assume that most companies/people want to 'do stuff for the greater good of advancing technology' (which is really not that case for every Stallman you have dozens of Larry Ellison's..). How would you fund that? It works great for certain types of software because using/contributing to OSS allows companies to decrease their costs since core components of the OS/databases/browser engines/web server/frameworks/etc. are not the things they would use to differentiate their end product. And that's great because they are able to pool resources together and come up with something much better than they would on their own. But that only works if your core product remains proprietary, if you can make money from offering additional services like consulting/customization/support or by adding an additional layers on top which provide end value to consumers (.e.g. Android, Chrome etc.).

What if your core business model is developing and selling a proprietary general purpose server/workstation operating system and you don't have a massive moat like MS (and well that's has been their business model for years anyways..)? Well tough luck.. you went bankrupt decades ago..

How would this work for companies that make CPUs/GPUs/any other high-end chips (or to be fair any hardware in general)? What incentives would they have to develop anything new if they can't keep your designs proprietary? Do stuff for the greater good of advancing technology?

Well sure why not.. With what money though? Since the market is more or less perfectly competitive everyone's margins are effectively zero. It only makes sense to invest into things which lower costs/increase productivity for your factory/distribution. How exactly could any R&D investment payoff? You want to make you chips faster/more efficient, well sure you can invest 1-5% of your total revenue into that at the cost of making your company total unattractive for investors since you'd not be making any money by doing that.

IMHO if we want to live in a world without IP communism (or something close to it) is our only real option. But we all know how that works out when it's enforced top to bottom....




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