Competition

Today I looked into Open RAN to understand the technology behind it and why the topic has been discussed politically for around five years. Open RAN refers to an open approach to the radio access network in 5G mobile communications. Central network functions are decoupled from one another and connected via standardized interfaces. As a result, network operators are no longer tied to a single manufacturer. Hardware and software from different vendors can be combined and replaced as needed. ...

Here’s a worthwhile post from @[email protected] on the topic of ‘Enshittification’. The economic reasons for enshittification Under capitalism, a company’s ultimate goal is to increase profits. Most people realize that there are 3 basic ways of doing this: Increase revenue (develop better products, acquire more customers). Decrease costs (improve production technology). A combination of the above. What most people don’t realize, is that this is a naïve, outdated view that applies only to young industries (it applied pretty much to everyone in the early stages of capitalism, because most industries were young - and this is why it is an established, widespread view). ...

In »Open Source: A capitalistic value engine« Christian Paterson was quoted for opensource.net as follows: Equally, clever engineering that separates commodity – or core – core-functionality with value-added functionality enables companies producing Open Source software to embrace an open and collaborative developer community whilst not providing a completely free lunch for competitors. Of course, if competitors start to feed back into the project because that makes operational sense for them, they effectively become co-investors. That may not stop them from obtaining an advantage, but it helps make the relationship less unidirectional. In this manner, one of the best defence tactics against competitors gaining an unfair advantage is to co-opt them into the project through a genuinely open and meritocratic governance structure. ...