Am Freitag, den 07.03.2008, 16:52 -0700 schrieb Thant Tessman:
> First, there is no such thing as dumping. It simply doesn't happen in
> the real world. It's a myth invented by people to try to explain away as
> 'cheating' why someone else is able to produce something more
> efficiently than they are. Any company that has the resources to
> underprice a product for an extended period of time in order to put
> competition out of business also has the resources to simply *buy* the
> competition. This is what happens in the real world.[1]
The counterexample to this claim is the Linux project. It is fully
capable to putting operating system companies out of business (and
effectively has done so for most Unix vendors), but it's not even able
to buy SCO.
That's simply because its strengths have not attracted capital, and in
fact making money is not among the primary goals of most Linux
developers.
I suspect that most market models fall down as soon as people do things
for other than monetary gains. (The result that a free market will
almost automatically allocate resources properly also depends on these
models, so a market isn't even desirable in situations where people are
working not for monetary gains. Unfortunately, economic theory does not
currently offer good models for such a situation.)
Regards,
Jo
From: Joost Diepenmaat
Subject: Re: is free, open source software ethical?
Date:
Message-ID: <87y78uxcpm.fsf@zeekat.nl>
Joachim Durchholz <ยทยท@durchholz.org> writes:
> The counterexample to this claim is the Linux project. It is fully
> capable to putting operating system companies out of business (and
> effectively has done so for most Unix vendors), but it's not even able
> to buy SCO.
"The linux project" as a whole isn't there to put companies out of
business, but if the combined investors (IBM, the commercial linux
vendors, etc) wanted to, they could certainly buy SCO at the moment. IBM
alone could do it easily.
> That's simply because its strengths have not attracted capital, and in
> fact making money is not among the primary goals of most Linux
> developers.
Depends how you measure it, and probably yes, respectively.
--
Joost Diepenmaat | blog: http://joost.zeekat.nl/ | work: http://zeekat.nl/