Sorry for the late response. I wasn't going to add anything to this thread but I found a fragment of a discussion from many years ago that talked about the idea of a Free Software product in a monopoly position, referencing this article:
http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/article/view/16/33
The summary of the discussion was the following. One party mentioned that the article suggested a Free Software product might be found to be exclusionary if interoperating with it meant that proprietary software had to comply with the license or stay out of the market. Another party suggested that this was FUD because there was no reason one business model should be favoured over another.
Anyway, it led me to think about these questions because they cover related scenarios but not precisely the one above.
On Thu Jun 21 12:33:21 UTC 2018, Erik Albers wrote:
Now my questions:
- How can we oppose the argument that publicly financed software released as
Free Software is anticompetitive?
In the case where a public institution is selling a piece of software in competition with existing players, perhaps it would be anticompetitive, but only because it is subsidised by the taxpayer not because it is Free Software.
However, the example you gave about the BBC (putting aside the hybrid nature of the BBC's business) indicates to me that the software could be used by companies in some market. There's nothing to stop them from using the software except perhaps for license incompatibility but, unlike in the article above, nobody is forced to use it to stay in the market. The software may well stimulate new development as existing companies take advantage of it and new companies enter the market with products based on it. Perhaps those companies who cannot use the software will develop the same features to improve their products. This sounds like competition to me!
If the new software duplicates an existing product on the market then that's unfortunate. However, nobody has a right to occupy a position in the market. Just because a company occupies a position in a market doesn't mean that anything that competes with them is automatically anticompetitive. Maybe the market is distorted, or there is a monopoly, or perhaps companies had a nice business selling software to the BBC which they now no longer need to buy. ;-)
- What can we bring up on the other hand in favor of publishing as Free
Software from a competitive point of view? (except the usual non-dependencies)
It gives players in a market a platform they can innovate on. It also provides a level playing field for all players to compete on. It doesn't always work like that because some players have more resources than others, but at least there's no barrier to entry or gatekeeper.
David