Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Intrinsic vs. Market Value

Author:Mark A. Hershberger
Posted:8/25/2000; 6:20:41 PM
Topic:Next survey: Are you an open source developer?
Msg #:20283 (In response to 20276)
Prev/Next:20282 / 20284

We've seen this in the C compiler market. I was once a compiler writer, but I quit doing it when the GPL destroyed the market.

Ahh... I see the light.

By the same token, one could argue that the presence of Emacs would eliminate the market for extensible editors. However, we can easily see that this is not the case. Editors, both free and proprietary, proliferate. It seems like every other newbie programmer wants to write an editor. Some have gained a lot of traction. Nedit, Pico, Jed, Vim, BBEdit, Q (is that still around?), and on and on.

In light of this, doesn't your hypothesis (the GPL destroys competition) need revision?

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:56:18 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.