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Old 04-07-2010, 04:21 AM   #216
Logseman
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After a good night sleep, I'll readress what I was saying.

Mainly, my idea is that open source stifles innovation because it makes planned obsolescence harder to apply. Planned obsolescence is, as you can imagine, the fact that companies build in a lifetime for their product, "forcing" you to buy the new version when that lifetime ends, regardless of you being happy with the prior product.

Planned obsolescence is, for software, the fact that every year a FIFA or Madden videogame come out, without interoperability with the former version, forcing you to buy to take out your dollars for cosmetic changes and current player names.

For hardware, it implies that companies build their products with proprietary batteries which only they are allowed to repair or give you a replacement for, or when they design a product in such a fashion that repairing it is more costly than buying a new one (something which is an issue with e-book readers as well).

Open source is, on the other side, more interoperable. The same Linux kernel has versions like Puppy which can be installed in very old computers alongside with the flashy Kubuntu series for the new machines. Kevin Carson explains in the essay I've mentioned some times before.

Quote:
Absent legal constraints [of copyright], it would be profitable to offer competing generic replacements and accessories for other companies' platforms. And in the face of such market competition, there would be strong pressure toward modular product designs that were amenable to repair, and interoperable with other modular components and accessories of other companies' platforms. Absent the legal constraints presented by patents, an appliance which was designed to thwart ease of repair through incompatibility with other companies' platforms would suffer a competitive disadvantage.
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