Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

If I may add, “static builds”, “vendoring”, “image-based” deployments are all part of an even older playbook the megacorps are all too happy to recycle. By making any replacement an all or nothing thing, that mixes open, free and closed components in an unscrutable messy blob, the bar for replacement and substitution is raised above the capabilities of most competitors.

The previous generation of software giants understood it very well, and they played the anticompetitive complexity game till they choked on needless complexity added just to corner the market, and were unseated by simpler free software alternatives.

The current generation of software giants are busy re-complexifying their solutions to lock down the market and close the free software capabilities that enabled them to rise in the first place.