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GitHub Is Not Open Source, A Rant (listed.to)

submitted 5 months ago by juliette@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I don’t think there’s a precise name for that, since it can be a lot of complex things.

Do you understand now why people call it a monopoly? Why the US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly?

There are indeed 5 characteristics for a monopoly and only one need fit the target to be called a monopoly, of which your criteria is only one:

Profit maximizer: monopolists will choose the price or output to maximise profits at where MC=MR.This output will be somewhere over the price range, where demand is price elastic. If the total revenue is higher than total costs, the monopolists will make abnormal profits.

Price maker: Decides the price of the good or product to be sold, but does so by determining the quantity in order to demand the price desired by the firm.

High barriers to entry: Other sellers are unable to enter the market of the monopoly.

Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.

Price discrimination: A monopolist can change the price or quantity of the product. They sell higher quantities at a lower price in a very elastic market, and sell lower quantities at a higher price in a less elastic market.

Had you provided another term, I would have agreed with you that the author doesn't know what a monopoly is, but it seems like the inverse is true.

[–] pipows@lemmy.today 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I don't like to argue semantics on the internet so I won't answer further than this

US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly

With all due respect, I really don't care what the US government calls a monopoly. It doesn't make it a monopoly just because some county government said so.

Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.

That's the most important thing. We agree on that one. A monopoly is the singular provider of a good in the market. Github is not the only provider of git hosting (think Gitlab and Bitbucket). Apple is not the singular provider of smartphones (Sansung, Motorola, Xiaomi, etc), nor it's the singular provider of laptops (Lenovo, Samsung, Alienware, Framework). All of the other points are things that monopolies do, but alone doesn't make a monopoly.

This difference is important, because creating a true monopoly is impossibly hard. So hard in fact, that they are usually caused by interference of the government (like Petrobrás here), not the other way around.