It makes sense if you are an amoral product manager at a large company with monopolistic tendencies.
The way I see it, there are two basic economic activities: value creation and money extraction. Classic open source is totally the former. Ditto the sort of artist painting murals in the alleys of San Francisco. [1]
Most things end up with some of both. E.g., all the entrepreneurs on HN who have a good idea and make a product. Value creation is where they start, but they need to pay the bills, so they then turn to monetization.
But for some people, they start with cash extraction. Their first question looking at anything is, "How do I get money from this?" Value creation is done grudgingly if at all. So when they see something like a browser, they think, "Wow, look at all the money flowing through this. How do I deflect a portion of that money into my pockets?" Whether it harms the user or the ecosystem is irrelevant to them except to the extent there will be blowback that harms the cash extraction.
To me that's the ethics of a parasite and it's revolting. But to a disturbing number of people, that's just good sense.
The way I see it, there are two basic economic activities: value creation and money extraction. Classic open source is totally the former. Ditto the sort of artist painting murals in the alleys of San Francisco. [1]
Most things end up with some of both. E.g., all the entrepreneurs on HN who have a good idea and make a product. Value creation is where they start, but they need to pay the bills, so they then turn to monetization.
But for some people, they start with cash extraction. Their first question looking at anything is, "How do I get money from this?" Value creation is done grudgingly if at all. So when they see something like a browser, they think, "Wow, look at all the money flowing through this. How do I deflect a portion of that money into my pockets?" Whether it harms the user or the ecosystem is irrelevant to them except to the extent there will be blowback that harms the cash extraction.
To me that's the ethics of a parasite and it's revolting. But to a disturbing number of people, that's just good sense.
[1] E.g. https://www.precitaeyes.org/