This tracks for Microsoft. The very same company that told Compaq that if they sold any PCs with OS/2 Warp, they would never sell another one with Windows.
Humans are why we can't have nice things. OS/2 Warp was a great OS.
We really need to have much stronger anti trust legislation and enforcement. It is absolutely ridiculous to allow companies to behave this way.
And before someone says that "free market is always good and government is bad", the optimum free market strategy if there is no government is to hire hitmen to assassinate the executives of competidor companies. A real competitive free market will always require the government to prohibit companies from forming artificial mottes around their monopolies.
> And before someone says that "free market is always good and government is bad"
I've never really understood that dichotomy myself. The free market IS good, that is for sure. But it won't exist unless the gov't uses its power to create it. Companies have to be kept small enough that there will always be a bunch of choices. And that won't happen by itself.
I generally agree, but I tend to turn the perspective around to this: truly "Free Markets" are basically the natural, unevolved state of affairs when you don't have a better system in place. The whole reason we invented those better systems is to improve the "consequences for the majority".
A true libertarian wouldn't support corporations at all. They are as bad as tyrannical governments. Proprietorships and partnerships would limit exposure to tyranny of the corporation. They focus the responsibility of the business on the owner and not some protected class of employee.
There's a special kind of delusion easily afflicted by successful people - that because they were so successful, it was because they are so much better. Therefore they will easily believe they will come out on top also in societal collapse. I think such reasoning is behind many super-expensive bug out plans with fortified villas and bunkers.
How many successful people are building bunkers? Isn't that just a pasttime of the very wealthy? There are a whole lot of regular successful people in this world that aren't building out doomsday scenarios in their spare time.
And I'd argue that for the most part these normal successful people are generally justified in thinking they are successful on the merits. Luck has a role, but so does grit.
Most aren’t building bunkers. I just took that as a colourful illustration of how success can skew your perception of reality. This is not even necessarily related to if the success is on their merits or not. I think one can fall into this trap regardless of how one got there.
The optimal free market with no government is for corporations (collections of people) to use violent force to enforce their goals. A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.
A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules and in a lot of cases, does. The issue is the rules themselves, which were crafted by? Corps.
Corps are entirely different. They push harder and harder and harder for PROFITS and will inevitably cross lines. When crossing those lines not only has no meaningful penalty, but actually turns a profit, after the fines are subtracted, they will not only continue to do it, but push even harder. After all, there's no real consequences, so why worry?
> A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules
The most despotic and scary governments of history would probably like a word with you. Maintaining a believable pretense of following any rules is a luxury we take for granted in many countries today, but Mao and Stalin didn't worry about the appearance of propriety.
Not really arguing against your main point though, I think you're right. Just don't forget how bad totalitarian governments can be.
You are citing outliers. A majority of the countries in the world aren't run by people like Stalin, or Pol Pot.
Yes, in those instances nothing is worse than the government, but a majority of the world doesn't live in those places. For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.
> For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.
No, for most people it's corporations that enable our current best-in-history lifestyle. The hardest things we face are scarcities created by government policy.
Posted via that government internet project because the government finally forced the monopoly communications companies to allow 3rd party connections.
Indeed according to the big private businesses at the time the internet was stupid and a money losing idea.
It's a common thing in American history where the US government invests in ideas/concepts that are seen as losers by the for profit industry only for those industries to swoop in and profit off the results...
Stuff like that and the American national standards institute is why the USA was in the front of the technological evolution for so long. We spent money on "useless" crap that ended up paying massive dividends later and allowed for the USA to set the standards.
This massively obscures all the incredible efforts by people in those companies over the decades to bring us from unreliable, insecure, hyper slow, wired proof of concept to something so valuable everyone will pay for it.
No, they're plutocracies, in the most literal sense. The involvement of votes doesn't factor into it. The "public" in "republic" refers to the public at large. A private corporation, being privately held, is necessarily not republican in any sense.
How about the one that decided that a New York con man and money launderer was the right choice for president?
I'm concerned that democracy as a general concept has a showstopping bug with no obvious fix. A bug that's always been there but has recently become fatally easy to exploit. Essentially, giving stupid people the same political power as smart people is mandatory in a democracy, but problematic because the former are much easier for "smart" minorities on all sides to corral into blocs.
The whole system then devolves into a battle for control over the easily-led, which is equivalent to any other form of government by minority interests. Regardless of who is on top at any given time, they aren't there to represent the interests of the majority.
The system was designed around the idea that people take voting seriously.
Sadly, we're not there. We're in a country where 1/3rd of the population thinks a rebellion against the government is needed. Not because they are being downtrodden, not because the government is taking their food, not because of mass slaughter by the military...nope. They want a world where only whites are allowed to own property, where there are strict rules for everyone except themselves, where other people's lives and choices are subject to their big magic beliefs, which are somehow better and more accurate than the 3000 other religions on the face of the Earth...somehow.
Voting is problematic when voters are either apathetic or worse, callous, like little children mad because they were denied 3rd dessert.
You seem to have a rather one-sided view of a rather large part of the population. That being commmon is a much bigger problem for a functioning democracy.
I base my view on their literal, factual behavior, past and present.
You however, seem to have a very rosy pair of glasses on.
According to your take, there were a lot of Nazis (pick any bad group) that shouldn't have been lumped in with the rest of the Nazis, because even though their actions were the very same horrific things, viewing them as a monolith is bad? We should look into their hearts and find the real motivation? lol
You my friend, are so badly mistaken, that I honestly don't know what to say.
If the literal, factual actions of 60 million people, attempting to destroy a way of life, because a clown told them to still isn't enough to view them as the enemies they are, then I'm not the one that's lost here, friend.
That's some take.. I hope it serves you well, despite my misgivings.
That bug has always been "fatally" easy to exploit.
Stupids having a vote isn't as misguided as it seems, as if we imagine instead the smarts simply stopped the stupids from having the vote, the smarts would neglect the needs of the stupids. The Trump election resulted on a bipartisan realignment on trade which was arguably tilted towards elite interest (access to markets, maximising GDP) over popular interest (Maximising domestic jobs and wages) before that realignment. The whole democratic vision from that time to ignore domestic low skill job losses and focus on retraining people to do new high skill jobs was something that sounded sensible to a smart person as it’s how smart people would personally react to such circumstances - but it lacked common sense and an understanding of the impact of such a plan on the common person.
Democracy almost intrinsically is going to give you middle-of-the-road quality leadership. You can do better and worse than a New York con man who at least had the marketing genius required to get so famous in the first place - many dictators are nothing more than thug lords or spoilt failsons. The promise of democracy is in setting good incentives and mitigating extreme worst case scenarios through elections and means to obstruct bad leaders.
Of course, viewing Mr. T as an anomaly is scapegoating, a way for people to quiet their nerves, to avoid having a naive article of faith undermined. There's emotional investment here. The case is similar with Harvey Weinstein. He is guilt, absolutely, and he should be punished, but Hollywood is full of exploitation. A scapegoat doesn't have to be innocent. In fact, it's more effective when the scapegoat is guilty himself in some manner. That makes it easier to accuse him and to deflect from the filth elsewhere.
Ideally we want a democracy to be representative (in the statistical sense) and resistant to regulatory capture and low-information voting. Maybe it wouldn't work in practice, but it seems like we already have a system that attempts to tackle precisely these however flawed it may be: jury duty. Perhaps it could be applied to things like voting.
No, if you remove either corporations or governments from the equation, the remaining thing will morph and split to recreate this. Corporations aren't fixed in stone - a sufficiently powerful one may be indistinguishable from a dictatorship, but it'll also evolve the same way.
That wouldn't be a free market. It would be some kind of oligarchic corporatism. Government is necessary to truly enable free markets. The key to understanding that is to understand what "free" truly means [0]. It isn't "do what thou wilt".
A freely competitive market (as envisioned by Adam Smith) is very different from a free market (as the term is commonly used today, at least by many conservative political parties). I fully agree that without sufficient regulations markets cease to be freely competitive.
The East India Company didn’t directly even ship opium to China, that was all done by private merchants.
And in any case initially it wasn’t so much about opium as about free trade in general. The British would’ve been fine with selling textiles, tools and other stuff to the Chinese people who wanted to buy them. Opium was just much easier to smuggle than anything else.
We simply need meaningful penalties that involve jail time and % fines, on top of the ill gotten gains. The current model is steal $1 million, get fined $250k, enjoy the profits.
Sadly, that'll never happen, because CU made bribery legal and who's congress going to listen to? The 100s of millions they allegedly govern or the guy that handed them $25k for a kitchen remodel.
I'm awfully worried about both Poland and Hungary, and their place in the EU even though I'm a brit, and now out of the EU. I think both countries should have had their EU membership suspended years ago, for corruption; meddling with judicial appointments; and generally not allowing free media. I suspect Hungary is much worse, but for me, a major reason for supporting Brexit was that I didn't want to be in a political alliance with countries that didn't comply with international treaties, which the EU was so reluctant to enforce.
Arguably free media is suppressed in most of Europe. In Sweden state press subsidies are not given to press considered extreme by those in power to give it. Of course, and no wonder, those in power is the opposition. The situation is similar in other European countries.
> the optimum free market strategy if there is no government is to hire hitmen to assassinate the executives of competidor companies
There's a huge difference between opposing regulation and permitting murder. Equating the two is a strawman, given that there are a large number of people who oppose various regulations and very few who would want to legalize murder.
As far as I understand the conditions of a free market are not met in this case:
According to the english Wikipedia:
* A capitalist free-market economy is an economic system where prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand [...]
Here one can argue that the available services (i.e. maintaining a train) are not set freely by the forces of supply and demand, but by the constructor of the train; at least to some extend.
You said that "[a] real competitive free market will always require the government to prohibit companies from forming artificial mottes around their monopolies".
I partially agree in this case. A free market that contains competitors that are able to fully satiate it will always require a government that hinders it from working towards a controlled market. By a controlled market I mean monopoles, oligopoles, cartels, or otherwise controlled environments(1).
So if there's no competitor I can walk to in case I am unhappy with my trading partner the market isn't free by definition. I can hardly think of bakeries in town requiring governmental intervention (unless they form a cartel, that is).
Not every market should be free, however. I guess you've just met too many hard-liners arguing for shady business practices in the name of the free market. I'd argue that a shady business will cease to exist in a free market due to the customers running away.
PS: Funny enough, I am fully onboard with stronger anti-trust enforcement (legislation only if that proves to be insufficient), only that I am doing it as a proponent to regain market freedom.
(1) Intentionally left broad as I can't be bothered to come up with a definition that fits what I have in mind.
Funny that your optimum free market strategy is murder. A market where murder is a legitimate strategy is anything but free. In fact a good litmus test as to the freedom of a market (or any social structure) is the legitimacy of murder.
Comparing murder to antitrust therefore seems to be a pretty weak argument. Deontological libertarians would view the use of force required to enforce antitrust as authoritarian overreach. They would see no moral justification in the enforcement of arbitrary limitations on the voluntary transactions of consenting parties. They would see these as tyrannical.
This stems from a core disagreement about the nature of society. Some people see it a as a collective project for the good of all participants (the sticky points being the definition of "good", and the non-optionality of "collective"). Others see it as simply an agreement to coexist peacefully and cooperate only voluntarily, while embracing the Darwinian nature of said coexistence.
Each side is well meaning I'm sure, but I find it hard to reconcile these two worldviews.
I don't see why. It's basically what happens in any free society - we (as individuals, organizations, social orders) compete over finite resources. Disputes are resolved via due process. Winners win and losers lose. The difference between civilized and uncivilized is only in which actions are available to the players, not in the nature of the game.
The problem is that competition for resources is taken as the essence of markets, which it is not. Competition exists in markets, sure, but it's not the point of the market per se. That's psychotic. This is the problem when decontextualized practicalities become enshrined as abstracted ideological and moral tenets of the highest order. According to your view, if I were starving, and you had a warehouse full of food, then I would be stealing if I were to break in and take some food to survive. Theft is always wrong by definition (you cannot say it is sometimes justified in ad hoc sense while remaining coherent; if the law just is competition for resources, full stop, then the starving man is just a loser, full stop), so I, the starving man, am morally obligated to accept my death outside the walls of that warehouse.
But as I said, this would be an incorrect view of markets, which occur within societies, to enable the good. Human beings are social animals, and so our good depends on society. The common good is also prior to private property. A scenario where people are starving, but where there are warehouses full of food, is one that demonstrates some degree of dysfunction.
> Competition exists in markets, sure, but it's not the point of the market per se. That's psychotic.
Competition is the point of every ecosystem, insofar as there is a point. The properties of an ecosystem are fundamentally emergent wherever living organisms interact, in markets or otherwise.
> so I, the starving man, am morally obligated to accept my death outside the walls of that warehouse
Why is this view so foreign? I don't expect you to adopt it per se, but surely you can see that yours is not the only perspective. There are many people who would prefer to commit suicide in dignity rather than live to seem themselves become a burden on others. There are even those who would rather die screaming in agony rather than pry greedily into the pockets of strangers.
> enable the good
Ah yes but then the you have to define "the good" which is notoriously challenging, and also be sufficiently comfortable in your definition to impose it by force on others who may disagree. I'm just not sufficiently comfortable with anyone's definition of "the good", my own included, to make that leap.
> A scenario where people are starving, but where there are warehouses full of food, is one that demonstrates some degree of dysfunction
I disagree, this scenario exists all over the natural world, and is fundamental to all ecosystems. In a competitive environment (which again, is inevitable), it's optimal to ruthlessly defend the maximum you are capable of, rather than the minimum you need to survive.
> "free market is always good and government is bad"
This view seems especially American, but it is also a very liberal view (in the philosophical sense, not the somewhat weird partisan sense). Liberalism reconceives the common good, private property, and freedom dramatically. Whereas traditionally, the state is viewed as steward of the common good (that is its essential function), and private property as something instituted for the sake of the common good, liberalism conceives of private property as primary and the common good as something grudgingly ceded from the private good. Freedom is traditionally understood as the ability to do what one ought (the freedom to be what you are by nature, that is, a human being), but liberalism construes it as the ability to do whatever you please. (It's an odd idea. If I happen to want to gouge my eyes out and cut my arms off for no reason, doing so does not make me free. It makes me less free, because now I am less capable of functioning fully as a human being. I am confined and prevented from doing all sorts of good things. Human nature is the yardstick by which freedom is measured.)
What does this all mean? Well, it means government becomes construed as an artificial, even malicious construct that stands in the way of freedom. Certainly corruption exists, but this is not a valid argument against government as such. And besides, without government, something fills the vacuum. The absence of authority isn't freedom, but exposure to power that lacks authority.
So, yeah, free markets are good, as long as freedom (and thus the good) is construed in the traditional, not the liberal sense. That means that government, properly understood, is not an obstacle to free markets, but a sine qua non of truly free markets.
> We really need to have much stronger anti trust legislation and enforcement
The Microsoft disaster you are replying to could just as easily be blamed on the government in the first place. Why were they so slow to react? Why couldn't the FTC have seen that, or been alerted and acted immediately? There is no legitimate reason, other than the government is a socialist organization that has no incentive to actually get anything done. This is why USPS, VA, Amtrak, etc all suck. Throwing more government at the problem will have the opposite effect: less will get done!
all this looks like points for open source. You can’t exactly stop someone from putting an open source OS on their hardware, and if the train software was open-source, then this “clawback code” nonsense would have been impossible to keep secret.
and you’re right, OS/2 Warp WAS a great OS. As soon as it started losing market viability, it should have gone open source as a defensive self-preservation tactic.
When LLaMa was released for free, it basically guaranteed it would never die a corporate death
> You can’t exactly stop someone from putting an open source OS on their hardware
Of course you can. Have secure boot requiring a signed bootloader. Currently Microsoft are good enough to sign a linux bootloader so you can run things like ubuntu.
Doesn't mean that in 73 years you'll have a situation where OSS is not only illegal, but you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that [0]
Coreboot (which System76 and Framework use): Exists
Love the GNU mentality though, but you don't need FUD to promote your ideas. Lots of problems would just disappear if most things went open-source, and the value proposition might shift but would still be there. The most valuable part of code is the people that create, understand and maintain it; not the code itself. The code itself is ephemeral. (I hate to admit this. Us coders love our brain-babies.)
Note: I own a System76 Thelio Major and have a Framework laptop on order, so I am not just a non-participating bystander in my beliefs here
That page was written way before most people had ever heard of linux, a decade before things like secureboot became a thing, and way before the most common personal computing device in the world was a choice of two locked down devices.
> You can’t exactly stop someone from putting an open source OS on their hardware [...]
Of course you can. It's a train, not a PC. Its primary function is to *safely* get me from point A to point B. No safety certification for the whole thing (including software), means it doesn't go on tracks. The freedom of your fist ends where my nose begins, which means your freedom to mess up the train's software ends where I step on board.
Poland has had its share of railroad catastrophes, and I very narrowly avoided being a victim - I got late for this train: <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17248735>. I no longer live there - I like trains, but the trains in Poland are an unmitigated disaster every single time I visit.
> [...] and if the train software was open-source, then this “clawback code” nonsense would have been impossible to keep secret.
There's two problems with that:
1. Just because it's open source, doesn't mean you get to load your own modified version (see above); which means the software that's actually running on the train can trivially be made different from the sources you were delivered;
2. Just because it's open source, doesn't mean it can't have a hardware backdoor, or some sort of manufacturer-installed APT.
You can't even buy an Intel CPU that doesn't include an entire separate core, with its own Ethernet controller and OS - and that is the stuff that's actually documented and sold as an "enterprise" feature. Imagine an entire train of nooks and crannies to hide this sort of nonsense.
OS/2 Warp is still used today, albeit in very limited situations.
I managed IT at hospitals for a large part of my career. At one of them, they had a "Lanier transcription cluster". It was 6 systems. One of them was an OS/2 Warp install that managed the modem cards.
It's apparently used to manage hardware, like those modem cards. Evidently, it does a great job of it.
I agree with you though. I think that Open Source would have made it much more of a competitor to Windows, today.
Then again, throw enough resources at anything and it could contend...ok.. not TempleOS, but everything else. ;)
IMHO, Apple should have open-sourced their OS a long time ago while offering "best" compatibility with their hardware. They would have expanded both markets tremendously.
I'm currently a "NixOS" guy, and it feels like the "last distro hop" for me. There's a learning curve but it's kind of like "you get ALL the customization, plus seat belts in case something screws up". I still like Macs but I don't really like the direction Apple's taken recently with regards to locking down macOS hardware and system software. I'm a fan of things like Asahi Linux but even that depends on Apple's permission to work
Timing would have been important here, if I recall correctly.
I believe the Apple II was a 6502 chipset, which was common then. They diverged into Moto 68k series, while the rest went towards 8088.
It's debatable, in my mind. Without Apple being unique, they wouldn't hold the niche they do today, but at the same time, had they made their OS Open Source, I suspect they would have had a great deal more Desktop Adoption, since for most, the barrier was/is price.
$1200 Macbook or $400 laptop?
*I know the technical differences, but a large portion of the buying public doesnt
For me, I work in Windows a majority of the time, but being a career IT monkey, what I believe is the right tool for the right job, so it's not always Windows. :)
I have old macbook that I use to stay up on the OS, at least as far as it can upgrade. I have a home server, with some windows instances, a couple *nix instances, etc.
> Apple should have open-sourced their OS a long time ago while offering "best" compatibility with their hardware
That would’ve been a horrible idea considering that they make money selling hardware and macOS is one of their main selling points?
> They would have expanded both markets tremendously.
What would they ever gain from this? How does Google benefit from Android? Thankfully Apple is not an Ad company (and therefore their interests are still somewhat aligned to those of their users) like Google. Open sourcing macOS would only incentive them to pivot to user tracking, ads etc.
The broadening of the MacOS market would more than make up for the initial loss in hardware sales. At the end of the day, Apple would be selling more Macs, because at least some of the hardware platforms not from Apple would have more problems than on Apple's hardware.
This is the exact same thing that would have happened back when PowerComputing was making better Apples than Apple was. They were in the middle of expanding the Mac market, but because Apple itself was losing money, the news kept reporting on that, which in turn had the compound effect of affecting all Mac sales. (This was the first case of "fakenews" I had ever experienced, btw... "Why isn't the news reporting on the expanding Mac market instead of the temporarily-contracting Apple market? Ohhhh because bad news gets the eyeballs!!") So Steve Jobs came back, shut the clone program down (which, again, would have succeeded for Apple AND other players in the end, IMHO), and the rest is history.
I discussed the idea with ChatGPT and here's how that went:
> The broadening of the MacOS market would more than make up for the initial loss in hardware sales.
Why? I mean Android has a much bigger market share than iOS yet Google isn’t making any money (after costs) from it if we exclude ad revenue.
> At the end of the day, Apple would be selling more Macs
I really don’t think that would be the case unless Apple significantly reduced its profit margins to remain competitive. They would be making way less money. So again, why?
> So Steve Jobs came back, shut the clone program down (which, again, would have succeeded for Apple AND other players in the end, IMHO), and the rest is history.
Which was one of the smartest things he did (if we’re prioritizing Apple’s longterm financial success). Apple can only charge excessive premiums for its products compared to everyone else because there is no other way to use their software.. which is why they are a multi trillion dollar company it’s that simple.
> I discussed the idea with ChatGPT and here's how that went:
I’m sorry but that discussion seems to be worthless (also what’s wrong with it? Why is it using such a weird style?).
Apple would have to throw away their entire business model to do this which is a massive risk on it’s own. Considering that Apple has been the most successful consumer hardware/software company in history in large part because of their current business model throwing that away to try and do something that many companies (including Apple) have tried and failed would be an extremely bizarre thing to do.
In 100 years from now, there's going to be only 2 ways to run any piece of software:
1) If it was DRM-secured, via a hack, which effectively "opens" at least the compiled binary form of the code.
2) If it was open source, via some Nix-like tool running on some virtualization of the hardware platform of the time.
Everything else will essentially be "lost", including (probably) every piece of iOS software ever (for example). I already have no more access to many games that originally ran on earlier iOS devices, and it's been years since and no one's stepped up to emulate or jailbreak those somehow, probably because it's still too hard. They will ONLY run on my first generation iOS devices (some of which I retained), to this day.
> I really don’t think that would be the case unless Apple significantly reduced its profit margins to remain competitive
I think they'd be able to retain premium branding and sales with only a moderate reduction in such. Look at any other product market that doesn't have "lock-in" with regards to closed ecosystems; there's usually a range of players and price points.
I'll give you that they have been successful with their current model, but remember that they also very nearly died with their current model (1997 with 2008 followup: https://www.wired.com/2008/03/bz-apple-ourbad/) and it was only the introduction of the iPhone that saved them. macOS has basically been having a long slow death for 15 years since. The reason why this model was successful may thus have more to do with market entrance timing and market creation timing and nothing to do with the model characteristics itself.
Qubes OS guy here. Will probably stick to the hypervisor OS/virtualized components desktop computer model. Sure there's a performance hit, but honestly I haven't felt this comfortable and secure that my data at rest WILL STAY AT REST and not sprout wings to flutter away with...
Humans are why we can't have nice things. OS/2 Warp was a great OS.