[tlug] Vendor lock-in vs monopoly

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Nguyen Vu Hung writes:

 > In a speech of RMS[1], he said that "proprietary program is a monopoly"
 > but I think "monopoly" is not the perfect word here, and "vendor
 > lock-in" fits better.

That's correct.  Distribution of the proprietary program itself is a
monopoly, by act of Congress.  Support in general is not a monopoly,
there are plenty of third-party vendors of support.  And all vendors
of support achieve a certain degree of lockin because there are
relationship-specific aspects to support.  However, when rms talks
about support, he doesn't usually mean user support, he normally means
application repair and extension.

Application repair is a strong lockin because of access to source,
usually sufficient to achieve monopoly. (Technically it's not a legal
monopoly in the U.S. because reverse-engineerng for repair is "fair use".)

Extension is a legal monopoly as far as I know, as creation of
derivatives is not considered fair use (again, AFAIK).