““An almost equally important payoff of open source is its utility as a way to propagate open standards and build markets around them. The dramatic growth of the Internet owes much to the fact that nobody owns TCP/IP; nobody has a proprietary lock on the core Internet protocols. The network effects behind TCP/IP’s and Linux’s success are fairly clear and reduce ultimately to issues of trust and symmetry — potential parties to a shared infrastructure can rationally trust it more if they can see how it works all the way down, and will prefer an infrastructure in which all parties have symmetrical rights to one in which a single party is in a privileged position to extract rents or exert control. It is not, however, actually necessary to assume network effects in order for symmetry issues to be important to software consumers. No software consumer will rationally choose to lock itself””
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