FreeSWAN & unnatural monopolies

John Gilmore gnu at toad.com
Mon Dec 10 23:15:25 PST 2001


> FreeS/WAN occupies a position very rarely found in efficient markets,
> such as open source software. While the position is rarely encountered,
> it can nonetheless exist: I believe that FreeS/WAN is a natural
> monopoly.
> ...
> But for whatever reasons, FreeS/WAN has been holding such a natural
> monopoly position in by far the largest market in which I have ever seen
> such a beast. I find this fascinating. I wonder if economists will some
> day study the case to determine what factors brought it about.

I doubt it.

The Linux kernels released by Linus Torvalds hold a similar 'natural
monopoly' over every other variant of free operating system kernel.  What
could explain this puzzling economic phenomenon?  Certainly the BSD folks
have been puzzled by it.

I mean, half a dozen people have rewritten 'grep', because it's just
not that hard.  And troff was cloned even though it was hard, because
the original was such a piece of unmaintainable (and nonfree) crud.
But you and you and you are all free to make your own variant of the
Linux kernel, and keep maintaining it and throwing in improvements.
Why don't you?  Even big companies keep following Linus's version.

Perhaps the puzzle results from someone who does a sufficiently hard
job, sufficiently well, that nobody who is actually capable of
competing WANTS to compete.  They have better things to do.

What puzzles me is how the mediocre X Window System has attracted no
competitors.  Yes, it's a hard job supporting all those hardware
variants by all those lovely undocumented proprietary companies.  But
the X model sucks on SO many fronts, breaking typeahead/mouseahead,
performance, display independence, having dozens of puzzling and
incompatible window managers, etc.

And have you looked at the 'object oriented' stuff layered on top of it?

  743 root      17   0 50896  44M  6320 S     0.7 36.0 15292m X
  874 gnu       11   0 14648  10M  3148 S     0.3  8.6  13:30 gnome-terminal

That's a 50Mbyte process (44M resident) of window drivers, and a
14Mbyte (10M resident) terminal window that I'm typing into.  I've
seen the terminal window get as high as 60 Mbytes, with more than 50
resident.

	John





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