I'll concede that points 2) and 3) could plausibly be raised in the early days of Linux. Point 1) - I don't think so. Nobody is stealing anything; people are voluntarily giving it up for free, for the benefit of the community. What could be argued is that "open source is literally communism" (therefore bad) - and I believe it was argued at some point.
> one can argue that that is its way of showing that it will be a paradigm shift of something in finance.
Judging by the recent interest of large financial institutions and corporations, I agree - there will be ripple effects of this, one way or another.
> I realise that one can argue that within a decade the market valuation of bitcoin (whatever that means) reached $200B which is a spectacular achievement
I've been on HN long enough to catch the cynicism which tells me that tech market valuations are pure bullcrap, so I'm not reading much from that number :).
I remember having discussions online with people who passionately argued that open source software was effectively theft from programmers at large--permanently filling niches that used to gainfully employ coders. I remember a guy who had some little utility he'd been selling online, which had been providing an income stream for him for years--and then along came some little free tool (that he claimed was an obvious rip-off) that did the same thing, and his income dried up. He absolutely thought OSS was theft.
Also, SCO, MS, and other companies certainly did try to paint a lot of open source software as explicitly stolen or copied. They always stopped short of providing proof, but that sure didn't stop them from making wild claims. SCO in particular went on and on about the sheave of Unix code they'd identified in the Linux kernel (while asking the judge to extend the deadline yet again for them to have to present evidence).
> one can argue that that is its way of showing that it will be a paradigm shift of something in finance.
Judging by the recent interest of large financial institutions and corporations, I agree - there will be ripple effects of this, one way or another.
> I realise that one can argue that within a decade the market valuation of bitcoin (whatever that means) reached $200B which is a spectacular achievement
I've been on HN long enough to catch the cynicism which tells me that tech market valuations are pure bullcrap, so I'm not reading much from that number :).