Is it the embrace in the popular ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ formula?
They’re not embracing it fully. The blog posts on Medium stay completely silo’d. So I don’t think offering an instance to writer is enough to extend and extinguish, but we’ll see!
how are they going to extinguish a open source project with this?
"The strategy’s three phases are:
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions."
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I know the phrase. How is Medium going to extinguish Mastodon is what I’m asking. For someone to EEE, they’ll have to own it first. Mastodon is still an independent organization.
Ah, there’s the disconnect between us. You don’t have to own something to EEE, that’s the thing. You can just use the existing code, make some proprietary modifications to it (implement cool new features, so, a soft fork without contributing back) so the users come to your site to use it.
They just have to become so popular that people who didn’t join a Mastodon server because it’s open source, but because it’s an alternative to something else (Medium? Twitter?) join Medium to hurt the Mastodon ecosystem.
You’re right that you can’t properly “extinguish” a FOSS project like that in a sense that you can’t develop it any further, but maybe some people lose interest in and stop their engagement with Mastodon when they see Medium “sell” code they wrote or other stuff they did.
