Excellent description. Very cool idea from Joost. More taproot annex protocols pls.

You forgot about that time LL deployed keysend payments with no spec. C-Lightning devs had to reverse engineer the feature in order to write the spec and a compatible impl.

Labs was made in the Silicon Valley mold: raise a shitload of VC money, hire the biggest and best engineering team, race to build the best developer tools, lock out the competition, and capture the market. Once you have captured the market (they have) leverage your monopoly power to squeeze out other impls and expand your monopoly. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

If you are a lightning dev ask yourself if you want the future of decentralized payments to go the same way as so many other markets that have been captured with this model: email service provider, internet search, web browser, video sharing, etc.

Monopolies are bad for free markets but good for monopolists. Which one do you want to support?

You counterexample is bunk. Carla is not a LL employee and even if she was, that repo hasn't seen any activity in months.