competition is good? [LWN.net]

competition is good?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 15:42 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831)
In reply to: competition is good? by dion
Parent article: Linux and flash

Competition between companies is fine because it only hurts the companies that compete and benefits the customers, but all competition between OSS projects does is to fragment the user and developer base and that leads to lots of duplicated effort.

What, competition between companies fragments the user base as well. If I go out and by a PS3 I know that there are some Xbox 360 games that I won't be able to play, so that does hurt me. And what about competition between OSS projects that are also maintained by companies (e.g. RedHat/GFS vs. Oracle/OCFS)? Were RedHat and Oracle to only work on one filesystem together, we may not be able to reap the benifits of one company trying to out-do the other.

So the way I see it is it goes both ways. OSS or not, the "user" suffers a bit from competition with the hopes that, in the long run, the user will benefit

Also note that, while they are one project now, both gcc and GNU libc have greatly benefited from competing forks.

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there's a difference

Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:03 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

GCC uses forks all the time for experimental development, and egcs itself could be seen as this kind of fork. But the forks used the same license, with copyright assignments, to make it easy to re-merge later, or to throw away any experiments that didn't work.

I'm more troubled when license barriers prevent re-merging, because it makes it harder to benefit from the competition. Branch B can't decide that Branch A has a better solution and import their code. ESR's bazaar cannot function.

That's why I regret that Gnash and swfdec have chosen different licenses.

there's a difference

Posted Mar 25, 2007 1:18 UTC (Sun) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

so go to the project that you think picked the 'wrong' license and explain to them that their carefully considered choice is wrong and they need to change it.

I'll bet that you won't get very far with this argument (although you may cause enough anger and distraction to reduce the effectivness of the peope actually doing the work there, causing the project with your favored license to 'win' becouse it's not suffereing from people like you)

takeing this a step farther, you are effectively saying that there should only be one license, and that everyone had better pick that license, even if they disagree with it.

do you start to see why this is a bad attitude yet?

there's a difference

Posted Mar 25, 2007 14:42 UTC (Sun) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]

No.

I don't think people should be forced to do anything, ever.

I don't think that sabotaging a competing project does anyone any good either.

I do think that it's better when everybody can agree to pull in the same direction, that's all.

there's a difference

Posted Mar 29, 2007 18:13 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

<diabolical>If it's the right direction, that is...</diabolical>

my license is better than your license

Posted Mar 25, 2007 14:55 UTC (Sun) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link]

I was going to comment about the licensing comment before but decided it was irrelevant, but since the discussion seems to have turned toward that:

OSS licensing has long been an issue, and it's a much broader issue. It is probably something that will never go away as there is no "perfect" OSS license. Even with the same license, two people will agree to that license but for entirely different reasons. It affects many more things than forks or competeting software. It's a shame, but it's just one of those things that we as a community have to deal with.

competition is good?

Posted Mar 29, 2007 6:37 UTC (Thu) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]

What, competition between companies fragments the user base as well. If I go out and by a PS3 I know that there are some Xbox 360 games that I won't be able to play, so that does hurt me.
Whitout competition, we would still be playing games on an Atari 2600.

competition is good?

Posted Mar 30, 2007 3:31 UTC (Fri) by Sutoka (guest, #43890) [Link]

If you finished reading his comment he went on to say that compition hurts
in the short term, but in the long run it has the possibility of making
things better.