competition is good?

competition is good?

Posted Mar 30, 2007 10:16 UTC (Fri) by dion (subscriber, #2764)
In reply to: competition is good? by hummassa
Parent article: Linux and flash

Best wrt flash should be something like: Correct, fast, integrated in that order.

WRT GNOME choosing C, that is widely regarded as a mistake or at least widely enough that Miguel shares that point of view.

Choosing C over C++ is really not a forgivable offense when talking about desktop applications IMHO.

I guess I should specify what I meant by "direct competition", MS-CIFS doesn't compete directly with SAMBA as it's not Open Source and thus not available to everyone that SAMBA is available to.

The same is true with GCC, lcc is not Free software and doesn't come close to GCCs abilities.

gnutls does seem to try to compete with openssl and there are certain smaller Free ssh implementations (dropbear for one), but they do not have nearly as wide a deployment (I certainly had never heard of gnutls before) so both openssl and openssh can be said to have a monopoly.

The BSD kernels could be seen as competitors to Linux, but again there is no direct competition, as BSD is a whole other OS, when was the last time you swapped out Linux with the BSD kernel on your system?

That being said I don't think forcing anyone to do anything is ever a good idea, so I fully respect peoples rights to choose what projects to work on.

All I'm saying is that the situation is much better when a single good project dominates without any competition than when there are n+1 crappy competing projects.

Having a single good project might not always be possible, but when it is it can be very, very good in deed.

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