Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 11:18 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Yay for Clang by jmalcolm
Parent article: GNU C Library 2.43 released

But I romanticize the notion that Open Source means software ideas openly competing with the best implementation winning in the end. I want a Linux ecosystem that leads to better software as you describe. For that to happen, innovation is required but collaboration is essential. The worst case scenario is a project stifling competition not through technical superiority but rather through market power. At least, that is my view.

The thing I think you're missing is that a FOSS project effectively cannot stifle competition through market power, because the rights to modify the program for any purpose and to distribute your modified program inherently break market power. If I attempt to force a lesser solution on the world via my "market power", everyone who disagrees with me can fork the previous version and do things the way they want to, and no matter how much market power I have, I cannot force people to use my version and not the fork.

This does not, however, mean that only technical merit matters. "Best implementation" is a rather woolly term, and one way in which an implementation can be "the best" is if it gets the social side sufficiently better than a technically superior project that's hostile to outsiders. For example, Canonical tried to set things up (via CLAs) so that they'd have control over Mir and Upstart, and a consequence of that was that both projects effectively failed to gain traction, even with technical superiority over the alternatives. Similar things were tried with the OpenOffice trademarks, and the result was that LibreOffice (which is technically superior, too) took over the space OpenOffice used to live in.

And note that the OpenOffice case, in particular, was one where the lesser alternative technically tried to use its market power to stifle competition.

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Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 11:41 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

> The thing I think you're missing is that a FOSS project effectively cannot stifle competition through market power, because the rights to modify the program for any purpose and to distribute your modified program inherently break market power. If I attempt to force a lesser solution on the world via my "market power", everyone who disagrees with me can fork the previous version and do things the way they want to, and no matter how much market power I have, I cannot force people to use my version and not the fork.

This misses the point COMPLETELY! What is the point of forking a broken design? And how are you supposed to rebuild your fork from the ground up with a fundamental new design?

That's the point of my WordPerfect/Word rants. Word won through EEE, and we now inhabit a world of Word clones. I could fork LibreOffice and try to impose the WordPerfect design on it, but is that going to go anywhere? Really?

Look at my previous post! I've quoted an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE increased productivity at my boss if I'm allowed to use MV. But the response from the world in general (and here on LWN) is "we're not interested. Relational is the standard". I actually expect my boss to be sympathetic - I'm quite likely to get the chance. But even if I succeed, it'll be an uphill battle to get wider adoption.

So yes, IT'S EASY for a FOSS project to help stifle competition, if it re-inforces a broken design paradigm. (To try and stay on topic with Clang - it can happen that you get a breakthrough. But Rust is only succeeding because people recognise that C is broken. Persuading people that Word and Relational are broken is extremely hard.)

Cheers,
Wol

Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 11:50 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

No, you're missing the point. If WordPerfect was FOSS (it wasn't), then you could maintain WordPerfect to your needs, and keep it in use, even if the WordPerfect developers took it down a "become a Word clone" route.

And I have looked at your previous post, and your rant here - there's nothing about "market power" in either of them, but rather about social influences, and your refusal to accept the mathematical proof that MV is a strict subset of relational in terms of what a database can do, since there is a 1:1 (in terms of number of operations) translation of MV into relational, but not the other way round.

Note that this doesn't mean that any implementation of relational is inherently better - after all, an MV design could well have better developer experience than a relational design - but that a technically perfect relational database can do everything any MV database can, with the same performance as, or better than, an MV database.

And yes, FOSS projects can stifle competition by being technically superior, or socially superior - but they cannot do so via market power.

Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 13:09 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> and your refusal to accept the mathematical proof that MV is a strict subset of relational in terms of what a database can do, since there is a 1:1 (in terms of number of operations) translation of MV into relational, but not the other way round.

So how come modern relational databases are only now catching up with MV as far as what the actual database itself is capable of?

> Note that this doesn't mean that any implementation of relational is inherently better - after all, an MV design could well have better developer experience than a relational design - but that a technically perfect relational database can do everything any MV database can, with the same performance as, or better than, an MV database.

And again, why does a SQL query need an optimiser? MV doesn't have an optimiser, because it's an easy proof it costs more than it saves.

Anyway, we're getting off topic and one of the editors will probably be stomping on this pretty quickly.

Cheers,
Wol

Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 13:24 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

For the first point - just because something is technically better in theory does not mean that all implementations are inherently better. Compare MySQL and PostgreSQL, for example - they both implement the same theory, yet do not have the same feature sets.

For the second: because SQL is not a great representation of relational, and you need an optimizer to go from the SQL query to a decent relational query. In addition, relational allows you to simply describe some very complex queries that in MV are simply not possible, and the optimizer allows the database engine to find a fast way to perform that query - where in MV, you just don't do that because you can't.

Put another way, those questions are like "why are planes not as good as buses at taking me on a 50 mile trip? Why do planes need autopilots, when buses don't - it's easy to show that an autopilot for buses would cost more than it saves?".

Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 11:51 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

>This misses the point COMPLETELY! What is the point of forking a broken design?

So you write something new instead. Either way the onus is on you to convince other folks that your fork/new design/whatever is "better" than what was there before. Or use something else entirely. Meanwhile, assuming both old and new are F/OSS, farnz's point about not being able to "stifle competition through market power" equally applies, because you're always free [1] to do your own thing.

[1] As in, have the legal ability. As opposed to other practical "have the skills/time/money/etc".