Yay for Clang

> 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