[LAU] Some disturbing news

[Louigi Verona]

Hey Holger,

Yes, good points. Companies buying one another do reduce the diversity of
technology. In some areas this is not a problem and new companies and
offers pop up all the time, in some cases the dominance of one solution
might create a situation where consumers have no choice. This does give a
niche business case for smaller companies, but building up competition will
take time.

On the other hand, the FLOSS environment has its own diversity problems. In
my article
<https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philosophy&a=philosophy_freedoms>
on RMS philosophy I do spend some time on it:

*... big open source products are often effective monopolies. Because a
product is so big and has been developed for such a long time, typically no
team will opt to create a replacement. It can even be considered a poor
move that undermines the work of the community, wastes time and effort.
Also, once a project takes off, it will create a snowball effect and
attract many developers and users, thus stealing potential resources from
other projects. The need to market the project to the community requires
very serious dedication from the initial team, and it make take many years
until the project takes off.*

*As a result, "free" operating systems usually have only one main program
in a given area. For instance, there is but a single serious raster
graphics package - GIMP. If GIMP does not satisfy the user - there are
virtually no alternatives that are able to boast comparable stability and
initial feature set. If one sees several programs being developed to
achieve a similar use case, then it is a good bet that none of them are
reliably good. Such is the situation with video editors on Linux as of the
moment of writing.*

*At the same time developers of the main package might be under very little
pressure to make their product competitive, by virtue of there being no
competition. This allows them to work at their own pace, prioritize new
features over stability and over polishing existing functionality, spend
time on experiments that are incomplete for years, and often hold bizarre
views about software development in general.*
And I have seen a lot of this.

Also, if someone writes a library that can be easily used in a project,
people end up using this library everywhere, reducing the diversity. In a
closed source world people would need to waste effort writing a new
library, but the overall result can be a net positive - new, diverse and
more efficient libraries appear all the time and the technology moves
forward.

So, the re-usability of FLOSS is both a feature and a bug.
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