When open-source eats itself, we win

I might not post a link from The Register. If that's a mistake, I'll remove it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/06/open_and_shut/

<qoute>Despite nearly a year in the market, Apache 2.4 hasn't stemmed its slide. But for me, that's not really the point. What's so interesting and healthy here is that two open-source projects are fighting for market supremacy in the only way open source really knows how: technical merit. Because both have to appeal to developers, and developers have a low tolerance for marketing speak.</quote>

In this way they will have faster and faster system to run, and developers can actually vote who wins, seems something we will never able to achieve?

Comments please,

Best,

dong

@xied75: One of the fallacies of open source is that all developers will sing kumbaya and contribute to a single project and produce the best possible deliverables by not having to "reinvent the wheel", as it regularly occurs with proprietary, closed source products. As you can see, it's not always the case, and it's probably closer to never the case IMHO.

@cbae: When I was deep into the open source world, the sheer number of forks was disturbing. I'd be looking at an application, and find out that there were two or three forks with varying degrees of difference from the original project. Some were mutually exclusive, and others just seemed to be different opinions on the implementation details of certain features.

There are good things about open source, but as a consumer I've never seen "If you don't like it, change it" pay off for me.

meritocracy only works if you factor out the cost of change

Well, one fact hold true, nothing of value in money from product sales is lost when either one of free open sourced project goes under. Trolling aside, I am glad there are more competitions to apache. More competitions = more innovations. I don't know if IIS already asynchronous already or not, but, both apache and IIS would be more motivated to offer something even better.

but as a consumer I've never seen "If you don't like it, change it" pay off for me.

I can submit a bug, but I can't make them fix it.  Just a few days ago I received an email telling me that a bug I submitted for Google Chrome has been closed because "it is no longer valid".  Even though the bug still exists.

I could write a patch for something, but I can't make them accept it.   And writing a patch would require me to be knowledgeable in whatever programming language is being used, and, intimately familiar with the code base so that I know where to find the code that needs to be patched.

I could create my own fork of the program, which I actually tried once a few years ago.  But I gave up after awhile because:  I'm not an expert C++ programmer,  the source code was a mess with absolutely no documentation telling you where to find anything in the 30,000 files scattered across hundred of directories, all of which made maintaining my forked version a huge pain in the butt.  The whole thing was way too much work for far too little benefit.

The tl;dr summary:  If you are an expert programmer, who is intimately familiar with the code base and who has commit access to the source tree, open source is wonderful.  If you aren't, it's meaningless.