4 ms·
Wikipedia is anti-competitive. Should open source be similarly so?
- bradbeattie 17y agoI think the analogy is somewhat flawed. You can always fork Wikipedia's data and create your own with whatever rules you'd like. A closer analog might be OpenOffice. You don't have multiple spreadsheet apps in that one suite; It just wouldn't make sense.
- amichail 17y agoWikipedia is such an overwhelming success at this point that forking its data won't gain you much.
- lukifer 17y agoWikipedia does compete, in the sense of debating over which edits to keep. Ultimately, it also competes for mindshare with the rest of the internet, and other wikis (usually ones that focus on a particular topic). I think the open source world can learn a lot from Wikipedia's social operating model, but there's no reason that there shouldn't be multiple open-source solutions to solve the same problem.
- amichail 17y agoBut central to Wikipedia's success is not allowing similar articles.
- lukifer 17y agoOne could see that as equivalent to a large OSS project that forbids you from writing two versions of the same function. Rewrite or improve the old one to be the new canonical version, or fork the whole thing into a new project, but no adding extra noise that'll have to be maintained. One thing is to keep in mind too is the immense scale of Wikipedia, which is not true of all OSS. Any large project pretty much has to use a similar model of competitive cooperation and rules of the road (or sometimes just an authoritarian leader), or it quickly spirals into chaos.
- amichail 17y agoConsider what it would be like if open source developers could only create one text editor with no possibility of forking at any point. How good would the result be?
- msbarnett 17y agoAs long as the editor is Vim, fantastic.
- bradbeattie 17y agoYou analogy assumes that open source developers are all working under the same banner, creating a singular suite of applications (e.g. OpenOffice).
- scott_s 17y agoIs this your hack so that your random questions get a higher ranking?
- amichail 17y agoWould you be happier if I submitted a blogger link to the same text?
- fragmede 17y agoThe brevity of the question makes it quite suitable for an AskHN post.
- amichail 17y agoBrevity is a good thing. It should not be penalized (as would be the case with an AskHN post).
- scott_s 17y agoamichail has a habit of submitting many Ask HN posts that aren't really questions to the community, but are more stream-of-consciousness musings. Non-link posts take a ranking hit because pg assumes they're less likely to have meaningful content; if I recall correctly, he wants to avoid people using HN as their blog. amichail has complained about this policy several times. Hence my question if this is his hack to get around pg's policy.
- amichail 17y agoI don't submit many of these posts now though.
- aw3c2 17y agoJudging by the zealots I say Wikipedia is much too competitive, at least in the minds of many of its controlling users.
- amichail 17y agoIt's a different sort of competition.