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There is also economics, where they have this scale from perfect competition over oligopoly to monopoly. What happens in reality differs very much: many competi

by qznc 8y ago

There is also economics, where they have this scale from perfect competition over oligopoly to monopoly. What happens in reality differs very much: many competitors for farmers, few competitors for car manufacturers, no competition for government institutions. Currently, Firefox works in a compiler oligopoly. It seems they would prefer a LLVM monopoly for better efficiency. Btw the Linux kernel only supports GCC, so Mozilla is not alone.

taeric 8y ago
This isn't really different across the industries, though; is it? Even farmers only do monocultures because of the money. Specifically, it is in their interest to only farm the crop that makes them the most money, if they can. They only diversify if they have to for survival. Again, see the banana and avocado market. The kernel is an interesting case. It specifically used the free compiler. More, it specifically does not target running on platforms that historically required another compiler. Though, again, going back to the original point. It is cheaper to build the monoculture. To that point, the risks associated with doing so are not the same as a biological case. Well, they somewhat are, but there is also the risk of development being too expensive not to do this. It all comes back to tradeoffs and this being a decision to make.