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Have you ever used a service in life where there is no competition? Straight up lack of competition examples are the easiest: DMV, airport food court, buying b

Have you ever used a service in life where there is no competition? Straight up lack of competition examples are the easiest: DMV, airport food court, buying beer at a sports stadium etc. If you work in tech then you’ve probably had to use software over whose purchase you had no control: Jira, PeopleHR, Taleo, Concur. There’s no competition there because you, the end user, don’t have the option to choose from a free market. For the vendor, the software doesn’t have to be any good as long as the sales pitch to you boss is amazing. Without competition, software rots and/or never gets better. What examples are there of monopolies in Free software that caused a product to languish? OpenSSL, Python’s logging module, systemd since it was locked in as the only properly supported Debian/Ubuntu init, pre-Chrome Firefox/Mozilla, post-GMail Thunderbird. What examples are there of corporate-sponsored software that languish without competition? Internet Explorer is the classic example but if you think Google are better than Microsoft, at heart, then how’s Android working out for us all in terms of excellence-in-the-void-of-competition?

sneak 4y ago
We are talking at cross purposes: your comment is a reasonable refutation of a browser monoculture, something we agree would be bad. FWIW I am typing my response to you in Graphene. Ultimately the issue is: what is the harm in using a library maintained by Google to do the webview rendering in a non-Google browser? I just don't see it.
- jackmott 4y ago
- nirvdrum 4y ago
  Google can do pretty much whatever it wants when it's the only player in the space. It certainly hasn't been shy about doing things outside of a standards body. Sure, it's open source, but can you meaningfully influence the direction of the project? If you decide to fork and deviate from what stock Chrome is doing, you're apt to be locked out similarly to sites that don't support Firefox or Safari. It looks pretty similar to what MS was doing with IE, just with a dash of "here you can skin this thing". The biggest differences being that Google has a strong interest in ensuring the web is the app platform of choice, rather than a desktop OS. On the other hand, Google needs to sell targeted ads, so it's unlikely to be the standard bearer for web privacy.
- bogwog 4y ago
  If Google has a monopoly on the rendering engine, who decides what the future of web rendering looks like? Google, and nobody else.
jhanschoo 4y ago
The argument needs to be more subtle to make sense, since Blink is open-source, whereas IE was not. Contrarily, I see another analogy; Blink being like Linux's dominance in infrastructure.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  The Linux Foundation aren’t trying to develop Linux to cement their advertising business. The Linux Foundation are benign, and Google aren’t.
a1369209993 4y ago
> Without competition, software rots and/or never gets better. [...] systemd since it was locked in as the only properly supported Debian/Ubuntu init To be fair, systemd was rotten to the core from day one (literally - namely, the core concept of shoving as much crap into pid 1 as possible to abuse the special semantics that are supposed to only allow for reaping of orphan processes), so you can't really blame that on lack of competition. Your overall point is spot on, though. (And I suppose you could blame lack of sufficiently direct/credible competition for Debian being able to shove systemd down everyone's throats, rather than being forced to support multiple init systems.)
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  the vast majority of systemd's codebase runs outside of PID 1. what does systemd actually run in PID 1 that you object to?

sneak 4y ago

We are talking at cross purposes: your comment is a reasonable refutation of a browser monoculture, something we agree would be bad. FWIW I am typing my response to you in Graphene. Ultimately the issue is: what is the harm in using a library maintained by Google to do the webview rendering in a non-Google browser? I just don't see it.

jackmott 4y ago
nirvdrum 4y ago
Google can do pretty much whatever it wants when it's the only player in the space. It certainly hasn't been shy about doing things outside of a standards body. Sure, it's open source, but can you meaningfully influence the direction of the project? If you decide to fork and deviate from what stock Chrome is doing, you're apt to be locked out similarly to sites that don't support Firefox or Safari. It looks pretty similar to what MS was doing with IE, just with a dash of "here you can skin this thing". The biggest differences being that Google has a strong interest in ensuring the web is the app platform of choice, rather than a desktop OS. On the other hand, Google needs to sell targeted ads, so it's unlikely to be the standard bearer for web privacy.
bogwog 4y ago
If Google has a monopoly on the rendering engine, who decides what the future of web rendering looks like? Google, and nobody else.

jhanschoo 4y ago

The argument needs to be more subtle to make sense, since Blink is open-source, whereas IE was not. Contrarily, I see another analogy; Blink being like Linux's dominance in infrastructure.

robin_reala 4y ago
The Linux Foundation aren’t trying to develop Linux to cement their advertising business. The Linux Foundation are benign, and Google aren’t.

a1369209993 4y ago

> Without competition, software rots and/or never gets better. [...] systemd since it was locked in as the only properly supported Debian/Ubuntu init To be fair, systemd was rotten to the core from day one (literally - namely, the core concept of shoving as much crap into pid 1 as possible to abuse the special semantics that are supposed to only allow for reaping of orphan processes), so you can't really blame that on lack of competition. Your overall point is spot on, though. (And I suppose you could blame lack of sufficiently direct/credible competition for Debian being able to shove systemd down everyone's throats, rather than being forced to support multiple init systems.)

tomjakubowski 4y ago
the vast majority of systemd's codebase runs outside of PID 1. what does systemd actually run in PID 1 that you object to?