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Having an army of engineers working on an open source project is an anti-trust violation?

jsjohnst 3y ago
Let’s say there’s a hypothetical world where Safari had 90% market share like Chrome does. Would the fact that WebKit is open source make a difference? Chrome is to Chromium as Safari is to WebKit after all.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Chrome is to Blink as Safari is to WebKit. If Safari had 90% market share because it was a great browser available on every OS promoted on some of the most visited websites (which, in this thought experiment, would be owned by Apple), while people were able to choose their browser on iOS, and browser vendors were able to choose the browser engine and if a version of Safari without sync were open source, that would make a difference.
- summerlight 3y ago
  Two major differences: Chromium itself is a standalone browser, not just a rendering engine. You need to compare Blink to WebKit. Also WebKit is the only engine allowed in the App Store and iOS. There's no such limitation in the Play Store and Android.
  - jsjohnst 3y ago
    > Chromium itself is a standalone browser, not just a rendering engine. WebKit has always been and still currently is a standalone browser. WebKit even has a standalone browser version for Linux too.
jwells89 3y ago
If said project has a monopoly marketshare which the parent company can then use to drive profits in its main lines of business, then yes I think it can. In this case the engineering resources presents a moat of sorts — it means that anybody hoping to meaningfully influence the project or fork it needs to dedicate as many or more resources, which is difficult or impossible for most organizations. Without that, the most that forks can hope to dissent on are things that can easily be toggled on/off or patch parts of the codebase that don’t change often, which is very limiting.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  There are many organizations which would have the resources to make a competing browser, like Apple for example.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    It’s still not good though, because it essentially rules out the creation and growth of new browser engines. A group shouldn’t need to be a multinational gigacorp to pull that off.

Let’s say there’s a hypothetical world where Safari had 90% market share like Chrome does. Would the fact that WebKit is open source make a difference? Chrome is to Chromium as Safari is to WebKit after all.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
Chrome is to Blink as Safari is to WebKit. If Safari had 90% market share because it was a great browser available on every OS promoted on some of the most visited websites (which, in this thought experiment, would be owned by Apple), while people were able to choose their browser on iOS, and browser vendors were able to choose the browser engine and if a version of Safari without sync were open source, that would make a difference.
summerlight 3y ago
Two major differences: Chromium itself is a standalone browser, not just a rendering engine. You need to compare Blink to WebKit. Also WebKit is the only engine allowed in the App Store and iOS. There's no such limitation in the Play Store and Android.
- jsjohnst 3y ago
  > Chromium itself is a standalone browser, not just a rendering engine. WebKit has always been and still currently is a standalone browser. WebKit even has a standalone browser version for Linux too.

jwells89 3y ago

If said project has a monopoly marketshare which the parent company can then use to drive profits in its main lines of business, then yes I think it can. In this case the engineering resources presents a moat of sorts — it means that anybody hoping to meaningfully influence the project or fork it needs to dedicate as many or more resources, which is difficult or impossible for most organizations. Without that, the most that forks can hope to dissent on are things that can easily be toggled on/off or patch parts of the codebase that don’t change often, which is very limiting.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
There are many organizations which would have the resources to make a competing browser, like Apple for example.
- jwells89 3y ago
  It’s still not good though, because it essentially rules out the creation and growth of new browser engines. A group shouldn’t need to be a multinational gigacorp to pull that off.