Which is an important advantage to open-source. Abandoned, failed close-source software is almost never available. Talk about wasted productivity... If an abandoned github repo has any redeemable value, it will get found and used.
The analogy might be clearer if instead of GitHub we used Fossil.
Re:The Cathedral and the Bizarre
by BlueTemplar on Sunday December 15, 2019 @06:58AM
(#21795813)
He does talk about how huge corporations use open source and exploit open source developers for their own profit...
Re:The Cathedral and the Bizarre
by buzzkillington on Saturday December 14, 2019 @08:52PM
(#21793923)
I'm unaware that the goal of evolution is to have one lion win the lion competition and eat all other lions.
Maybe we should stop using bad metaphors? Writing software is not a Darwinian process, neither is competition on the market place. Unless you got your OS by randomly twiddling bits in the binary file, in which case why are we even talking about open source?
Re:The Cathedral and the Bizarre
by zimpenfish on Sunday December 15, 2019 @06:53AM
(#21795790)
> have one lion win the lion competition and eat all other lions
If that improved the chances of that lion's genes surviving, it would absolutely be selected for. Obviously it generally doesn't because there's safety in numbers, etc.
> the goal of evolution
Minor nit: evolution has no goal. It is undirected, random, capricious, etc.
If "category killer" is a winner-take-all competition, then there are going to be a vast number of losers, and we do see a vast number of unmaintained projects. It's just that no one is bothering to remove them from view when they're defeated.