I think this is not always true.
Read from: "The Ideology of Competition" http://blakemasters.com/post/20955341708/peter-thiels-cs183-... http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-...
Re:Browser Wars, the game
by stuartmemo on Saturday February 16, 2013 @06:52PM
(#5233586)
If a single company was in control of Webkit then it would be an issue, but thankfully there's not. I actually see Webkit's main competition being native apps!
Re:Browser Wars, the game
by derekerdmann on Saturday February 16, 2013 @07:55PM
(#5233769)
Take a look at http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-software-monoc.... The author points out how GCC's monopoly, though open source, forces clang to copy its implementation quirks almost exactly, because it's been the de-facto standard for years. Open-source doesn't automatically make the problem go away.
Open-source doesn't make the problem go away, but it does make the problem surmountable.
It was surmountable in gcc's case, but still took lots of resources (which clang has). It might not be surmountable in other cases, and even if it is it raises the bar quite a lot for new competitors.
Then again, this is why we first develop web standards or markup languages (e.g. HTML, XHTML, XML) in the first place ;)