Open source as a civic duty

Re:Open source as a civic duty by wes-exp on Saturday August 17, 2013 @10:05PM (#6231301)

Sorry for the lack of clarity. Case #2 is only meant to illustrate that commoditization has harmful effects of innovation. Microsoft, for a time, commoditized the browser market, which harmed web innovation. I don't think that's in dispute.

My overall argument is thus:

A. Commoditization is not necessarily good. It often harms innovation (supported by case study #1 and #2)

B. Open source is a kind of commoditization

C. A and B together implies that open source is not necessarily good.

By the way, I would argue that it wasn't open source that enabled Firefox to save the web. It was the fact that Google was making lots of profit on web search ads, and used that money to fund Firefox's development. The fact that Firefox was open source, is incidental.

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Re:Open source as a civic duty by minor_nitwit on Saturday August 17, 2013 @10:26PM (#6231361)

Firefox had to become successful before Google's payments would make a difference. Google didn't front Mozilla the money to develop a browser.

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Re:Open source as a civic duty by wes-exp on Saturday August 17, 2013 @11:20PM (#6231498)

You're right, Mozilla didn't initially depend on Google. It depended on Netscape, which created Mozilla.

I think it's hard to argue that Firefox's ultimate rise to prominence wasn't directly related to funding provided by Google, though.

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