> How can open source software be in competition with anything?

Market share is power. Popular open-source projects can, and do, shape the industry. If you believe your trajectory is the right one for the industry, competition matters a lot.

As an example, Mozilla's Firefox was created to compete with Internet Explorer. It succeeded, and now Mozilla is working to defend the open web, so market share is still crucial for Mozilla even today.

I'm sorry but you're incorrect. Mozilla's Firefox was originally called Phoenix, and it was created because Mozilla the browser was a dog-slow encumbered monstrosity of Netscape's attempt to create an all-in-one solution for the web. Firefox was essentially competing with Mozilla Suite, but it wasn't so much "competing" as filling a necessary role: a browser that didn't suck.

Mozilla Suite was also not created to compete with Internet Explorer. In fact, Internet Explorer was created to compete with Netscape, which was the dominant browser for years until IE finally knocked it off its catbird seat. It never recovered because IE offered a simple, fast browsing experience, even if it sucked dick at actually rendering content.

In this vein, Phoenix was created in the model of Internet Explorer. So in a way you could say it competed, but in actual fact it was competing against its own progenitor.

Reflecting more on 'competition': the browser wars nearly destroyed the web as we know it as each browser introduced incompatible proprietary extensions which were then picked up (badly) by each other over time. The lack of standards, or good implementations of standards, severely hampered the adoption of more advanced technology. Firefox continues that tradition today by pushing more and more features that IE can't support; we're just lucky that Firefox is the dominant browser now, and that people are now used to upgrading their browser virtually every week.

It always makes me chuckle that Firefox adds more and more features and becomes more and more like the suite they replaced; I still miss the Composer for web pages!

I remember using it when it was called Firebird.

Huh. I was basing my comment on the knowledge that Mozilla feared IE would become the way to browse the web. I should have double checked.

Firefox founder here. You are correct and the reply comment is incorrect. Firefox was created to take on IE. Period.

I stand corrected, then. I definitely agree that by 2004 there was a huge effort to get as many people to the browser as possible, even comparing it as a better browser than IE. Still, it's interesting that IE was only ever mentioned two years after the initial release, and everyone who talked about the goals of the project were talking about the bloat of Mozilla and having a better user experience. I imagine it would have ended up much worse if the focus was competition alone.

You seem to narrow down (i.e. restrict) pretty heavily what competition can mean. Open source projects can compete even if no money is involved, e.g. on visibility and amount of help and traction they can get from the community. This is partly related to the concept of fragmentation (where some people argue that fragmentation dilutes efforts).