Free software and open source philosophies differ, sometimes with radically different outcomes

Jonas Oberg jonas at fsfe.org
Wed Nov 22 11:38:36 UTC 2017


Hi,

> Seems easy indeed ... but you do not seem to acknowledge that large
> corporations have an infrastructure and revenues that others don't have.
> Android was forked its a one man's project running on a negligible number of
> devices , its obviously impossible to compete.

That doesn't seem to be a failure of neither Open Source nor Free Software,
or anything of the kind. Free Software is not immune or an answer to market
dominance, as we can see historically in Apache, as an example, which just
ten years ago or so had a 70% market share. It was, and continue to be,
difficult to compete with that.

Just as it is difficult to compete today with the Linux kernel on
embedded devices. In some ways, what we want in Free Software *is*
market dominance, but market dominance of Free Software solutions. Whether
you can effectively compete with such solutions or not is a different
problem which Free Software does not provide an answer to.

-- 
Jonas Öberg
Executive Director

FSFE e.V. - keeping the power of technology in your hands. Your
support enables our work, please join us today http://fsfe.org/join



More information about the Discussion mailing list