zlacker

I think there’s a time though when an open source project becomes so dominant in its field, that alternatives become few or untenable. In these cases were all at the mercy of the market for having consolidated on a set of choices. The mindshare around the project gives maintainers a tremendous amount of power over others.

Many mainstream projects fit into this. It’s not feasible from a business perspective to get to fork Linux or MySQL. There’s alternatives, but if they don’t work not everyone can spend startup funding to build a NoSQL database.

In these cases committers have a tremendous amount of power and often get disconnected from practitioners.

>>softwa+(OP)
Android runs on billions of devices and is a fork of Linux. There's two or three commercial forks of MySQL, I think Percona started before Sun bought MySQL, but I can't remember for sure anymore.

>>toast0+c1
Yeah and it takes a company the scale of Google to maintain it. Not feasible for pretty much anyone else.

>>softwa+qP
Few small companies can maintain a full OS, regardless of the open source alternatives. Yet FreeBSD, OpenBSD and SmartOS are all still living projects, and none have a Google behind them.