"There is one major web rendering engine that grew entirely out of the open source world: KHTML is KDE's web renderer which was built from the ground up by the open source community with very little original corporate backing. The code was good and branches were born as a result, the best known being Webkit. Now, after years of split, KHTML and Webkit are coming together once again."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-26
I see this used a lot, but I'm not sure that "competition" is the right term when it comes to something developed by free software communities. Wouldn't "alternative" be better? I mean, what are they competing for?
Marketshare.
Just because it's FOSS doesn't mean there's no competition! When you sit down to play games with friends, don't you intend to win? What would be the point of building an alternative if it wasn't intended to compete with an existing solution in some way.
Member since:2006-11-24
Maybe because "competition" is such a corporately-tainted word that has gained excessive dictionarial (English) baggage over the last several decades?
"Competition" is best used to compare Dell and HP, or Canon and Nokia, not KDE and GNOME or Gecko and WebKit.
That is, unless you want to count the corporate backings which are put behind such projects (Apple/Nokia/Adobe behind WebKit, Mozilla/Google behind Gecko, Novell/Sun behind GNOME, Trolltech behind KDE, etc). Then yeah, they're "competing".
Member since:2006-06-21
The very definition of "game" means that there's a winner and several losers. As for "marketshare", it has very definite economical connotations, as in "buy and sell". Now, I don't recall the GNU manifesto speaking along these lines, in fact I distinctly remember it shunning commercialization.
A certain amount of competitivity is of course understood in any endeavour. The teams of similar free software projects will naturally have a drive to make the best stuff, surpassing the others. But it's not for mercantile reasons.
"Marketshare", "competition" etc. have distinct commercial tones and meanings. Which IMHO are not appropriate. At the very least, because they imply that free software is driven by the same mechanisms that drive economy, and that's a huge fallacy.
Member since:
2006-06-21
I see this used a lot, but I'm not sure that "competition" is the right term when it comes to something developed by free software communities. Wouldn't "alternative" be better? I mean, what are they competing for?