Comment by philh
8 years ago
> With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases.
With just this information and no other, I think I'd predict corporations to make better software than open source. I take it that's not what you had in mind.
(This is for similar reasons that I expect for-profit companies to provide better service than government-run ones. I don't particularly want to get into a debate right now about whether that actually happens, just trying to explain my intuitions.)
I'd agree with this. We can all agree Windows is infinitely better than Linux because people pay for it.
Also Internet Explorer is infinitely better than Chrome and Firefox.
For a non-technical user Windows is the infinitely better product than typical Linux desktops, you should see the pain that people go through that use commercial software nominally supported on Linux such as Cadence tools compared to the same experience on Windows, not to mention the lack of any serious well made office suite.
Heck in direct comparison Ubuntu 16.04 looks like a joke system compared to Windows 10, for example Ubuntu doesn't let me use my on board sound and only displays the dedicated sound card, but only half of the time. It has a horrible toy like ripped off user interface with ugly buttons, I can't think of a single application that is actually better than an equivalent application that is also available on Windows.The only reason I'm using Linux is because in a lot of areas including the field I work in it has achieved the same lock in that windows has for the general desktop market.
It is kind of sad that the only two alternatives are a clone of 70s technology or a clone of 80s technology. I feel like there should be a way to get things unstuck, but research into operating system design has all but ceased, with very few exceptions, many of them ironically coming from Microsoft.
Ubuntu is backed by Canonical Ltd. so it's corp vs. a much bigger corp. Linux as server vs Windows Server might be a more appropriate comparison for this.
It's so frustrating that the data derived from this reality never agrees with these simple economic theories I derived from first principles and my econ 101 class that are so obviously correct.
I blame the so-called "experts" and their propaganda about "complexity" and "human behaviour" for distorting the efficient market. In the cases of historical data it seems they have even retroactively distorted the markets.
I didn't say corporations make better software than open source. I said that if I had only a single piece of information that's the prediction I'd make.
I have opinions about to what extent my counterfactual prediction is correct; and to what extent it's not; and why it fails, in the cases that it fails. I left them out because they weren't relevant. If you wanted to talk about them, that's a thing I might be willing to do. But I'm not interested in being snarkily accused of mistakes I didn't make.
I have no idea who makes better software.
What I mean is this: If you mix open-source with a for-profit entity, don't be surprise when that entity try to extract profits even in orthogonal ways to the original intention of the project.
Of course, in practice, and by the nature of open-source, this is a very difficult to do and, normally, can be prevented, but the trend is there and should be take into account.