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Comment by Breakthrough | Hacker News Reader

It's a very valid point - it doesn't take a genius to figure out competition drives development, while having a market monopoly affords you a great position of "extortion" in regards to your customers (developers). If there was only one solution from only one company, it would literally be their way - and that's it.

Then again, this is why we first develop web standards or markup languages (e.g. HTML, XHTML, XML) in the first place ;)

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I think this is not always true.

Read from: "The Ideology of Competition" http://blakemasters.com/post/20955341708/peter-thiels-cs183-... http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-...

If a single company was in control of Webkit then it would be an issue, but thankfully there's not. I actually see Webkit's main competition being native apps!

Take a look at http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-software-monoc.... The author points out how GCC's monopoly, though open source, forces clang to copy its implementation quirks almost exactly, because it's been the de-facto standard for years. Open-source doesn't automatically make the problem go away.

Open-source doesn't make the problem go away, but it does make the problem surmountable.

It was surmountable in gcc's case, but still took lots of resources (which clang has). It might not be surmountable in other cases, and even if it is it raises the bar quite a lot for new competitors.

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