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pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 5 days agoYes. Open standards always win, given time. No one keeps paying for a closed standard, once the open one is just as good.
Closed standards win all the time; messaging and social feeds being two major examples.
Open standards usually win only when complying with closed standards is more costly than using less developed open standards in the short run and developing the open standards over time.
You’ve picked relatively new things. And I cannot predict the future. You might be right. Those could be lost causes. Experience tells me they are not.
I feel an obligation to point out the past to the younger folks who think “Microsoft and Adobe always win”. I feel this obligation,l because I was one of them.
Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silver light were inevitable. They were further closing down of existing dominant closed solutions. Now both are forgotten, replaced by open standards.
Microsoft now pretends they always intended to play nice. Adobe now pretends they never even tried to build a walled garden around the Internet.
We can perhaps agree at least that closed standards do frequently win, for awhile. No disagreement from me, on that point.
We might also agree that closed standards only fail when corporations get too greedy?
But of course, I’ll share my faith: corporations always, eventually, get too greedy.
Flash and Silverlight follow what I said. They were ubiquitous until the costs, being a bloated platform that couldn’t be ported to smartphones, caused the industry to shift to an open model.
And messaging is a very old use of the Internet. IRC was created in 1988; Discord shouldn’t be a thing based on what you’ve said.
Flash and Silverlight follow what I said. They were ubiquitous until the costs, being a bloated platform that couldn’t be ported to smartphones, caused the industry to shift to an open model.
I feel like we’re trying to find something to disagree about now…?
And messaging is a very old use of the Internet. IRC was created in 1988; Discord shouldn’t be a thing based on what you’ve said.
Discord does substantially more than IRC can do.
It’s wild to me that “people eventually move to the free thing, once it is feature complete” is a controversial take.
Yes, it can take multiple lifetimes. Yes, there’s plenty of examples where the closed thing persists long after an informed public would have switched.
But the shift to an open public standard eventually happens.
Nobody keeps a monopoly forever.
Monopolies based on restrictive agreements and secret code are unnatural, and they require constant upkeep. They eventually succumb.
In some cases, the standard even persists, but as an open one. Microsoft has figured this out, and now strategically open sources things they know they cannot keep alive, otherwise.
yarr@feddit.nl 5 days ago
Like Gimp? Oh, wait that didn’t take over. Well, at least Libreoffice is the standard office suite today, oh wait, that didn’t take over. Well, Linux is the most used operating system at least. Whoops, except Android counts as that and it’s increasingly locked down.
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
I mean, I can help you can pick things that haven’t won yet all day. Gimp is free, Adobe works hard making a more compelling expensive product.
Adobe will someday stop innovating. Gimp will not. Gimp’s source code is the more resilient, thanks to it’s license. We (old people) have seen this play out many times.
Unix, DSD, and a dozen variants used to be the compelling options. Today, use Unix variants outside of Linux is vanishingly rare. Closed source browsers are rare today, and even those are built on the open source browser cores. Everyone is trying to enshitify Android, not iOS, because it’s the resilient licensed software.
It takes time. Everyone who can make a dollar fighting it, does so. But open standards win.
yarr@feddit.nl 5 days ago
Any browser that’s not Chrome is rare today. I’m not sure pointing at Chrome as a well-managed open source project is a good idea. Although one can view the source, Google controls the codebase and development process with an iron hand. Any feature that is a good idea technically, but will hurt Google is a no-go to have merged.