I’m going to disagree. Over the two decades I have been programming I have come to appreciate the benefit of Open Source Collaboration vs competition. Competition between platforms is good, but it’s not the best. Because those who produce content waste millions of hours collectively trying to address every little quirky difference between the platforms. And the standards only help so much, whether it’s POSIX or WHATWG.

The real reason MS and IE were not so good is because they were a closed source monopoly! And moreover the copyright was enforced by the government.

Now even M$ switched over to WebKit / Blink.

Collaboration beats competition in the end.

Wikipedia beat Britannica quite handily. And it beat Encarta, too.

Open source beat closed source over time.

The Web beat AOL and Compuserve.

Science beat secret cults and alchemy.

Today Pharma is using patents and competition. People are prevented from building on each other’s work in microbiology but not in other sciences. Isn’t that wild?

I would rather have lots of people adding to one snowball platform, than having competing platforms. AS LONG AS that platform is open source and anyone can use it for any purpose. If your commits don’t make it into the core, just market them until they get popular enough. Compatibility is the goal, though.