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Survey On the Future of Open Source, and Lessons From the Past
An anonymous reader writes "Andy Oram reports on the quality, security, and community driving open source adoption. 'All too often, the main force uniting competitors is the fear of another vendor and the realization that they can never beat a dominant vendor on its own turf. Open source becomes a way of changing the rules out from under the dominant player. OpenStack, for instance, took on VMware in the virtualization space and Amazon.com in the IaaS space. Android attracted phone manufacturers and telephone companies as a reaction to the iPhone.'"
You entirely missed the crux of the summary. Each company knew they could not, individually, supersede the established competitive advantage of the most successful player in their industry. However, bandied together in cooperation, they COULD forge a competitive advantage and undermine the player's supremacy. Better to collaborate on an alternative than concede and pay out millions to the player.
It's like Zulu uniting tribes against The British Empire. Or Attila the Hun uniting tribes against Rome. Or Genghis Khan against China.
If your business model needs you to the be the sole owner of a competitive advantage, and you are never able to achieve that advantage alone, then you have no business model.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
The GPL is hard to understand, because it is quite long. This is because it is written to have legal meaning. It's the legal system(s) that is at fault here, I think.