Openness makes diversity

• from the nature of openness, there tends to be more options that offer the same thing

• at times, it also causes diversity by people who disagrees with the standard or wants to take it in a different direction

• it is good especially it lets other projects to stand on their vision; Tradeoffs lock yourself in a position

• as one or two progresses, it turns into a cooperative competition

• examples

  • Linux distros and How Linux distributions are technically their own operating system with their subtle (or major) differences to others

  • Nix package manager pioneered functional package management; then Guix package manager took it in a different direction with a stronger focus on Reproducible builds and roam:Bootstrapping

  • in terms of desktop landscape in Linux, both GNOME and KDE creates friendly competition to progress desktop standards; this rings true especially both are contributing to the Freedesktop repository to create more standards for the desktop

  • bits 128-255 that ASCII leave made a competition for other standards such as OEM by IBM-PC for graphical characters or simply used for non-English alphabets

  • the major members of the BSD family (i.e., NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD) all have different priorities; NetBSD focuses on compatibility, FreeBSD is on minimal system with the adequate amount of support, and OpenBSD in security