

Why software monocultures are bad - steveklabnik
http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-software-monocultures-are-bad.html

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shurcooL
Thank you for a well articulated article.

Up until now, I had trouble with concretely understanding the negative points
of having an open source monopoly in something. I thought, following DRY
principle is good, why would anyone want to do same thing more than once?

Now there's something to think about.

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Skoofoo
A web rendering monoculture may be a bad thing, but what would you do in Opera
Software's position? Opera has less than 4% market share so companies very
rarely go through the trouble of supporting its quirks, resulting in a subpar
web browsing experience that drives people to other web browsers. It's a
vicious cycle, and switching to WebKit is Opera's best bet to break out of it
and gain market share and influence.

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metajack
This was a point that Brendan Eich made in "Why Mozilla Matters"[1]:

"Mozilla is not Opera. If we were a more conventional business, without enough
desktop browser-market share, we would probably have to do what Opera has
done. But we’re not just a business, and our desktop share seems to be holding
or possibly rising — due in part to the short-term wins we have been able to
build on Gecko."

I don't think people are blaming Opera; they are just frustrated at the loss
of some diversity in the rendering engine space. At least we can expect some
fresh injection of open standards support in the WebKit project from the Opera
team, which should benefit all WebKit users.

[1] <https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/>

