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by blazespin 3308 days ago
It is a business decision, and the right decision is not to allow for monoculture to develop.
1 comments

This is just flat inaccurate. Given the GP comments' premise of optimizing only for the business's direct interests, the expected value of your contribution against monoculture is so negligible that it won't balance out changing damn near any habit that you had already chosen. It's a pretty basic collective action problem; if you're optimizing for yourself and your business alone, ignoring the wider picture is still the optimal decision.

The actual argument against (which others are making and which I'm sympathetic to) is that one shouldn't optimize only for direct bottom-line business interests, that businesses and people have a social responsibility, etc etc. But that's entirely different from what you're talking about.

That's not at all what I said.

It's a business decision.

That's it. I didn't say we should optimize for direct bottom-line business interests. I said IT IS A BUSINESS DECISION.

It is not the decision of the developers unless the BUSINESS GIVES THEM THE ABILITY TO CHOOSE.

And even in THAT, it's a business decision.

That's all I said. The business that pays for the labor and chooses the direction they go in.

This idea that a business targetting a specific browser is some horrible social problem is silly. If I'm making a product that's meant to sit in a kiosk running Chrome OS, I'm sure as shit not going to pay for FF and Edge support. If I get it on accident, fine, but if something breaks in FF I'm not putting any effort in fixing it.