[jasonzemos]

One company controls the specification and reference implementation. These gimmicks tend to be "open" so contributions can flow in from anywhere, but the company has full priority and benefits by controlling the pace and final result.

Outsider contributions are submitted publicly, while features developed by the company start in secret and can remain secret as long as possible. The company's contributions are rammed through while outsiders contend with endless bikeshedding with no guarantee they will get anything they need.

In the end there is no sensible reason for any other entity to partner with the controlling company. The partner finds they are prevented from innovating while being bogged down by the "process." The controlling party then seeks to cannibalize the partner's product during this time by shelving any of their unique features and ideas. Once the partner moves on, the requisite changes and fixes to the specification are magically pushed through.

I wouldn't call this a core business model as much as an enhancement to one. Fundamentally it's an attention grift -- a bamboozle of complex rules, procedures and processes, cloaked in goodwill, and furnished by a large interest and future hope at any given time.

[lowwave]

>One company controls the specification and reference implementation. These gimmicks tend to be "open" so contributions can flow in from anywhere, but the company has full priority and benefits by controlling the pace and final result.

Google Chrome for example

[IX-103]

Google doesn't control the w3c. And Google Chrome is severely limited in what they can push due to threatened/actual anti-trust litigation. Their whole "privacy sandbox" thing is being done under the scrutiny of quite a few governments in addition to practically every digital advertising association on earth.

[recursive]

True. But they can implement non-standard things. And they're not compelled to implement the standards. And sometimes they don't.

[darawk]

Except all these things can be trivially forked. If you don't like how the VC one is doing things, just fork it. There are a billion forks of everything in the crypto space, for exactly this reason.

[polskibus]

It’s easy to fork the code but not the user base.

[lowwave]

yes, when was the last time you see google chrome forked and adopted a large user base? That is event with big VC money behind it Brave for example. Open source is now days used a marketing scheme to attract developers to work for free, and attract user to think that is open.

[say_it_as_it_is]

There are a "billion" forks in the crypto space, but have any surpassed the original project in quality or adoption?

[darawk]

Sushiswap did for a bit, iirc. It's doing quite well either way, though.

[threeseed]

There are hundreds of open source projects that implement a social network.

So does that mean I can be the next Facebook with one click of a deploy button ?

[darawk]

Facebook wasn't the first social network. Not even close. Facebook succeeded because it did very similar things to the prior ones, but a little bit better than them in just the right ways. That is the essence of a fork.