[antonok]

Open source has the best kind of coordination. If there's a real use-case for two things to work together, you or someone else can implement it and share it without anyone's permission. Meanwhile in proprietary land, people sometimes build things that nobody wanted, and also leave out features with high demand. Proprietary optimizes for the profit of some individuals; open source optimizes for maximum utility.

Thus far, open source has optimized for maximum utility for individuals who can write code... but AI may be changing that soon enough.

[illiac786]

I am a fan of open source, but it’s definitely not for the coordination part.

Proprietary, money driven development, is top down and has coordination in general. In very large software, it starts failing sometimes (I’m looking at you Oracle)

Open source handles conflict by forking. I wouldn’t call that good coordination.

But, at the same time, I don’t see a better (or less worse) solution so I shut up and I take their code =)

[latchup]

> Open source handles conflict by forking. I wouldn’t call that good coordination.

Forking is far from the first step in conflict resolution; it is the ultima ratio between projects in the open-source world, when all dialogue breaks down. In other words, the worst outcome is that people agree to disagree and go their separate ways, which is arguably as good a solution as is possible.

In the corporate world, coordination mostly exists within companies through top-down decision-making, as you said. Between them, however, things look much grimmer. Legal action is often taken lightly, and more often than not, a core business goal is to not just dominate, but to annihilate the competition by driving them out of business.

Coordination between corporations, such as through consortia, is only ever found if everyone involved stands to profit significantly and risks are low. And ironically, when it does happen, it often takes the form of shared development of an open-source project, to eliminate the perceived risk of being shafted.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Forking is far from the first step in conflict resolution; it is the ultima ratio between projects in the open-source world, when all dialogue breaks down.

You also do a fork if you simply want to try out some rather experimental changes. In the end, this fork can get merged into the mainstream version, stay independent, or become abandoned. People wanting to try out new things has barely anything to do with all dialogue breaking down.

[baobun]

You may also fork from having different goals or ideas about some mutually incompatible requirements without an communication or coordination issues. Friendly forks happen all the time.

[latchup]

Right. In this case I am talking about a "hard" fork, where core contributors disagree on where a project is headed and split up with no intention of collaborating further. Of course, forking with the intent of merging back contributions does not apply here, as is a cooperative and coordinated process. In that case, the "fork" really only serves as a staging ground for contributions.

[IshKebab]

Often there's a great use case for two things to work together but you have a chicken and egg situation. You need a top-down edict to get everyone on the same page.

[yencabulator]

You, the singular you as a person, can simultaneously improve both of those two things. With proprietary software, uhh, enjoy the ride.

[IshKebab]

Wrong. Take the LSP example: a) I don't have time to add LSP support to Vim, Emacs, KDevelop, etc. and write language servers for Python ok n, C++, Rust, Go, etc. and b) those projects would not accept my contribution if I tried. They would say "what is this LSP thing that nobody uses? Come back when it's popular".

The latter is where you need the coordination. In a company someone high up can say "we're doing it's like this" and everyone has to fall in line.

[yencabulator]

In a company, yeah. LSP is a Microsoft initiative. Swap your open source examples to proprietary editors from different vendors and it's otherwise the same story, but now you can't provide both the chicken and the egg yourself.