What happens when open source turns out to be better? Much better?

Chris Blizzard of Mozilla gives a great interview to der Standard in which he highlights how Firefox is increasingly pushing the envelope on browser innovation. If you've taken a look at Mozilla Labs lately, you'll understand what he means.

While Mozilla may not have innovated everything in the browser wars (e.g., tabbed browsing, which arguably came from Opera), it is responsible for driving these innovations onto more than 150 million desktops worldwide.

The most salient point for me is that Firefox is gaining market share because it is better, not because it's open source. Firefox, then, is a classic example (as with Linux on the server) where it is rising because of its quality, not because of its cost, code access, etc.

I had breakfast this morning with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, and while John isn't prone to self-aggrandizement and was quick to point to the Mozilla community as the source for much of Firefox's success and innovation, he indicated a range of new projects under way at Mozilla that are setting standards for usability and functionality in the browser. You can see a glimpse at the Labs site mentioned above, or simply by typing into the address bar ("the awesome bar").

In a similar manner, Mark Shuttleworth isn't resting on his Linux laurels and expecting people to use it because it's free. He wants to make the Linux desktop better than the Mac desktop. He's setting his standards high. Knowing Mark, he'll likely achieve them.

This is the future of open source: not code that just happens to be free, but code that just so happens to be better.

[tfosorcim]

"What happens when open source turns out to be better? Much better?"

Well, let's see. Hmmm...

There's *Ubuntu (K, Ed, Eee, etc) which gets updated EVERY SIX MONTHS, FireFox, ThunderBird, Instant-On motherboards, Instant-on UMPCs (oops, sorry; mine takes 15 seconds), Suse, Fedora, free applications which are more powerful than their multi-hundred $$$ counterparts, Debian, Xandros, gOS, a whole host of other Linux/UNIX distros (tried FreeBSD lately?) Opera, and ad infinitum.
Then, of course, there's that teensy-weentsy issue of continually sending your hard-earned money to a provider of software which won't work correctly, and will be fixed Real Soon Now by service packs and bug fixes and a whole new operating system, none of which will work right either. But they've got fixes...

"What happens when open source turns out to be better? Much better?"

Other than this, not much, I guess.

[hawkeyeaz1]

Firefox is better because or innovation, but the innovation is partly due to the fact it is open source and free. No, that isn't the only reason, but it is a fairly notable part.

[jezzali]

Listening to some of Marks recent comments I find myself looking at my KDE 4.1 RC1 desktop and asking, "well... what am I looking at right in front of me ?".

Message for Mark: "already doing it... started working on it about three years ago you know... long before you started telling people this needs to happen... its ambitious, and not quite stable yet (almost though), but its here... guess you didn't get the memo"

[tfosorcim]

My apologies to all the thousands of hard-working people--both code writers and support providers--who are making Open Source a success, and which point I neglected to mention.
I also forgot to specifically mention two great Open Source products/derivatives: (1) FreeDOS, and (I am totally incapable of posting a comment without rolling a granade into the pup-tent) (2) Mac OS X. Before all you Mac-haters waste your and my time, note that I am NOT making a statement about Apple, or its business model, which I do not like, I am stating the simple fact that when Apple decided it was time for a totally new operating system, they chose to use FreeBSD as the core around which to add AppleStuff. Microsoft should have been so smart. So you see, all you Apple/Mac OS X users (some of whom, ironically, are rabid Linux/UNIX-haters) are using FreeBSD every day! Sorry 'bout that.
By the way, FreeBSD is UNIX (Berkeley Systems Distribution), not Linux.

[gabeheim]

Close, but no cigar. OS X is based of XNU (X is Not Unix) which is based off MACH microkernel. A Unix compatible layer is provided by integrating BSD/FreeBSD components on top of Mach. BSD is a forked Unix operating system developed by Berkeley, but it is not Sys V based. It is based off source to which AT&T did not have exclusive copyright or were rewritten by BSD. FreeBSD was based off the Berkley code without any AT&T code, and it was completely rewritten, borrowing some from MACH. So, I would say that OS X/XNU is POSIX and has Unix like parts, but not Unix, and that Linux is more Unix-like in the sense that it is a monolithic kernel by design, although it is not Unix either. (XNU is microkernel by design that grew into a somewhat monolithic kernel)