Why does the software development community fragment itself, particularly...

Bitusan · #1 05-06-2008, 04:30 PM

...the open-source side of it? Why for example does it duplicate (divert, waste) effort on designing parallel separate projects like MySQL and PostgreSQL instead of agreeing to continually refine a single standard application?

Why does it come up with Ruby, Python, PHP (and then, separate "frameworks" for all of these as well), etal, instead of focusing on continually refining a single language?

Why does it have competing markup, styling, etal, standards and competing browsers?

Can you imagine if all this duplicated effort ended, a standard was chosen and refined, and developers could then focus more on solving ~other~ problems?
If you didn't have to undertake research into what to USE, then what else could you focus your intellect on instead?

For businesses, if all software was eventually standard and not a research project to decide on, what other activities could you instead focus on, how else would you compete with one another in your products/services?
Even within communities that arrive at a consensus on software, competition is present in arriving at the consensus.
When a standard is community-driven, input is still inherently incorporated. No one is choosing anything for you; by agreeing to develop, for example, one database management system, you'd be choosing to direct your input into that effort rather than trying to get MySQL to add triggers and things PostgreSQL can already do ... and besides having to figure out how to convert a database (and perhaps scripts accessing it) to PostreSQL when you suddenly realized MySQL wasn't powerful enough.

I guess I don't understand how this would be taking away choice if everyone chose to end the duplicated effort.
As another example, the world's air traffic controllers have settled on a standard language (English) -- and therefore they aren't all scrambling for dictionaries at critical moments.
There are also different ways of competing ... for example, spending time trying to workaround the inconsistent implementation of CSS in browsers isn't making any one browser go away, but it is taking away time from competing one what matters, the web application (server side) itself, rather than the presentation (client side).