People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
You seem to be confused on what’s the actual product these companies are producing. They are selling brand name and accessibility (scaling).
Free as in freedom. The less red tape a process has the more accessible it is. Capitalism by principle is about lower the bar of entry for competition, more competition, more freedom, more actual work — bigger pie.
That’s only a minor goal, the main goal of libre software is to respect user’s freedoms as being forced to run unknown code on your machine is unethical.
Libre software also is compatible with market competition, in fact I’d argue that it’s a core principle of it — that’s what forking is.
Finally collaboration and competition are two sides of the same coin; what do you think collaboration is? What if my idea for project is at ends with yours? is that cooperation or competition? My goal is to introduce this feature, if you oppose me then we are directly competing , right? I fork the project and now we have two projects that are competing over market.
You seem to be confused on how capitalism works because capitalism is why we have copyright and IP laws that harm accessibility and innovation. The reality of capitalism is that as companies have an incentive to stifle competition, and big companies are in position to do that very effectively. No company actually wants to have competition, and free markets lead to massive consolidation as the winners end up devouring the losers.
And that goal is achieved by keeping the code in the open which facilitates collaboration and the ability of the users to modify the code. I agree that cooperative competition exists in open source world, but it’s very different from market competition under capitalism. Capitalist competition is a negative sum game where in order for somebody to win somebody else has to lose. Open source is largely a positive sum game where different projects can learn and benefit from shared knowledge and resources.