HACKER Q&A
📣 CM30

Is it possible for a open source project to kill commercial competition?


I know, it sounds insane. But would it theoretically be possible for a passionate community/fanatic to make a system/piece of software/service that a corporation can't compete with without losing money?

For instance, if a system like Matrix included everything Slack and Discord charge money for free. Could that basically make people not want to pay for said features ever again, and get rid of the market altogether?

In theory something similar happened for programming languages and web browsers didn't it?

  👤 Godel_unicode Accepted Answer ✓
Yes it did. Google's chromium project, Firefox, and webkit have combined to kill IE/Edge. The key difference with hosted applications IMHO is that the open source version needs to overcome the cost of hosting. For clientside apps that's less of an issue.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/20/20813510/microsoft-chromi...

👤 PaulHoule
Linux and the BSDs killed the commercial UNIX market, at least mostly.

Back in the 1980s there were "cheap and cheerful" compilers such as Turbo Pascal, I think those have been squeezed between free tools and Visual Studio.