Open Source is not immune to monopoly

The recent fiasco involving Linus Torvalds running Linux like the privileged man that he is and entirely missing the central points of the arguments made by people who don’t enjoy his kind of privilege reminds me that there are some OSS projects that have become so large, so important, and so monolithic, that the behavior of their project leadership becomes indistinguishable from a monopoly/monopsony. Turns out, OSS is not immune to monopoly/monopsony after all, and I think one big part of a possible solution to this problem is the same one that should be applied to monopolies/monopsonies in capitalist markets: forcing interop of smaller components. When any project becomes a monolithic tangle, it becomes enormously expensive—impossible even—to fork. In other words, it becomes anticompetitive. To keep the ecosystem healthy, such projects must be broken into interoperable pieces that are small enough that it becomes tractable for a small group of people to fork one component at a time.…