Look at Unix. It was essentially open source before anyone invented the term, and that caused a large number of ways to solve the same problem and left the market to sort them out, which they didn't (the market never will sort out bad quality in anything but the single most important property of the products), and Unix got itself into a position where some horribly demented crapware from Microsoft could compete with it and fool a whole bunch of people for a while.

Re: source access vs dynamism (Usenet article).

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.li...[groups.google.com]