> This is a key benefit of open source: we can take the freedom granted by being useful to monopoly capitalism and use it to liberate work for the public good, thus diffusing that monopoly power.
In theory. In practice, a fork on that scale rarely happens because it would require a large part of the community to adapt, lots of supporting services to switch etc, which is unlikely to happen unless it's a major issue like "oh btw we're shutting everything down next month". Convenience keeps developers with how it's currently working, and developers are the community.
Why does it have to fork that hard? C is used everywhere; there are ISO standards for it. UNIX also escaped the bounds of AT&T a while back as POSIX. The same could happen elsewhere also.
Because most will (sooner or later) become incompatible as goals diverge. You're right that it could happen, but I don't see it as likely, be that a programming language or a tool.
In theory. In practice, a fork on that scale rarely happens because it would require a large part of the community to adapt, lots of supporting services to switch etc, which is unlikely to happen unless it's a major issue like "oh btw we're shutting everything down next month". Convenience keeps developers with how it's currently working, and developers are the community.