Open Source Web Browsers

Why does the software development community fragment itself, particularly the open-source side of it?

Why for example does it duplicate (divert, waste) effort on designing parallel separate projects like MySQL and PostgreSQL instead of agreeing to continually refine a single standard application? Why does it come up with Ruby, Python, PHP (and then, separate "frameworks" for all of these as well), etal, instead of focusing on continually refining a single language? Why does it have competing markup, styling, etal, standards and competing browsers? Can you imagine if all this duplicated effort ended, a standard was chosen and refined, and developers could then focus more on solving ~other~ problems? If you didn't have to undertake research into what to USE, then what else could you focus your intellect on instead? For businesses, if all software was eventually standard and not a research project to decide on, what other activities could you instead focus on, how else would you compete with one another in your products/services? Even within communities that arrive at a consensus on software, competition is present in arriving at the consensus. When a standard is community-driven, input is still inherently incorporated. No one is choosing anything for you; by agreeing to develop, for example, one database management system, you'd be choosing to direct your input into that effort rather than trying to get MySQL to add triggers and things PostgreSQL can already do ... and besides having to figure out how to convert a database (and perhaps scripts accessing it) to PostreSQL when you suddenly realized MySQL wasn't powerful enough. I guess I don't understand how this would be taking away choice if everyone chose to end the duplicated effort. As another example, the world's air traffic controllers have settled on a standard language (English) -- and therefore they aren't all scrambling for dictionaries at critical moments. There are also different ways of competing ... for example, spending time trying to workaround the inconsistent implementation of CSS in browsers isn't making any one browser go away, but it is taking away time from competing one what matters, the web application (server side) itself, rather than the presentation (client side).

Public Comments

1. That's because everyone thinks they are smarter than the other and can do the same thing better. That's the beauty of competition - you encourage creativity and improvement.
2. Imagine the thousands of developers working on Opensource code. Each has their preference and are developing something for everyone. If they all worked on the same project, then they'd be nothing more than a software vendor, holding everyone captive to their whims. Choice is good.
3. Some people don't agree, and some have different needs. When two sets of people have needs that are mutually exclusive: ease of use vs. speed (regular users set it up) vs. (developers/programmers set it up) there's not always a way to resolve the difference without two projects.
4. Because MySQL and PostgreSQL fill or have filled different needs historically. I can same the same for Ruby, Python, and PHP, Java, C++, C#, etc. Why not let them compete? It's very Darwinistic. The best one(s) win out and the others die off. Can you imagine how crappy it would be if you got to pick for all of us what we were going to use no matter what *we* want?
5. You've obviously never been in a cockpit while it flew over France... :-)
6. Go with your idea, make the absolute best software standard solution. There, you just created a new software to add to the others already out there.
7. The Software Development Community Fragment itself particularly on the open source as the PHP, Python, Ruby all are basically used in outsourced software development as It is smarter way to get the results and it save time and get quality work . Lot's of outsource company is working in this field .