I am an ardent capitalist and I believe in the importance of competition.
Not merely to prevent group-think, centralization, and monopolization, but to ensure that users can leave a software team and switch to a completely different one, rather than becoming beholden to a particular team.
Developers shouldn't have a captive audience.
A software team is any group that regularly interacts and coordinates their work.
One team can produce many different products, and the products can appear to compete with each other, but the products only have one actual producer.
This is a form of pseudo-competition targeting different customer groups, like Volkswagen does with its brands.
You are an auxiliary member of the team, if you follow them passively and read their ideas.
Because their ideas and conversations are shaping your mind and making you less mentally free.
That is why, when you have a solution A and you read someone else's "better" solution B, for the same problem, you will often be tempted to alter your solution.
That might be a good thing, if their solution is truly better. But it means that you now have the same solution and nobody will have a choice of solutions.
What if someone comes along later and they have a problem that would have been solved by your "worse" solution? We will never know because you never built it.
This is how innovation dies a thousand deaths.
I‘m not sure if I got your point. But isn‘t the centralization of know-how a side-effect of specialization and therefore civilization itself? Like the internet: designed for decentralization but ended up hyper-centralized?
Yes, but each new centralization quickly begins to atrophy and opens up a market.
Centralization is merely the formation of a new hierarchy.
Additionally, it is important to differentiate between a true technical advancement and mere gatekeeping or patenting.
For instance, Google's clean search page and page-ranks were innovations.
Allowing Google to dominate search results for decades was gatekeeping.
Everyone at the top of a hierarchy should have to fight to stay there.
From the moment they sit down on the throne, someone should be storming the castle. The competition should be constant and relentless.
Capitalism is red in tooth and claw.
I like this metaphor.
It also makes it clear why the system is so unpopular, with those at the top seeking a modern-day Licence to Crenellate and royal help suppressing peasant uprisings
Yes, but rebel groups invariably create a new state and the head of that new state should sleep as unsoundly as the head of the last one.
I'm with Machiavelli - a wise Prince should destroy ALL the castles in his realm unless he already fears The People more than invaders.
Any organisation large enough to demand public oversight to protect investors from their hired managers is a castle in need of demolition.
