““The reason this is a serious issue is that both the pool of users and the pool of talent available to be recruited into open-source cooperation for any given product category is limited, and recruitment tends to stick. If two producers are the first and second to open-source competing code of roughly equal function, the first is likely to attract the most users and the most and best-motivated co-developers; the second will have to take leavings. Recruitment tends to stick, as users gain familiarity and developers sink time investments in the code itself.””
