Competition is a zero-sum game, it only makes losers.

With corporation you need to have some competition if you want to keep their power in check, but their shareholders understand that it only weaken them (that's why M&A are so ubiquitous).

But for open-source, it's pure deadweight loss.

I disagree. Without competition, open source or otherwise, there is very little reason for a popular project to keep improving and innovating.

Vim isn't made weaker by emacs, or vice versa, quite the opposite. Neither can rest on their laurels. That's very good.

> I disagree. Without competition, open source or otherwise, there is very little reason for a popular project to keep improving

This is a very common worldview nowadays, in fact it's probably the core tenet of the contemporary credo[1], but that's also an extremely narrow view of human psychogy: humans routinely seek to achieve the best they can do without any kind of competition.

Worse, with competition people tend to optimize for the specific metric the competition is about, and everything end up looking the same (from movies to retail product, that's the ”ice cream vendor paradox”), if you want to explore the entire problem espace you need to remove competition and let people set their own goals. Competition is also only a stimulation when you're in a good position to win, otherwise the desperation faced when you only have very little chances of winning is very likely to destroy your motivation (the school system is extremely prone to this phenomenon, and so is competitive cycling).

In fact, since there's almost never a reward, the vast majority of open-source products exist solely because their creator wanted it to exist, and they are maintained because their creator just want their creation to be perfect.

Oh, and by the way, biological evolution isn't about competition either, that was just Victorian England elite projecting their worldviews on a biological phenomenon: species don't want to win anything[2], some “packs of genes” just happen to be more suited to persist over time than others.

[1] even above the “myth of Progress”, which is currently being challenged by the "myth of the golden age"/ “myth of Decadence”

[2] “species” don't even exist in the real world, it's just a simplifying (and useful) model of the world (if you're interested in learning more about that, look for “Beefalo” and “pan-genome”.