There are many examples of competition between in the OSS world. Desktop environments, database engines, programming languages, text editors.
The author of vim told me that at one point he felt pretty content with the program and had not been changing much for a number of years. Then some other guy took on a very active development of another vi clone (forgot the name, sorry) and this gave Bram the incentive to speed up and add many new features to vim. So in this case the competition was beneficial, and I expect that it usually is.
And BTW I don't think competition in science is primarily driven by funding. You need little or no funding for theoretical physics, and yet they're as competitive as anyone or more. The main reason for the very fierce competition in science IMO is that the number of tenured positions is very small compared to the number of PhD graduates. You have to be better than the other guy or else you can kiss your academic career goodbye.
The author of vim told me that at one point he felt pretty content with the program and had not been changing much for a number of years. Then some other guy took on a very active development of another vi clone (forgot the name, sorry) and this gave Bram the incentive to speed up and add many new features to vim. So in this case the competition was beneficial, and I expect that it usually is.
And BTW I don't think competition in science is primarily driven by funding. You need little or no funding for theoretical physics, and yet they're as competitive as anyone or more. The main reason for the very fierce competition in science IMO is that the number of tenured positions is very small compared to the number of PhD graduates. You have to be better than the other guy or else you can kiss your academic career goodbye.