Competition works because the more successful a company is, the more resources it gets (money from the customers).

If a free Linux distribution is more successful, its resources don't scale accordingly.

Yeah, duplicating/triplicating/n-cating bugs, feature development and support effort, really paid off for the Linux desktop ecosystem. Which year will be the year of the Linux desktop? One, when we get brain to brain communication and abandon desktops entirely?

Cooperation/Symbiosis: win-win

Predation: win-lose

Competition: lose-lose

This is how dynamically coupled systems work.