Ethernet just celebrated its 40th birthday and its history is arguably a better analog for bitcoin and the alts than say myspace versus facebook. It was up against Big Blue's token ring and IBM was the Fed of the computer industry at the time. IBM even commissioned professors to write papers suggesting that ethernet wasn't feasible for commercial use, but happily ethernet eventually won over and it marked the first major kick in the nuts for IBM's influence and hegemony (Microsoft and Compaq later took out further chunks). Ethernet was also a decentralized architecture and beyond interacting with the layers below and above it, it didn't care much about anything. It just provided a solid and pervasive framework. Open source didn't really exist back then and ethernet was licensed but it was much cheaper than token ring. The major reason ethernet prevailed was because it was up against only IBM and there wasn't much else in the way of noise. In a way, I think Bitcoin could have benefitted from a more restrictive licensing agreement, whilst still remaining open source. Sidechain developments may indeed be complementary but the alts are mostly an expensive and divisive distraction imo, even though there are some very promising ideas.