All I see with the FOSS ecosystem is it picking up steam at an extraordinary pace from 2005. Postgres in particular has absolutely dominated its incumbents in recent times, an insane reversal from the situation at the turn of the millennium.
There's a guarantee of correctness, availability of auditability, and a tide of slow, iterative improvements.
The key is supply and demand.
Open source software is often not a trailblazer. Open source is often reactive to a need, and punctuated by a demand for quality, bad treatment by the commercial incumbent, and constant iterative improvement.
See the pattern of so many technologies, Docker following VM ware, open source databases following Oracle (1980s Oracle was a real pioneer).
Open source has always and will continue to be a slow rolling borg that chases commercial software. Projects will never be rushed, but the benefits of an open base has time and time again crushed closed source incumbents.
Very sad if this ever comes to pass. It's a world in which I would never have learned about computers or decided to work with them. I think it makes more sense to charge big companies but keep software free and libre for individuals.
(I don't think this future will happen though: I think it's based on a deep misunderstanding of what drives FOSS developers to do what they do).
- OSS allowed an entire industry to flourish,
- It has had so many contributions that it is easily the category which is the biggest benevolence of the world, and possibly the biggest achievement of humanity,
- It allowed the entire world to go securely on the internet (launch a Debian and it’s secure and up to very high professional standards without effort, try doing that in the legal field),
- Its results are permanent. In 2100, documents written in Office 365 or Adobe will be lost, but they’ll be able to recompile LibreOffice, Chrome (at least Webkit) or Wordpress. Benefits of OSS accrue over time, as opposed to closed-source software which is sold under closed license and DRM.
In practice, I think that only entirely cloud based ecosystems will be lost to time. As long as the requisite hardware can be emulated and there is an archived version of a local viewer, it's possible to interpret a closed source format document. People already do it with WordStar and retro games.
I agree, but how do you distinguish between the two, and how do you make the source available yet compel large companies to pay?
Most of us work at such high levels of abstraction we couldn't even name all our dependencies. Which in effect makes us the same sort of consumers app users are: expecting a lot out but not putting anything in.
I think mobile was a reprieve for commercial software and UX specialists and the increasingly negative comments on new OS versions indicate it is close to done like desktop.
For every user that likes a change there are 19 that prefer the flow they already learned to stay exactly the same and at least half are looking for exploitive attempts to modify their behavior in anything a publisher changes.