What else would one expect them to say? "History has shown that open source wins, and we've had a good run and it would come as no surprise were a new low-power architecture end up eating our lunch." ?
> We respect RISC-V and look forward to more competition in the datacenter space. However we are confident that our advanced technology will allow us to maintain our decisive lead in performance, power efficiency and cost.
It's hard to compete with established FOSS, which is why companies tend to embrace and build upon it, strengthening its position even further.
The web stack is full of examples: Web servers*, OBS killing everything else, ActiveX, Flash, Mosaic, and also lots of smaller examples related to how we interact with various file formats/codecs.
If you wanted to start developing a new closed-source web server, streaming software, alternative to ffmpeg, programming language, compiler, browser engine, or even mobile operating system, people would probably call you insane. Trying to beat the open-source incumbents with something closed-source and possibly paid looks impossible.
* I am amazed Microsoft IIS is still barely hanging on.
Your examples are almost entirely focused on the tools to build software, and there open source truly has 'won'. However, what do we all do when we get that tooling? We build SaaS software running on proprietary IaaS cloud environments. The big players know there is no money in proprietary tooling because startups will gravitate to free software. Even then, that is often free as in beer (vscode and chrome spring to mind).
> If you wanted to start developing a new closed-source web server, streaming software, alternative to ffmpeg, programming language, compiler, browser engine, or even mobile operating system, people would probably call you insane.
Absolutely, but people would also call you insane for trying to start a business where you open source your IP.
Honestly I think for consumer level software open source has truly and utterly lost. All consumer operating systems with non-negligible marketshare are proprietary (including android), apps on iOS and android are overwhelmingly closed source, and SaaS is the dominant business model for everything else. Hell, you can't even look at the source code of modern websites without seeing a wall of minified/obfuscated js junk.
All save of the things I listed aren't just a tool used by developers and have user-facing components, but yeah: that's my bubble. However if most of our tools, libraries, and technologies become open source, then inevitably end-user software will become more open-source as well.
> All consumer operating systems with non-negligible marketshare are proprietary (including android)
That's the purist way to look at it. I can understand it when it comes to free-as-in-freedom software vs. proprietary software, but for open source vs proprietary it doesn't make much sense.
It is a sliding scale and it matters how much of the software stack someone is using is open source software. If you open some random "SaaS" website nowadays, most of the code running on your computer will be open source, as will most of the software running on the remote server. The only things that aren't open source will be whatever the SaaS company hacked together on their open source stack, and possibly the operating system your mostly open-source browser is running on. In the case of Android most if not all of the code executing in that moment would be open source as well. Take further apart their JS blobs and it's just 90% libraries they grabbed from NPM. Take apart their server side and it's more of the same.
The point is that the amount of open source code people are running is increasing. Saying "but a lot of software has closed-source parts!" is being blind to the change that occurred.
If you just care about OSS as opposed to FOSS, you likely either care about being able to audit (even crowdsourcing it) what you're running on your computer, or you simply believe that it is the best way to develop software. In recent years we've had both a better shot at auditing what we're running as well increasing collaboration between software developers.
Android ate every other mobile OS excluding iOS, in part because it was OS and close-enough to free for OEMs. I can't even think of a closed-source webserver off-hand. Even the fine people at Redmond had to offer Linux support on Azure. The vast majority of the web runs of FLOSS.
FLOSS wins when working with OEMs. Only with consumers does the new-shiny-proprietary win.
Microsoft IIS? Still about 6% of web servers & in 5th place, according to September 2022 stats. Though that's a huge crash from 2018 when it was the #1 largest share of websites (40%) according to Netcraft.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server
https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/08/24/august-2018-we...
Of course free beer is great for OEMs.
That's presumably why my 2016 Civic used Android under the hood instead of QNX. The latter would be faster and more responsive, but Android is free, easy enough to force into the shape Honda needed, and possibly even gave them an easier time finding people familiar with the more inner workings of the OS.
just go back a few decades and remember people paying for Borland Turbo C. The long arc of history is very clearly bending towards open source software.
If we are talking about tools (programming languages, web frameworks databases) there is little incentive for companies not share their improvements or full projects with everyone if they are not planning to make money from selling it directly. E.g. it’s not like open-sourcing React had any-negative business impact for Facebook, the opposite, people worked for free to improve their internal tools and it made it easier for them to attract new talent.
Google created Android and Chromium because it allowed them to increase their ad-revenue and they made them open-source because it was much cheaper to build top of projects which which already worked. I.e. they gained more by open source software than they lost by giving away their improvements for free, which is fine because they never intend to make money from them directly and having access to the OSS bits didn’t make it that much easier for other companies to compete with Google in the core market.
I don’t see how would this play out with hardware. If you designed a CPU core which is much better than your competitors what would you gain by giving it away? If making chips is not part of your core business and you just want a product which fits your needs better (e.g. equivalent situation of a software company which allows it’s employs to submit patches to Linux/Posgres/etc.) how would you even do that? You don’t have the expertise or equipment needed to produce chips and if you did it meant that you made a significant investment to be in that position and therefore have no incentive to share your improvements with anyone).