if your competitors can't sell your product, it isn't open source.
Gimp isn’t better than Photoshop.
LibreOffice isn’t better than Office.
Kdenlive isn’t better than DaVinci Resolve/Adobe Premiere/Final Cut Pro.
Heck, a whole lot of I know consider IntelliJ a whole lot better than VSCode.
Open source isn’t really guaranteed to compete with proprietary software and often doesn’t.
The author calls that fracture, but to me an open source product with extensions will logically have both proprietary paid extensions and open source extensions, just like there are vendors who sell closed-source software for Linux.
If I sell my proprietary application for Linux and I only distribute it for Ubuntu, that doesn’t make Linux “not really open source.”
In my opinion that is normal and expected and isn’t cause for alarm.
Open-source software has pretty comprehensively replaced proprietary software throughout the computing stack over the last 30 years mostly by being vastly better. Proprietary software is holding onto footholds in a few places, most of which you listed.
The general strategy for preventing the situation where "an open source product with extensions will logically have both proprietary paid extensions and open source extensions" is copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL.
That means companies will be, regardless of the desire otherwise, forced into proprietary models, and proprietary development will continue to be the most effective way to put food on the table.
Open source will forever be a niche volunteer thing plus some predatory abuse by monopolies because the OSI is not interested in open source being the default way to make software.
The OSI's definition of open source was worked out in the 1990s and has changed almost not at all. That stability in the meaning of "open source" (or "OSI-approved", if you want to be precise) is a good thing. If you want to experiment with software licenses that (like open source) don't lock the user in or that (like open source) allow forking, but that are better than open source at allowing the maintainer to earn money, then please do -- just don't call your experiment open source. Coin another term.
It is not some awful tragedy that those who want to experiment with software licenses cannot use the reputation of the "open source" label to market their offerings.
Parenthetically, "nice volunteer thing" is not an accurate description of AOSP, Chromium, Firefox and most Linux desktop software.
All exploitative projects entirely funded and mostly operated by a monopoly found violating the law or awaiting judgment for such in almost every single first world jurisdiction.
Also neither AOSP nor Chromium are used in the real world in practice, over 99.99% of users use proprietary forks.
In other words, thank you for supporting my statement entirely.
> Linux desktop software
Yeah, definitely "not niche".
I didn't think it needed spelling out, but OK: GrapheneOS would not exist if AOSP didn't have an open-source license. Electron, Microsoft Edge and Brave browser wouldn't exist if Chromium hadn't been released on open-source terms.
Surely it is not your claim that because Google has done bad things, nothing that Google has ever done has ever been positive?
Going back to your previous comment, where you write, "the OSI is not interested in open source being the default way to make software."
Do you actually believe that if the OSI had been smarter or more ethical or had listened to your advice (sent back in time perhaps) then open source might have become the default way to make software?
I consider it obvious that that was never a possibility.
> GrapheneOS would not exist if AOSP didn't have an open-source license
First, Graphene OS is used by... less than 0.01% of Android users, so again, thank you for confirming my point. Furthermore, GrapheneOS is harmful for the ecosystem. Similar to VSCode, proprietary services are essentially gated out from alternatives to the default proprietary Android. And the big problem with Graphene and other AOSP forks, is they waste developer effort while protecting monopolies. Every developer-hour wasted on Graphene is a developer-hour not spent on a truly open mobile OS, and that's sad.
> Electron
We could live without it. Nobody needs a whole browser to ship a single page app. But also...
> Microsoft Edge and Brave browser wouldn't exist
So remember that whole part where I said 99.99% of use is the proprietary forks? Edge is, of course, completely proprietary. (Brave is just a cryptocurrency grift, will focus on Edge here.) Microsoft is a monopoly in several respects still, and Edge adds several anti-features like ads on the start page and shopping "features" which collect your shopping behavior. Furthermore, the switch to Chromium for Edge makes the Internet ecosystem worse. Because one of the largest independent web rendering engines disappeared overnight... further contributing to Google's monopoly stranglehold over the web ecosystem, and it's ability to essentially force standards bodies to comply with it's choices or become irrelevant.
> if the OSI had been smarter or more ethical
I think time travel conjecture is sort of pointless, obviously there are dozens of conditions on when good licenses got approved, what projects adopted them, etc. But if SSPL was approved, as the viral copyleft license it is, less open alternatives would evaporate overnight. Without the risk Amazon would lift your product, wrap it in a proprietary platform, and simultaneously undercut you on cost, I think at least for SaaS, there'd be very little reason for a business to launch without providing their code on fair terms.
All that being said, the discourse around the OSI and open source is toxic enough and compromised enough, I think shifting to new terms is ideal anyways. I saw https://fair.io/ "fair source" recently, which seems quite reasonable, though I'd love to also see an expression of it more focused around labor and sustainability in addition to just business case. Developers deserve to get paid for their work, and I feel the primary goal of open source at this point is to cultivate free labor for the tech monopolies backing the OSI.
i think you're missing not only the point but actually reality as a whole