Web is mostly a distraction for proponents of FOSS. Web developers consume the foundation of FOSS and, without moving past web development, cannot contribute to that foundation. I don't honestly look to domination of web software components as a source of open source growth or an indicator of open source health. Web developers are users and FOSS is powered by developers.

Put more stock in Valve and Crytek's long-term influence on developers using Linux to game on. They subsequently can learn to program Linux, and that's way more influential than 99% of the garbage out there about web being some egalitarian magic kingdom where open source and individuals can thrive, so there. Gaming is one of the last great bastions of totally proprietary software platforms where users with the natural propensity to do so do not eventually become developers.

I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.

On a less provocative note, I don't understand the argument about web apps. There's tons of FOSS web application frameworks and widget toolkits, and the web is slowly conquering the desktop, for better or for worse. Has it not dominated?

I hate apple, and I hate that I'm giving them my money, but just the latency issue alone is enough for me to give up on Android.

Help me Mozilla, you are my only hope.

Open Source Software is there because somebody is writing it, software isn't going to write itself. And mostly it's alive not (at least "not only") because somebody is financing it, but because there are people that both can and want to write it. And, oh, I should've said "make", not "write", because making it is so much more than just writing it. Especially when we talk about general purpose client-side apps author cares about so much.

And here we have problems with both "can" and "want". Generally, people that are actually able to write software prefer slightly different stuff from your "typical end user". Actually I don't know a single browser that I would still like and it's pretty obvious that your "typical user" won't be so much delighted by my beloved CLI apps.

But what really makes me sad is that "can" problem. There might be enough of those who can do some simple coding in community, but it still takes large company to hire somebody who will cooperate with programmers to make beautiful design for their app or some folks that can do some serious math/programming. FOSS apps still generally suck in terms of UX and visual design (at least for that typical end-user). There's no FOSS that could compete against Photoshop or Cubase or be even close to quality of Google's text-to-speech services.

Of course there's no one to blame except ourselves, but if you want to see the problem — here it is. It's about us improving our skills to be able to build something outstanding, to build it for free and make it open source.

In smaller countries like Scandinavia centralization works VERY well. That is due to their homogeneous nature. In US, we may require something decentralized and more resilient model to have the Free/Open Source software movement. Something where people have incentive to work on good software without wanting to get bought out by the next google or facebook.

(If you are playing in the high end of the market and can bring something other than technology to the fight, quality, user experience, ease of use for example then proprietary can keep a foothold).

So the question then becomes can the other layers become commoditized to the point that Open source wins out in those ?

If people want to choose to view the tech world through a filter that projects everything into some open source vs. proprietary software conflict, fine. There are many such filters though.

Someone could have a similar filter that only cares about vertical vs. horizontal integration. It might even be instructive! Microsoft was on top of their game in the '80s and '90s because they had the right business model (horizontal integration- sell the OS and have everyone else make the hardware it runs on and the apps that run on top of it). Other companies have more recently had more success with a more vertically integrated approach, where the hardware and the software are explicitly designed with each other in mind to maximize things like performance, power management, size, shape, and UX of the resultant products.

As things like the mobile industry continue to evolve, we may be moving back into an era where horizontal integration becomes dominant again. And maybe that will lead to another era where it goes back to being dominated by vertical. Who knows. But at no point did vertical or horizontal ever "win" (although plenty of pundits said it did in the '90s), and there is no endgame where one does. It's just a pendulum that swings back and forth. If it ever stops, that means that the entire industry has ground to a halt.

The exact same things can be said about open source vs. proprietary, including the fact that the two are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of things have open source as well as proprietary components, and plenty of companies have some mix of vertical and horizontal integration. I'm not saying these perceived dualities in our industry are comparable, as they describe very different things, only that describing it as a war with an ultimate winner or loser is futile for the exact same reasons.

People should absolutely love open source and be inspired to be proponents of it wherever possible, but I always take great exception to philosophies like RMS', which seem less about emphasizing a particular set of virtues (freedom, openness, sharing, etc.) and much more about demonizing something else. RMS' life goal is not to promote free software, it's to destroy proprietary software. Do what you do because you love something, not because you hate the opposite of that thing. That always leads down very unfruitful paths, including casting everything in binary terms and thinking about things like imaginary battles and wars instead of simply doing great things in the manner that most inspires you and encourages others.

Don't get me wrong. I love open-source. I've been using and contributing to it for 15 years. But to me, success is having a high-quality product, a vibrant ecosystem surrounding it and an active, engaged community using and contributing to it.

As long as all those things are true, who cares what everybody else does?

Truism. I believe in it.