Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…
> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors Why is that unfortunate? It has enabled a cycle of OSS to user AND OSS to vendor to vendor enrichment to user...since you can always modify the code at will. The best of both worlds, until you get into that special "extension" problem that GPL3 tried to lock down.
Because there will only ever be 3 major multi-billion tech companies that stand to benefit most from OSS.
Because they own their markets, where they can wait to find out what OSS software has become successful and either just profit from it by hosting it directly or invest the paid resources into replicating it - an opportunity and reward not available to anyone else that doesn't have a large cloud market share.
Because they're using their profits (made possible from hosting other's OSS investments) to finance their own OSS investments which will have infinite paid and support resources that Indie OSS developers will be unable to compete against, eventually leading to building a brand where there'll be customers that will only use OSS by the cloud vendors first, since they're commercially backed and dependable.