Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

What's interesting is that the 4 markets that the article listed have reached commodity status so we can infer that open source dominates once the market reaches the point that there is insufficient profit in the mass market for proprietary solutions to dominate. See the Java IDE market as another example.

(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 ?

Why does it have be a war? Why is open source only considered a success if it drives proprietary software out of business?

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?

Huh. I'm quite fond of my Galaxy S3, but I've got to admit that latency is often an issue for me. Perhaps it depends on what apps you've got going in the background?

We will NEVER win the FREE software war, no matter how many battles we have won or will win. It will all be irrelevant, as long as the current economic, Geo-political paradigms (central banking model) are in place, then Free/Open Software will never grew to its' maximum effectiveness.

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.

The behavior in the node community as you have described can be taken as an example of just how community-minded FOSS developers naturally become, and not necessarily even slightly out of some sense of geek-altruism. The choice to support the FOSS community or more closed-source development is as clear-cut to developers as choosing between a lush rain forest or bio-domes scattered throughout the desert.

Imagine a world where every developer learns to program using open source tools and has participated in one open source community prior to college or on-the-job training. Does any individual developer choose to use closed source and become embedded in a bio-dome where their capability to survive is permanently bound to the decisions of the bubble around them? Does any manager of developers expect to be able to direct developers to do this? Does any executive expect to retain even part of their personnel by telling them to willfully extract themselves from the rich ecosystem in which such demands cannot be made of them?

Let's take OpenGL vs Direct X for example. MS says, "Learn Direct X or else your games are doomed to only use 50% of the display's luminosity range!" This is obviously crap, and MS will make tons of moves specifically to implement their software as a yoke upon developers captured by their tool-chain treadmill. You like Active X. You really do, and because you've learned to use it, now you will have a little sign on your website that tells people that IE is required to use your government service. You will specify it in job ads. You will recommend it as a developer, a manager, an executive, a South Korean politician. Your investment will chain you, your users, perhaps your entire country to tribute payments.

Oh, the company can make money. So can the developers, and there is no union necessary because there are no scabs, no hard manufacturing assets, or any other reason other than entrenched, slowly eroding fiefdoms that can convince developers to choose the bio-dome over the rain forest. Corporate, closed-source software development is in a quite precarious arrangement compared to manufacturing and amorphous labor. This is true, even withstanding the still-entrenched gorillas like Apple, MS, Oracle, Google, etc etc etc.

The point of this is that if everyone develops with FOSS first, get ready to see major hemorrhaging of anachronistic bio-domes until their glass is shattered and the ecosystem thrives straight through them. This is bigger than web. Imagine how many wasted resources will be recovered and how productive new companies can be.

This is a quite attractive future depending on who you are. Web can't take us there. Web is not the thing that breaks down all walls. Mozilla can try and try and try. Web is always going to be waiting on standards while other programmers just do, no call for comments required.

The other thing I'm getting at is that web is not a primary indicator of the growth of FOSS because not everyone who uses web has access to the tools that can be used to create web. Web is more Gutenberg Bible than printing press. You need access to the press to become more than just a consumer of the fruit.

In the sense that drawing nascent developers, before they even think of programming, into the FOSS community, forever freeing them from the illusion that rowing the monopolist corporate bireme is a necessary part of life, what Valve and Crytek are doing by improving their strategic relationship with FOSS might as well be the invention of artillery in a land of castles. Linux as a gaming platform fuels a new wave of Linux users with a strong propensity to find joy in programming, the users most likely to become developers. What's going on in gaming on Linux is what leads humanity to a FOSSier world. Valve is one of the rare companies that is in position to push this change and benefit if this change becomes reality.