Software developers never took Richard Stallman’s communism seriously.

Open source has primarily been a way for software developers to commoditize their complements. Instead of paying rent seekers for fundamental building blocks, it made more strategic sense to build dependencies in an open way so nobody could be leveraged while building more specialized software.

15 years ago I swore I’d never again build software I own on proprietary platforms I have no control over. The 15 years prior to that I had been rugged at least 3 different times by a vendor deciding the proprietary platform I built on was no longer worth supporting.

Luckily, enough open source software existed by that time to make my new open source only strategy viable. Linus Torvalds did more good for the world than Bill Gates ever will.