Comment by jussij

I think one of the side effects of Open Source has been the devaluation of source code. Many decades ago, Microsoft destroyed the IBM PC by licensing their source code to other hardware manufacturers. Not only did that destroyed the power of IBM hardware, but it also allowed smaller hardware players like Dell to enter the hardware market and defeat hardware giants like IBM. Move on to the present day and software is no longer the king it once was, only because the major players like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon etc now all tend to use the same Open Source software. However, they now run that common code on proprietary hardware systems meaning we have come full circle where hardware is once again the king of the castle, and the real money is the hardware and not the software. And the real problem is, unlike earlier times when a small players like Dell could take on massive players like IBM, these days with hardware once again king, it now requires high levels of capital to compete.