Comment by stingraycharles

> What picture does this paint? Things programmers care about directly, like the OS and the kernel, are quite well covered. Whatever we need, there's an open version.

I think this is the wrong conclusion. It’s rather the opposite: when there’s money to be made (applications, device drivers), businesses have came in and managed to dominate it with proprietary versions (music, video, etc).

When they don’t, it’s because of strategic business interests: you’re probably going to want to make your programming language open source in order to gain developer interests, but the applications you make on top of that closed source.