| We'll get there. We're very close actually. We took a huge hit in the 1990s when Bill Gates use chilling effects to try to own the software industry. The web finally recovered with things like Chrome that got browser competition going again, and Facebook Apps that reminded us we can make our own stores and ecosystems of import. The next big hit setback was the cloud transition. Servers are just super useful and they are orders of magnitude harder to administer than a PC. This consolidated power amongst sysadmins (and away from users and coders). That has driven the slide back towards proprietary web apps. But we have been slowly chipping away at the complexity differential between administering a server and using a laptop. See Heroku, etc. We're not there but we're very close to the world where you can spin up a server as easily as you download apps. Then of course the most recent hit is Apple and the App Store. We eealized there is some value to having a trusted third party curate a collection of software. And again, we don't have tools to allow people to do that in a decentralized way, but we'll get there. The question to me is: will free software always be playing catch up? Is this a forever thing? I think no: it's a disruptive technology with an inherent differentiating factor (access by default, vs paywall by default). I think we're still getting to feature parity with the proprietary development culture, but when we do I think the fortunes of centralized/decentralized will reverse. But we'll see! 2043 at the latest, if anyone wants to wager. |