[pwang]

I was first annoyed at the amateur level of analysis in this piece. "Um, it's 2018, open source software runs production workflows in every single business; if you don't realize yet that every industry in the world is being reduced to becoming a commodity machine to run business rules & agreements as fluid software, then you're about 5 years behind the curve."

Then I realized it was written by Bill effing Gates. And that made me feel sad.

Firstly, because Bill is smarter than this. His lack of awareness of just how pressing this phenomenon is, indicates that he's either had his head in the sand, or the intellectual circles he swims in hasn't been ringing the alarm bells about this. (See my essay on the Changing Nature of Scarcity: https://medium.com/@pwang/the-changing-nature-of-scarcity-fc...)

Secondly, because of the irony. Bill Gates made his fortune having created a business around selling software. It would be good for him to review John Perry Barlow's "Selling Wine Without Bottles": https://www.eff.org/pages/selling-wine-without-bottles-econo...

As the world's first and most successful wine bottler, billg might find this perspective illuminating.

[ethbro]

YMMV, but aside from anyone that started in the Google & Facebook area, huge swaths of the economy are still dominated by closed source software.

From personal experience, this covers: any kind of software-driven hardware, health care, tax, CAD, POS, finance, transportation, & retail.

They're changing. But I'd estimate most Top 500 companies are at 0-25% open source migration of core business processes.