[danans]

I don't think the problem is that FOSS (as a movement) can't accomplish what proprietary software does. For a while, some FOSS software did address certain user needs better than proprietary software.

But the world of proprietary software (including permissively licensed open source software) just moved faster, because its associated business models gave it the money, incentives, and the early signals needed to attack problem spaces in human-computer-interaction and secure, managed application platforms, among other things, that FOSS didn't have the resources to address, and so it just fell behind in key areas relevant to users.

We just don't know what the FOSS movement could have achieved given similar resources (or how it would have gotten those resources in the first place without a business model), or a lot more time.