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by ActorNightly 2444 days ago
The majority of web servers that serve all the web content that you use are Linux based.

Some of the most popular video games that have massive markets and revenues behind them (CounterStrike and moba games) have all started out as free mods to existing games.

The largest share of the worlds smartphones run Linux.

Twitch streamers, some of which make extremely high salaries, use open source broadcasting software

Python is now becoming the de-facto language of scientific computing, with all the major libraries available for free.

You are greatly discounting how much open source software has affected, and more importantly changed the direction of bought software.

1 comments

I don't think anybody is doubting about the huge impact of open source in science and technology, is more that maybe linux is still not a substitute for some commercial products
But...it very much is if you are looking at software that falls under the group of "operating systems".

There are use cases that realistically warrant enterprise software, but those stem from the argument of optimization of time - for example, not doing all your computation stuff in python with spending upfront time learning it when you engineers know Matlab. But those are not intrinsic to the software, it just so happens that Mathworks funds universities and pushes their product to be taught in classes, so that they can get revenue from companies buying licenses when their engineers enter the workforce.

If colleges switched to teaching with open source software, this would have zero net effect on the capability/knowledge of someone that graduates said program, because all the material is going to be new to him or her anyways. And, it would also increase the userbase of the software, and thus improve it.