In a way, shareware, public domain and demoware have won, after the FOSS hype cycle, as it appears to be the only way to secure a source of income, and not everything can be done via selling support.
Nah, FOSS is going stronger than ever. But just as before, it's the ones that are playing the 'commodify your complement' game that are winning, while those that think that FOSS by itself is a business model are struggling.
> If big boys take out the funding from key projects, meaning stop paying their employees to contribute, everything would crumble.
What's your point? If Microsoft goes bankrupt, the MS ecosystem would crumble. And so on, ad infinitum. Nothing lasts forever. Since people aren't clairvoyant, they make an effort at evaluating risks vs benefits, and end up continuing to use both MS products and FOSS software.
> Why do they pay? As means to drive ecosystems into the products that actually provide money, like cloud, SaaS and hardware, closed source.
Yes, that's that whole 'commodify your complement' thing I mentioned. But so what? As long as those companies contribute free software that is useful, enjoy the ride. Maybe the current privacy-invading ad funded IT hegemons will fail one day and be replaced by something else, but at least whatever comes next will have a big pool of hopefully useful software to start building on top of.
You think so? I always saw it as Open Source won, and a huge part of it being how RMS is a bit of a repulsive individual even many Free Software proponents are disgusted by. I don't want to sling mud, but some of his stances are not good.
I meant FOSS as in "Free and Open Source Software". Which I would interpret as software licensed under FOSS-compatible licenses, while at the same time not making any statement wrt subscribing to FSF or RMS politics (or RMS opinions on what constitutes rape of a teenager).
So yeah, "Open Source won" is one way of saying it, I suppose.