[tsimionescu]

Open source can never "win" a consumer market because a team of engineers is never going to be able to live off of giving away software for free, nor can you sell free software to the public at large. Open source works in B2B contexts because businesses either collaborate on building infrastructure they need to sell their core product, or because you can sometimes sell support and commercial licenses to businesses.

This is precisely why Linux has overwhelmingly won the server market for at least a decade, but it is still a bit player in consumer devices (except Android, which is barely open source and is controlled by a huge corporation selling our data).

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Open source can never "win" a consumer market

Perhaps open source doesn't devalue consumers in a way that they are a thing to be won - not even in aggregate.

The network devices in my home are open source, as is most of the OS. With my customers it's a mix - but where there is open source, it pretty much just works.

Meanwhile, any complaining is typically due to the ongoing poor treatment by Microsoft, Intuit, et al.

[tsimionescu]

> Perhaps open source doesn't devalue consumers in a way that they are a thing to be won - not even in aggregate.

You can win a market, that doesn't mean you're winning the participants. You could at best be winning them over, which is a positive for anyone.

> The network devices in my home are open source, as is most of the OS.

The software on those devices is open source, or in other words, the companies selling your devices are using OSS to power them (or you yourself installed software mostly created for this purpose by similar companies).

[pjmlp]

UNIX has won the server market, Linux happens to make it free beer.

[ffgjgf1]

Open source software is only really widely successful in areas where it’s a cost center rather than the end product, though.