[smokel]

Some things do indeed improve, but some other things require a massive effort that no hobbyist or small company can make happen.

This is most obvious in places where a lot of coordination is required, for example in supporting proper color correction throughout all applications, or decent support for advanced printer functions.

There are many incremental changes, but we often get stuck in local minima for years.

Still, I personally like that one can (relatively) easily watch what happens under the hood. It's not entirely clear to me why Windows and MacOS must remain closed source.

[inigyou]

Because if it's open source you can't make money from it or have multiple tiers.

[alightsoul]

If it's open source you can make money by selling managed services to companies. They don't want to deal with it really.

[inigyou]

How is Red Hat's revenue compared to Microsoft's?

[alightsoul]

Are we sure it's because they have closed source as a moat, or because they have the first mover advantage? I would say it's the latter because every single one of their products has fully functional, feature complete competitors even open source ones. Like apache superset and postgres

[esseph]

Are you sure you want to put Microsoft on any kind of pedestal?

[achenet]

if your sole goal is making money, yes, because Microsoft have actually done a pretty good job of making money, even if that's generally at the cost of the well-being of people using their software.

[preisschild]

Not directly from it, but from the products you build on top. See Valve's use of Linux for example.