[jandrewrogers]

Linux leverages ubiquitous disclosure in computer science from decades past. Open source software is largely built on a computer science technology base that, while sufficient, does not reflect many qualitative computer science advances that have been made in the last decade. For software that routinely leverage computer science advances (e.g. databases and parallel systems) you already see a divergence in capability and performance between platforms that are not open source and the open source world because of this lack of knowledge transfer.

Graph analysis platforms are a great example of this. Every open source graph analysis platform is a non-scalable toy that is useless for most real-world use cases compared to private systems that were being quietly deployed five years ago. Why the discrepancy? Because the unpublished algorithms and data structures used by some closed source systems are several orders of magnitude more scalable than is possible with the best existing public algorithms. And this is not the only example with which I am familiar.

The problem open source software has if it is based on increasingly obsolete computer science is that it will not be economically competitive with closed source that is much more scalable and/or much faster and/or has much higher throughput per watt. A combination of materially better capability and efficiency has an enormous impact on CapEx and OpEx, and people care about those kinds of things when it starts adding up to large amounts of money.