I agree with the author's concerns. It's a bit unsettling to build upon a closed-source ecosystem, but it's unrealistic to expect the world to work otherwise.

I agree with the author's concerns. It's a bit unsettling to build upon a closed-source ecosystem, but it's unrealistic to expect the world to work otherwise. When people have skills, it's natural and totally understandable that they try and market these skills. It's something they're good at, and that they can make a living off of. I've worked on teams and with groups that use Github and Slack extensively. The reason these services have succeed -- and why they were adopted, at least by the teams I knew -- is because they got their foot in the door early on. Someone was on a payroll, being paid to come up with a good, simple, user interface, a useful feature set, and a decent API. Most OSS projects just don't have the developer base to come up with an idea and develop it to the point where it's a really well-polished piece of software ready for use by even the most tech-illiterate users. Once all of that was invented, it was trivial for just-as-good OSS and self-hosted alternatives to surface. For Slack and Github, those were Rocket.Chat and Gitlab (and more recently, gogs). There's nothing wrong with these services; they mimic their closed-source counterparts really well, and are sometimes even better than them in some respects. They just didn't come into the market at the right time to get the critical mass of users early enough to dominate the market. So TL;DR it's less a problem that closed source G-men are trying to take over the market, and more that developers have to choose between having the free time to come up with an idea and to develop a well-polished OSS app, and spending time having a steady source of income.