In the article it mentions the once popular book 'Principles of Leather Tanning'. This probably sold really well but not as well as shoes, belts or other finish

In the article it mentions the once popular book 'Principles of Leather Tanning'. This probably sold really well but not as well as shoes, belts or other finished leather goods. People would probably have at least double the amount of shoes as copies of the book. The book was for the trade audience not the end consumer. Open source is a bit like that. Much like a book has to be read rather than merely used/worn, Open Source Software has to be cloned/forked/apt-get-ed/'make'd and so forth. Now if you were to buy a pair of leather shoes then the particulars of what chemicals and processes were required to tan the leather may well be learned from the 'Principles of Leather Tanning' but tweaked a bit to a proprietary recipe that could be kept 'under wraps'. Regarding the Open Source desktop applications, Libre Office is not a clone of Word/Excel/Access/Powerpoint. Same with Gimp, it is not a feeble clone of Photoshop. These tools may be able to use the same file formats but there is a different ethos to them. For some people the UX of Libre Office is far superior to MS Office - no ribbon and therefore no need to Google search the simplest of tasks. If you are dealing with data - as in CSV files - then OpenOffice is your friend, MS Office just ruins it. This does not affect people doing glorified to-do lists and glorified receipts in Excel but if you are reading in data from some code you have written then OpenOffice is the more productive tool.