I think there are two things driving any perceived slowdown in OSS. One is the economy, and the other is platform changes. A down economy has unusual effects o

I think there are two things driving any perceived slowdown in OSS. One is the economy, and the other is platform changes. A down economy has unusual effects on free time: the less-competent are first to go and most likely to stay unemployed, while the best and brightest will be retained and overworked. This would deprive OSS of much of its premier talent. We are also seeing a major platform shift on lots of fronts; from traditional desktop computing to alternate form factors(phone, tablet), from big iron to commodity computing, and from C, C++ or Java console or WIMP-style apps towards modernized browser apps, which have an increasingly rich set of options for UX. All of this causes a huge upset in the very gradual process of open-source development and encourages a gold rush of low-tech apps that exploit the new platforms. I don't think this leads to a "Long Beard's Revenge" scenario, though, as the next thing that's going to hit the browser, now that it's getting more capable, is to make webapps that are client-heavy and cheap on the back-end. Open-source stacks will correspondingly start building up more heavily on the JS end of things. After some time, we'll see more open-source JS apps. And then who knows what will happen? OSS is perpetually underfunded and overexploited; it's a commons good, after all. And when OSS authors "put themselves out of business" by writing excellent software, they've essentially fulfilled their economic destiny. But I don't think industry is to blame for the particular bias Zed discusses. It goes back to the state of the economy: Income inequality locks people out of open source, as fully participating in it is a luxury of self-actualization, one which takes lots of time and effort. At the same time, if most of the money in the world is sitting on a few rich people, the best way to get their attention as consumers is to make slick toy apps. That is, if things were right with the world, our apps would be extremely boring-looking, very useful and functional, and mostly open-source, because that would mean nobody is feeling pressured to monetize their software.