The essential problem is gatekeeping. Any commercial business uses money as a means of getkeeping what it uses (buys). This works well to reduce and so contro

The essential problem is gatekeeping. Any commercial business uses money as a means of getkeeping what it uses (buys). This works well to reduce and so control the purchases of chairs, desks, external consultancies and proprietary software. We all know the horrors and pain of trying to raise a PO to get a license for a really useful / necessary piece of software. I fundamentally guarantee that if React needed a 0.01 cent license for every internal and external installation it would have four users globally. FOSS short circuits this gatekeeping function - and it is only popular because it is hard to keep track of and easy to load up npm and grab 900 libraries. Imagine there was a FOSS plug-in everyone used, call it mothership that on every install (and indeed invocation) it routed back a simple packet to say "i am alive and used on this machine in this domain in this company" (let's call it a common piece of config like git email config) Immediately every legal department would soil their pants and internal software development would grind to a halt - or FOSS developers would be able to charge decent value for their work - or some ecosystem of foss-aggregators would spring up providing licensed, limited installs and support and legal protection. Personally I am in favour of the last option - for each product a series of (local) companies could club together and provide support for each other's code bases, (if you use my react-foobar I will license company X to indemnify you - sort of approved vendors schemes) I struggle to see many better ways Edit: Andressen was slightly wrong - FOSS is going to eat the world. And as such it's production will be a public good - paid for out of taxpayer money and directed as such - either as a utility through regulation or as science through funding only the brightest. And the big question remains - if we could see the whole stack easily, and if it all was priced at the minimum wage for every developer in the stack how much would it be? Would anyone pay it? Or worse, would they realise they did not need all those in-house developers anymore as they are all running "libBusiness.py" and it all kind of fits together. Or as is more likely - will we see lots of companies like redhat, that produce a "bank/airline/retailer in a box" - and the internal teams are focused on that 5% of USP? I am not sure I understand that world - but I also do not think I currently could select correctly all the FOSS packages needed to build that stack that can just run a business. Trust me it does not look like the openERP style stacks. at all.