You're wrong. TeX had no impact and everyone nowadays in science makes PDFs first and then compiles to TeX only for legacy reasons. Similarly, the public domain

You're wrong. TeX had no impact and everyone nowadays in science makes PDFs first and then compiles to TeX only for legacy reasons. Similarly, the public domain WWW was a good idea but really just cloned AOL.com and I expect AOL to make a comeback soon. The public domain SQLite has had a good run but Oracle now has MySQL and so I expect them to start taking good market share. And I used to work at Microsoft and they had a non-public domain VCS called SourceDepo (sd) that will soon give git a real run for its money.