> companies like Apple and Google to have the 15-20 years required to build empires on top of the work of open source developers Well, apple built on top of Fr

> companies like Apple and Google to have the 15-20 years required to build empires on top of the work of open source developers Well, apple built on top of FreeBSD instead - which already existed and worked great. And Microsoft - the most important competitor 20 years ago - just happily built their own competing implementation of … well, everything. The moat wasn’t effective long before Google and cloud services took over. The lack of forsight around needing gpl3 was just a nail in the coffin.