Ah, I remember reading more or less the same exact thing on /. in 1992, the first (among many) Year of the Linux Desktop. The intervening, holy crap, 32 years

Ah, I remember reading more or less the same exact thing on /. in 1992, the first (among many) Year of the Linux Desktop. The intervening, holy crap, 32 years have shown that open source is awesome when it scratches a developer/sysadmin itch and your primary customer base are devs/sysadmins. As soon as you want to sell to average Joe users, you need PMs, and UX people, and testers, etc, and the OSS business models have in fact never achieved to get those in the picture: not once in 32 years, an entire generation. In fact, 32 years later I would go as far as to say that Microsoft has been deviously clever in promoting Open Source as its Great Enemy, the Nemesis that will bring it down. And while we were all busy promoting Libre Office and what have you, Lotus died, Ami Pro died, Word Perfect died. I.e. commercial companies with half a chance to be actual, true, competition. Open Source will not kill Microsoft. Better commercial software is the only thing that can.