Depends on your view really. Consumer targeted FOSS has the disadvantage of being harder to monetise directly, you could make (for example) a for-pay Linux dis

Depends on your view really. Consumer targeted FOSS has the disadvantage of being harder to monetise directly, you could make (for example) a for-pay Linux distribution but you will probably just get killed by the free forks. I think Corel Linux , Lindows etc of the past made this mistake. You could monetise by adding "value add" proprietary software to free software, but then you will get to a point where you aren't really any more "open source" than OS X. FOSS where the developer themselves is probably not the end user does tend to suck pretty bad. On the other hand stuff people have built because they were feeling a "pain point" tends to be amazing, if a little quirky. Not every bit of software has to have mass market appeal in order to be good. An example might be something like XMonad which is something that a company like Apple or MS would be very unlikely to fund development of and part of the reason that people love it is probably that it doesn't need a business model to survive.