There was no battle and there is no war. Different methodologies and philosophies surrounding software development have different pros and cons, which themselve

There was no battle and there is no war. Different methodologies and philosophies surrounding software development have different pros and cons, which themselves change over time as the tech industry changes. If people want to choose to view the tech world through a filter that projects everything into some open source vs. proprietary software conflict, fine. There are many such filters though. Someone could have a similar filter that only cares about vertical vs. horizontal integration. It might even be instructive! Microsoft was on top of their game in the '80s and '90s because they had the right business model (horizontal integration- sell the OS and have everyone else make the hardware it runs on and the apps that run on top of it). Other companies have more recently had more success with a more vertically integrated approach, where the hardware and the software are explicitly designed with each other in mind to maximize things like performance, power management, size, shape, and UX of the resultant products. As things like the mobile industry continue to evolve, we may be moving back into an era where horizontal integration becomes dominant again. And maybe that will lead to another era where it goes back to being dominated by vertical. Who knows. But at no point did vertical or horizontal ever "win" (although plenty of pundits said it did in the '90s), and there is no endgame where one does. It's just a pendulum that swings back and forth. If it ever stops, that means that the entire industry has ground to a halt. The exact same things can be said about open source vs. proprietary, including the fact that the two are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of things have open source as well as proprietary components, and plenty of companies have some mix of vertical and horizontal integration. I'm not saying these perceived dualities in our industry are comparable, as they describe very different things, only that describing it as a war with an ultimate winner or loser is futile for the exact same reasons. People should absolutely love open source and be inspired to be proponents of it wherever possible, but I always take great exception to philosophies like RMS', which seem less about emphasizing a particular set of virtues (freedom, openness, sharing, etc.) and much more about demonizing something else. RMS' life goal is not to promote free software, it's to destroy proprietary software. Do what you do because you love something, not because you hate the opposite of that thing. That always leads down very unfruitful paths, including casting everything in binary terms and thinking about things like imaginary battles and wars instead of simply doing great things in the manner that most inspires you and encourages others.