Very good, clear thinking here. The point about being design-led is very important -- usability and user experience is paramount and is the main area where OSS

Very good, clear thinking here. The point about being design-led is very important -- usability and user experience is paramount and is the main area where OSS has failed. Still, I think you're going to need businesses around this. Many things are simply far too hard and resource-intensive for hobbyists and small indy projects, and not everything can be made completely distributed without sacrificing usability. (See: CAP theorem) What we really need are a new breed of Internet businesses with business models that put the user first (again), businesses whose model is not surveillance or "eyeball farming" but delivering value to the primary customer. I also think that such businesses will need, to have such credibility, strong legal statements of privacy and user-control in their EULAs. Being open source is also a good thing, and is not mutually exclusive with having a business model.