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Lovely essay.

Agreed, I wish I could write like that. :-/

So this past year we've witnessed the demise of a major tech company that placed its bets on open source approach like none other before it. Yet it met its demise as none of these open source efforts on multiple fronts bore sufficient fruit to enable the company to be independently viable.

The company that has absorbed them is one of the most successful in the world today and relies for the nearly all of its revenue to be generated from proprietary software.

All the significant open software rides on the coattails of sponsoring companies that make their revenue in other areas. What independent open source software companies that are independent and attempt to subsist on open source software generated revenue are under a definite threat of being undermined as other, larger companies erode their business.

Open source is wielded by some companies as a tool to erode the business of their competitors - the so-called Craigslist Effect. It's also analogous as to how Toshiba one time attempted to undercut US RAM chip manufacturers by dumping memory chips at below cost as a means to steal market share. Open source is frequently used to the same purpose (i.e., Google vs. Microsoft). When hardware companies use such tactics, it lead to government legal intervention. Yet when it is done in the software arena, it's heralded under the virtue of being open source. And besides we all hate the capitalist companies that generate revenue from their software employees.

Bottom line is open source software is great for companies that do not either derive their business from software, or else are companies that are already very large and powerful and use open source software as a means to undermine their competitors in strategic ways via the Craigslist Effect.

they wont let us give those chips for free, so your argument is invalid.