I think the impact of OSS is much smaller now that most people use their devices as web browsers to interact with cloud applications. It's still important, but just a small part of the puzzle, rather than a game changer like it was before in the times of doing most activities through desktop applications.
Quite the contrary. The browsers people use are largely based upon open source engines. The cloud applications people used are built upon ecosystems of highly successful open source projects. Basically every major web development framework is open source.
The role of open source has shifted, but it's more important than ever.
That's why you start hearing FLOSS talking from governments: these days FLOSS does not means FLOSS but being able to grab free code to serve jails to end users... Proprietary development model is not sustainable anymore, and IT giants have found the way to sell mainframe-alike systems where the users just get dumb terminals, than they push FLOSS.
Today we not only need mandatory FLOSS in the public administration: we need a public IT development that push back the classic desktop model against the worst-than-classic-mainframes cloud model, starting forbidding certain web services for the public administration and reaching the point of forbidding modern web at a whole.
All the core software and much of the tooling running cloud infrastructure is OSS. The browsers are OSS. The allowable space for proprietary software has shrunk significantly.
> The allowable space for proprietary software has shrunk significantly.
Not really. It has just shifted.
All the proprietary software we use today are through various SaaS offerings. And that these are built on an OSS base and freeloading off all the work and effort invested by volunteers into OSS software-components is not something that you as a user get to benefit from.
While not illegal or a license-violation in itself, it does strike me as somewhat immoral.
I just started working for a small SaaS company that uses open source extensively, and I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand I agree that we are "standing on the shoulders of giants" or perhaps "freeloading" by using this software to support a proprietary solution. On the other, this is far from glamorous SV software development - it's run on a little more than a shoestring and the product is fairly small and reasonably priced, so in a sense, we're using open source to serve customers very productively by focusing only on a narrow solution for them.
This is exactly one of the things the FSF tried [1] for more than a decade at least. It is very good to promote free and open source software in the public sector, but it seems that legislators are again late on the issue (and incidentally that Stallman was again early).
We wouldn't have cloud applications without open source software: FOSS software underpins everything and the reason for its success is that there is no fee, it's just free and easy to use. It's as if sugar and flour was free for the food industry.
