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.
