This quote is particularly biting:

"It became clearer than ever to me that while Linux and FOSS had won the battle over the tech giants a decade before, new ones had taken their place in the meantime, and we were letting them win."

It's true. We won it all, but we somehow still lost, and that's a difficult and sad thing to realize. Even though FOSS ate the world, we didn't win software freedom, we just enabled a bunch of new tech giants to put us into consumer roles with little to no freedom once again.

I think the wins of the open camp are real and tangible and they powerfully shape the industry. Android is free precisely because an open kernel is available that could empower a competitor. Google is absolutely paranoid about this possibility, and is severly limited in the Microsoft-esque moves they can make.

I think what precludes the final victory of open source is that the world itself changed for the better. The mobile and web revolution brought easy to use software into the hands of billions. These are people who wouldn't have been able to touch a PC twenty years ago, let alone understand or care about what source code is. They have vastly different expectations than the professional software users that created the free source movement in the image of the hackers of the 70s and 80s. Just look at the number of rooted phones sold. It's an appliance model of computing.

In this new consumer environment, the free source development model is less adequate and cannot compete with commercial software that can directly monetize the apps and invest in further development. What is required, I think, is to update the free software philosophy to the 21st century, and relax some of the ideological goals to facilitate development and reach the more substantial goals, like privacy and security.

The walled gardens of Google and Apple can be replicated. What is lacking is a free software business model that can gather the $1 billion or so required.

> I think the wins of the open camp are real and tangible and they powerfully shape the industry.

Outside mobile: Linux (the OS not the kernel) won the web.

Way back in the 'Linux on the desktop' days, KDE needed something like gtkhtml so KDE made KHTML and Konqueror. Apple needed a web browser and couldn't make one from scratch, so webkit was forked from KHTML. Chrome needed to fork webkit so made blink. Edge adopted blink too.

KDE's code is now in Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The only major web browser not containing it is Firefox (which is also OSS). That's AMAZING.

While I agree with you, it’s also sad that what was formerly community-controlled got more and more taken over by corporations until now Google has practically complete control over Blink. It’s open source, but the community hasn’t made it.

Google open-source projects have a strong tendency toward not building outside of an internal Google build environment and they'll pretty much just be like, "Whups! Nobody works on this who doesn't work at Google, so we very commonly break the build." ChromiumOS suffers from this a lot and it's like, unclear that they are even really adhering to the licenses for the upstream FOSS they include and depend on, but who even has the time to challenge them?

Reminds me of the 90s when RedHat's source CD wouldn't actually build their binary distro, but since almost noone ever tries, almost noone cares.