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I'm not sure I agree with "proprietary wins" everywhere. It certainly wins in the short term in lots of markets. Anything sold directly to lay users is often dominated by proprietary offerings precisely because of those paychecks: games, "apps", and such. But I can think of a number of markets where "loosely organized volunteers" have mostly-gradually won because the cost of copying software is functionally zero.
Four decades ago you were buying, for any computer you bought, the operating system (even if bundled), a BASIC interpreter, maybe a compiler, and maybe even briefly a TCP/IP stack and a web browser. These days, the open source model has wholesale swallowed some of these markets. We're down to two modern web rendering engine cores: Firefox and Chrome, everything else nontrivial is bolted onto those engines. There are, last I counted, four commonly used compilers for software: msvc, icc, clang, gcc, of which the last two are probably the vast majority of the market and open source. Most devices that aren't Windows PCs (shrinking market) or Apple are running on a Linux kernel, and those that aren't are probably some BSD (or purely embedded). I can't imagine paying to use a programming language these days and I'm pretty sure Matlab and such are losing ground to Python. There also isn't a shortage of academics working with non-proprietary tools and publishing cutting edge, if not generally user friendly, stuff.
IMO the lesson I take from this is that the non-proprietary model can win in the short term, and stay relevant for a long time, but it at least seems to me that even entrenched, expensive professional tools are, slowly, losing ground to free (as in beer, which is coincidentally often as in freedom) alternatives on a more generational time scale: Matlab to Python, with KiCad and Blender as examples of tools I expect to (mostly?) displace commercial alternatives in the next couple decades. As software expectations get more complex, the make-buy calculation changes when "buy" includes leveraging existing non-proprietary offerings. I don't know if I'd completely stan RMS here too, since there are commercial source-available packages (Unreal Engine, for example) that somewhat have a foot in both camps.
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