"if the open source community is so great" if.. i dont see how they can be an if .. it is 100% absolutely great .. with all the great FOSS projects around, how much more evidence do you need

It's because I've been around for a while.

The idea, and failed promise, of FOSS wasn't that there will be many "great FOSS projects around", it was that it will win the desktop (and not just as some FOSS released by some corporate behemoth, but by community -bazaar- FOSS projects).

That, it never did.

And in fact, in all those years, they've failed to even better Photoshop (Gimp is still far behind), MS Office (Open/Libre Office and co), etc and other such basics. Heck, compare GTK/Gnome's latest APIs to something like Cocoa (and even more so with Swift) and weep.

And then SaaS used server-side FOSS to kill the free part behind the service providers server farms. They can use all the FOSS goodies they like, and nobody gets to see their code or change it.

>And in fact, in all those years, they've failed to even better Photoshop (Gimp is still far behind), MS Office

Your memory is selective: they did however, manage to make a better IIS (Apache, Nginx), a better IE (Firefox, Chromium) - even a better System X kernel (BSD as adopted by Apple).

Win some, lose some.

It's not selective: it's specifically about the desktop space. I've mentioned that they did fine on the server.

So, IIS and xBSD etc is out of scope regarding what I've said. I also mentioned explicity community/bazaar projects, in the original FOSS spirit of the late nineties that was said to conquer the world.

As for Firefox and Chrome, both are based from code by big (at least at the time) corporations (Netscape, and Apple, and later Google).

If the latter didn't get involved with Webkit, I don't see us using KHTML 2016 today. As for the former, Mozilla (which begat Firefox) also started with big commercial backing with full time employees from Netscape for several years (until the company burned to the ground), and until today works with mostly paid Mozilla staff, not random community people. It was able to do that based on inheriting some of the momentum of Netscape (which at one point was the number 1 browser), and, based on that, to ask for millions from Google etc to have it as the default search engine. Without Netscape's legacy code, 2+ years of refactoring/engineering work, and initial user base (at the time of the transition) it wouldn't have gone far.

In other words, yeah, open source can do a great job on the desktop too, if it starts as a proprietary code donation and has huge funding. But that "open source" is just a licensing model, so of course it won't be any different in any characteristic to proprietary projects, apart from the licensing -- the CLR released by Microsoft is also "open source" under this metrics.

My comment was about the FOSS bazaar model of volunteers from all over the world, the one touted by the Gnome, etc teams, -- which didn't fare as well on the desktop space.

LibreOffice is a better MS Office in many regards. I'll give you Adobe tools, but Krita is better than Photoshop for people doing mostly tablet art and you've brought up Gimp in a transition period, where they're doing a huge rewrite to support GLSL that allows them to extend their codebase a whole lot where previously it was not possible.

Also GTK is a toolkit firmly linked to Gnome. The best toolkit currently available for Linux is Qt, and it's also cross-platform and integrates well with all desktops and operating systems it supports.

"Let them build Skype" is a good replacement for "Let them eat cake".

Yeah, only in a totally different and irrelevant context, where only "let them" remains the same.

The FOSS community weren't some hungry peasants that the aristocrats at Richmond took their bread away.

On the contrary, they were shouting how they don't need those stinking "proprietary" products, and that they can do one better.

While stroking their neckbeards and drinking Mountain Dew?

There are free services for voice, video and text chat.

What is more difficult, politically speaking, is producing a free client for the Skype protocol. Clean-room reverse-engineering the protocol and producing a client that uses it without Microsoft raining down upon the project is not just a technical problem (or of not switching to cake).

If the closed-source world is so great, let it build an equivalent to the Internet without any of the open pieces the Internet relies on.

You should take into consideration the many DARPA and public/private university dollars that laid the rails for the FOSS stuff to take off for the internet to evolve. Granted not closed-source, but directed-spending, funded research with lots of people involved, not spare-time hobby projects. FOSS nowadays is invisibly supported by large corporations. My first net experiences were on Genie's pay service, and BBS modem dialup to other people's homes and servers. You were truly free to do as you pleased, not worry about the interpretation of GPL, GPL3, etc... I find the MS hatred compared to the Apple ecosystem here very unfair. I had a 386-based pen tablet, the NCR 3125, in 1994 (it came out in 1991, 19 years before the iPad, 2 years before the Newton). As a closed-source system running either PenOS or Windows 3.1(?), it had serial communication to other laptops via LapLink and a cool handwriting recognition system. The PenOS SDK was free to acquire and play and learn with. I believe Wikipedia incorrectly states the Apple Newton in 1993 was the first PDA to have handwriting recognition, but I guess if that's considering the NCR 3125 was not a PDA. The point is that if you go back past the 5 years windows that is constantly touted in this article, Apple would be the 'evil' one, stealing from Xerox, BSD and others, and then encapsulating it into their walled-in, monolithic kingdom. They were largest market cap company until Google displace them this year (Alphabet), and it is definitely not FOSS, yet the masses go like Soma addicts to the spartan white, cloned stores for more with nary a protest. At least the MS kingdom has so many branches, you can choose to follow any one of them. MS Research is amazing. F#, F*, Typescript, the SMT solvers like Z3, Simon Peyton Jones of Haskell fame, is funded or paid by MS. I think MS is far too diverse of a company to pinpoint one aspect and call it 'evil'. It's the one that is wolf in lamb's clothing, Apple, that is truly to be feared ;)

If companies like MS were willing to allow this to happen they would. MS could publish their API and allow third party clients tomorrow. By the end of the year they would be numerous Linux clients for the Skype service. I just can't see this happening.

So are you saying MS should give up mobile since it niche as well?