Since 1989, we have seen a truly staggering wave of mergers, buyouts, and corporate consolidations of all kinds, creating so many more mega-conglomerates (like Alphabet, the big cable companies, etc) than we had before.
So if you wrote a piece of (good) open source code in 1989, chances were not too bad that it would get picked up and used competitively by a wide range of small-to-medium companies. If you wrote that same piece of code today, the chances are much higher that it would either be ignored altogether, or picked up and used anticompetitively by these megacorporations.
I don't think FLOSS really started significant levels of commercial use until the "LAMP" stack of the late 90s. Early internet companies picked up on Linux as a cheap alternative to Solaris or HPUX to run Apache. (I'm not sure there were massive commercial competitors on the server side? IIS? ZWS? WebSphere?)
Possibly not until 2010ish that we started to believe that Microsoft's total domination of the software world might be cracking. And of course Microsoft never touched OSS back then.
(Not OP)
To me the main difference is that in 80s the main way of consuming software was by having it distributed to you, which then can trigger GPL copyleft clauses. These days it is more and more common to consume software as a service, where GPL copyleft is not triggered because the software itself is never distributed.
I think you are making good points. But there are other perspectives:
Open source has done a ton of good. It massively accelerated technological advancements and made software development more accessible, democratic and efficient, because people depend and build on common, collaborative technologies.
A lot of programmers are not in for the business. I want a decent life and not worry about money, but I don't ask for much, especially not in the material sense. The reason I love programming is because of programming itself. It is a fascinating and rewarding craft. In a perfect world, I would be focusing purely on solving problems and make the solutions available for as many people as possible.
Yup. You have to pay for what you use. For some things, that's a pricetag in dollars that you can look at on your balance sheet. For all software except that cast into the public domain, that's an obligation to use it in the ways that the license requires. If the price for a library in dollars is too high, you either grit your teeth and pay it, or you find some other way to accomplish your goal within the law. If the price for software in usage rights is too high, you make the same decision.
> Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please?
Mostly the sheer volume of open source that’s out there. I think FOSS makes a lot of sense for stuff that’s too much work for a small team and needed by a lot of people: operating system kernels, compilers, browsers, etc. That was the stuff to work on in 1987. Today most of that layer is “done”.
I hate to make a really obvious point, but if this seems like a bad deal to you, then .. don't take it? While there's lots of room for debate over "I need this job because I need the money, even though the job is bad", in this case it's very simple: there's no money. So you don't have to take the job.
The modal open source project receives no money. Then there's a long tail of projects that get just enough donations to keep going, a few ones that have secured a commercial sponsor, and then one or two big enough to have a "foundation" (Mozilla, Apache).
> We live in a very different world compared to 1989 when the GPL was first published
Could you articulate which differences you feel are relevant please?