And in this alternate past history, how would they have generated an income? I think your clarification is spot-on, and the debate around whether they could or would have been out-competed is an interesting one, but fundamentally they need to be able to generate revenue somehow.

I totally get open-source for libraries/components/building blocks/etc, and strategies like “commoditise your complements” have been mentioned elsewhere. But I’m struggling to see how open-sourcing the actual end-user product isn’t just literally giving away everything for free?