The reason software developers today have so much power and flexibility can be directly attributed to open-source. Open-source tools are good enough now that 1-4 engineers who are friends can get together and build something amazing and profitable while standing of the shoulders of giants via open-source software. If most things were not open source, we'd be paying a lot more to be able to do our work and we'd have a lot fewer references and examples to study and learn from as we try to invent something of value. Without open-source, many of us would be spending months to years longer to bring a product to market.