> the OSS competitor will always win in the long term.
That's an interesting point, and I've seen it come up more and more in recent years (or even months). It would be interesting to see a survey of major software technologies over time, with proprietary, commercial and open source all represented and see which ones still exist, are still usable in the current ecosystem, and support new features. e.g. operating systems, web servers, mail servers, database servers, CRM solutions, etc. I imagine if you looked at each period at five year intervals from 1993-2008, it would be very telling.
> I think it's probably only true for software that primarily serves large users of OSS.
I think I understand what you're trying to say, but I'm not sure that description makes any sense. Prior to the popular OSS version being created, in most cases an OSS version didn't exist so there couldn't be a large set of users of OSS.
Apache has been run on windows for decades (or very close to it) now. Same with Sendmail, and MySQL These are people that chose to run open source software on a proprietary operating system (windows 98 or windows 2000), so I'm not sure large sets of OSS users had much to do with it. I think it's more that the software was robust, it worked, and it was free.
I think what your point is getting close to though is that it's probably true for software that has a more technical audience. Setting up server software requires some technical fluency, even today (if much less than in prior decades), and those people are more likely to both have heard of competitors, to be able to assess how they might perform in comparison, and to be able to actually install and troubleshoot them given the generally more complex documentation.
What I think we've seen over the last few decades though is that those technically minded people have come to become users of OSS. That is, I think your cause and effect was backwards, as those people are now users of OSS because there's good, solid OSS software that makes sense for them to choose, and once they're using it they are OSS users.
> it's probably true for software that has a more technical audience
Not just technical - technical and already use OSS. But yes, this is broadly my point. However...
> That is, I think your cause and effect was backwards, as those people are now users of OSS because there's good, solid OSS software that makes sense for them to choose
While this is partially true (obviously it has to exist to be used), I'm talking about the original proposition: that OSS always wins.
That's plainly not true when you're dealing with users who don't generally have exposure to OSS. Even polished OSS that serves these audiences (LibreOffice, etc) perform extremely poorly.
I think you get my point in the first part but you're narrowing your focus to why it works on that audience - when my point is that that technical audience isn't the general audience.
That's an interesting point, and I've seen it come up more and more in recent years (or even months). It would be interesting to see a survey of major software technologies over time, with proprietary, commercial and open source all represented and see which ones still exist, are still usable in the current ecosystem, and support new features. e.g. operating systems, web servers, mail servers, database servers, CRM solutions, etc. I imagine if you looked at each period at five year intervals from 1993-2008, it would be very telling.