It dominates the server, because many FOSS users refuse to pay for tooling don't have any other option than paying subscriptions for their servers to keep running, or very least they need to buy hardware.
FOSS Desktop doesn't scale to keep a company running under such premises, because a large majority refuses to pay, and living from patreons and donations only goes as far.
Which is why everyone that wants to make money with Desktop FOSS software, either moved it beyond a paywall served via browsers or to mobile OS stores.
From my point of view FOSS friendliness is a marketing action, where underdog companies play nice, use non-copyleft licenses and as soon as they get rescued due to positive vibes, whatever, hop again into dual licenses to keep their business rolling.
> FOSS Desktop doesn't scale to keep a company running under such premises, because a large majority refuses to pay, and living from patreons and donations only goes as far.
Okay, how complex does an OS need to be, really? Let's see, it needs to schedule and run your programs, interface to the hardware, manage permissions… that's about it. Why would it need to scale? What's so impossibly complex about an OS that it couldn't be done by 5 highly competent engineers in 2 years?
Oh, right, the hardware. With the exception of CPUs, hardware vendors don't publish their specs, and don't agree on a set of interfaces. So you end up having to write a gazillion drivers, dozens of millions of lines of code, just so you can talk to the hardware.
Solve that problem, and OSes won't need to scale. Perhaps even to the point that game devs will be able to ship their own custom OS with their games. As was done in the 80s and early 90s.
Having a stable driver ABi, and being micro-kernel based helps with scaling, which fun fact, that is what Playstation with its heavily customised FreeBSD, or Switch with their in-house OS do.
As for portable specs, if Open Group, Khronos have taught anything, is that there is a big difference between paper and real hardware/platforms.
Yep, we shipped with our customs OSes, which also had our custom workarounds for faulty undocumented firmware bugs, those that we occasionally took advantage of for demoscene events.
> As for portable specs, if Open Group, Khronos have taught anything, is that there is a big difference between paper and real hardware/platforms.
But… they don't even specify ISAs, they specify APIs. I'd wager the big difference is only natural. Another way would be for a vendor to design their ISA on their own, then make it public. If a public ISA gives them an advantage (and I think it could), others would be forced to follow suit. No more unrealistic consortium. :-)
> faulty undocumented firmware bugs
I hope that today, any hardware bug would trigger an expensive recall, and firmware bugs would just be embarrassing. CPUs today do have bugs, but not that many. We could generalise that to the rest of the hardware.
FOSS Desktop doesn't scale to keep a company running under such premises, because a large majority refuses to pay, and living from patreons and donations only goes as far.
Which is why everyone that wants to make money with Desktop FOSS software, either moved it beyond a paywall served via browsers or to mobile OS stores.
From my point of view FOSS friendliness is a marketing action, where underdog companies play nice, use non-copyleft licenses and as soon as they get rescued due to positive vibes, whatever, hop again into dual licenses to keep their business rolling.