This sometimes might be true, but there are many counterexamples. If you look at the web content management systems, the market is dominated by well-engineered open source CMS products, e.g., Drupal, ez Publish, typo3... Even for webshops this true: presta shop, opencart, ...
It might seem like domination but its just the biggest field. The pie is huge, everybody needs CMS. So everybody eats and if you focus on one segment it might see like its domination.
I would say if anything every other website now is Webflow. Every shop is Shopify. And highest quality CMSes are commercial products like Craft CMS or Kirby CMS. So serious projects often grab those instead of OSS offerings.
Ok, there is for sure a closed source offering. Although, if you look at the data of the 1 millio top site on builtwith a strong oss share is clearly visible. It goes without saying that wordpress has the overall largest share, which technically might not be considered a fully-fledged CMS...
There‘s a large proprietary CMS market, mostly Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, EpiServer/Optimizely. There‘s also the more recently risen headless/SaaS content platforms such as Contentful, Sanity, Contentstack, etc. At the bottom end of the market you got Webflow, Wix, and Squarespace.
Wordpress and Drupal do compete but the market is not dominated by open source if you look at more than just the count of websites.
Similar things are true in commerce. Salesforce Commerce, SAP Commerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and commercetools are all not open source but very sizable businesses.
None of these are counter-examples to what the OP said
> Not all, but the ones that aren't have clear product management of some sort.
That's effectively all of these except maybe ublock.
If you don't have someone trying to sell some portion of your code base, true community efforts not a commercial effort that happens to be OSS, you're probably an infrastructure project.
Interesting. So all of the examples have salaried design and product folks?
Meanwhile there's thousands of volunteering FOSS projects that are engineers only. Do product & design people not have passion projects? Or they do but are for some reason unable to collaborate with engineers (or vice versa)?
It's a complex problem. Design agencies and individual designers are blighted by the spectre of "spec work" [https://www.nospec.com] [https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1]. The tl;dr of it is that business will approach agencies and demand they work on a product for free, of a a cost lower than the wok is worth in an act of good faith for the promise of fully paid work in the future. Except the work rarely comes. The upshot is designers are taught the value of their worth at college/university.
The other problem is the FOSS community itself. See the concurrent post about GIMP [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624055]. Opinionated devs that either don't see the value of design or having a designer. I know that this isn't true for all projects, but there a bad apples amongst the bigger, more well known projects (GNOME for example) that will spoil it for everyone else. Again, GIMP is a great example of this. As a result, most 'passion projects' lead to designers working on small projects that inspire them, which are rarely software related, ore they look to create something that can provide an income, either as a small second income or as a new business.
Canonical basically supports Ubuntu. (Over and above the Linux kernel and other components many of which are supported by many different companies (and individuals).
