When I started working in the 1980s (as a teenager but getting paid) there was a sort of battle between the (genuinely cool and impressive) closed technology of IBM and the open world of open standards/interop like TCP/IP and Unix, SMTP, PCs, even Novell sort of, etc. There was a species of expert that knew the whole product offering of IBM, all the model numbers and recommended solution packages and so on. And the technology was good - I had an opportunity to program a 3093K(?) CM/VMS monster with APL and rexx and so on. Later on I had a job working with AS/400 and SNADS and token ring and all that, and it was interesting; thing is they couldn't keep up and the more open, less greedy, hobbyists and experts working on Linux and NFS and DNS etc. completely won the field. For decades, open source, open standards, and interoperability dominated and one could pick the best thing for each part of the technology stack, and be pretty sure that the resultant systems would be good. Now however, the Amazon cloud stacks are like IBM in the 1980s - amazingly high quality, but not open; the cloud architects master the arcane set of product offerings and can design a bespoke AWS "solution" to any problems. But where is the openness? Is this a pendulum that goes back and forth (and many IBM folks left IBM in the 1990s and built great open technologies on the internet) or was it a brief dawn of freedom that will be put down by the capital requirements of modern compute and networking stacks?

My money is on openness continuing to grow and more and more pieces of the stack being completely owned by openness (kernels anyone?) but one doesn't know.