Yes, Open Source is killing the software market --- everything is moving to become a subscription/service.<p>What this means for users --- you'll pay over and over again for what used to be available for a one time fee.<p>What this means for developers --- less opportunity to earn a living doing what you love. How do you make money developing Open Source? Short answer --- you don't.<p>This is all a good thing, right? Right?
Bruce Sterling had a throw-away mention in his 1994 book about tornado chasers Heavy Weather, saying that in this future no one paid for regular software but everyone shelled out (perhaps subscribed even?) to <i>groupware,</i> software that worked together, because it was just too damned much of a pain in the ass to do anything else.<p>For all the p2p popularity & interest- ipfs, dat, hyper, various blockchains- it feels like there's still very little progress. Even if we take the easy path of building centralized servers, there's few architectures & systems that can help up rapidly develop "multiplayer" software systems.
<i>It won’t happen overnight, it will start out as a poor alternative, but slowly growing to become the robust and cheap ... solution that everyone uses.</i><p>That's the perfect definition for "The Innovator's Dilemma", the 1997 book by Clayton M. Christensen: what happened in the hard-drive industry, and other industries, as cheaper alternatives arrived and put the previous 'top-dogs' out of business.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma</a>