Open source has won hands down for developers. It’s basically a giant tool bin and parts yard for people who build things with software. It’s also useful to extremely tech savvy people who like to DIY homelab type stuff.
In the consumer realm it has lost equally decisively.
The reason, I think, is that the distance between software nerds can use and software the general public can (or wants) to use is significantly larger than anyone understood. Getting something to work gets it like 5% of the way to making it usable.
Even worse, making it usable requires a huge amount of the kind of nit picky UI/UX work that programmers hate to do. This means they have to be paid to do it, which means usable software is many many times more expensive than technical software.
The situation is hopeless unless people start paying for open software, which is hard because the FOSS movement taught everyone that software should be free.
"In the consumer realm it has lost" is kind of weird to me, though. I'd say, don't think about "developers" v. everyone else but "anyone doing anything creative, as opposed to merely consuming, with computers and related devices" and it's not at all clear that the creators are the losers?
This seems almost like you're framing an observation "in the consumer realm it has lost" as some moral failing and feels in dangerously bad faith. What's the point? Do you really want to willfully ignore the artists using Procreate a closed source iOS app, the chip designers using proprietary EDA tools, the DJs using proprietary DJ software like Serrato, the musicians using proprietary DAWs like Ableton?
If anything, it's the creatives who use more proprietary software than the folks doing generic office work that can get away using LibreOffice and read PDFs using evince.
The generous reading, which I think is mostly correct, is that consumers mostly don't directly run open source software, e.g. LibreOffice on Linux. A ton of the software they run has significant open source components but it's packaged up as a proprietary SaaS or an app store app.
SaaS is how most people use open source, which is very ironically the least open way of using software. Closed source commercial (local) software is considerably more open and offers far more privacy and freedom.
I wouldn't say that open-source SaaS is the "least open" way of using software.
If you're using a hosted service based on open source software, you know that you can leave. You can grab your data and self-host. You can move it to another host that has reused or forked the code. You can run it locally. You have options.
If you're using local closed-source software, your files might not even be usable without an Internet connection. Think Spotify (closed source, local) where even your "offline" playlists won't load if you don't allow the software to phone home once in a while.
In the consumer realm it has lost equally decisively.
The reason, I think, is that the distance between software nerds can use and software the general public can (or wants) to use is significantly larger than anyone understood. Getting something to work gets it like 5% of the way to making it usable.
Even worse, making it usable requires a huge amount of the kind of nit picky UI/UX work that programmers hate to do. This means they have to be paid to do it, which means usable software is many many times more expensive than technical software.
The situation is hopeless unless people start paying for open software, which is hard because the FOSS movement taught everyone that software should be free.