I know everyone here loves FOSS, and for good reason, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t have its own issues. UX and accessibility are two I whine about regularly, but another big one is project abandonment.
I can’t tell you how many old forum/reddit posts I’ve run across of a lone developer hyping up their latest project, only for me to go to the github page and notice the last commit was 7 years ago.
If you’re not familiar with the Gemini protocol, it’s an updated alternative to Gopher, which in turn was an early competitor to the WWW back in the 90s. Gemini itself I can’t speak to, but if you go down the list of gemini servers and clients on geminiprotocol.net, you’ll see 404s, broken links, and expired certs galore. There was a flood of developer interest 5 or 6 years ago when the protocol was new, but everyone wandered away once the shiny wore off.
My recent foray into wiki software has turned up a few corpses as well. Wiki.js development seems to have stalled, and Pepperminty wiki has been abandoned for three years now.
And yes, I know this is because FOSS devs are often doing this on their own time for little to no money, so passion is the only thing driving them, but passion can only get you so far.
Besides loss of developer interest, community schisms can cause a project to sink. Remember what happened to Audacity? I think it ended up surviving but there was a real concern for a while that the forks wouldn’t be as well supported.
All the FOSS offerings I can think of that are “too big to fail” have big corporate support, like the Linux kernel.
I’m guessing most of us are self-hosting as a hobby, and we can afford to risk a loss of support when a project is abandoned, but businesses don’t have that luxury. That’s why they use proprietary software.
Complex social hierarchy is a super important aspect to account for too. In the proprietary software realm, you infer confidence in the accumulated wealth hierarchy. In FOSS the hierarchy is not wealth, but reputation like in academia or the film industry. If some company in Oman makes some really great proprietary app, are you going to build your European startup over top of it? Likewise, if in FOSS someone with no reputation makes some killer app, the first question to ask is whether this is going to anchor or support a stellar reputation. Maybe they are just showing off skills to land a job. If that is the case, they are just like startups that are only looking to get bought up quickly by some bigger fish. We are all conditioned to think in terms of horded wealth as the only form of hierarchy, but that is primitive. If all the wealth was gone, humans are still fundamentally complex social animals, and will always establish a complex hierarchy. This is one of the spaces where it is different.