Evil Lives On
Sadly it’s not been much of a rollercoaster since open-sourcing Java, ultimately, Java got big on being strongly fronted by Sun, It had -anyway - always been an open development process , just short of having an OSS licence really…
Harsh reality for most OS projects, the community only gets as far as an interesting hobby and stops short of becoming a viable alternative for the everyday Joe.
Just take how many open source jobs (actual development,not jobs in companies that sell Linux CDs) out there and divide it by the number of contributors - that is a small fraction. I can only extrapolate that many of them to make their day-living developing on bad, proprietary platforms using closed languages.
This is why I feel that Ubuntu is probably the only true contender to Mac &Windows for the same reason, they have real strategy and a real business model.
Much as we try to deny, it sometimes takes a dedicated full-team well-funded team to take it down the final stretch.