> Has open source software ended up as a "larger and blander" sea of software "retellings" compared to proprietary software?
By all means, yes! There are so many open source clones of proprietary software, lots of stuff that is solved, but fun to rewrite, so people do it. How many pointless gnome themes are there? How many web servers, media players, databases?
That’s survivor bias. The number of bland, irrelevant forks on GitHub far outnumbers the few relevant projects, it’s just that we, as software developers, have found ways to ignore those as we sift through options.
> Has open source software ended up as a "larger and blander" sea of software "retellings" compared to proprietary software?
By all means, yes! There are so many open source clones of proprietary software, lots of stuff that is solved, but fun to rewrite, so people do it. How many pointless gnome themes are there? How many web servers, media players, databases?
That’s survivor bias. The number of bland, irrelevant forks on GitHub far outnumbers the few relevant projects, it’s just that we, as software developers, have found ways to ignore those as we sift through options.