I don't think anything is "crumbling". Some companies got a large amounts of investment and sky high valuations on a product they were practically giving away. Now they need to figure out how to make those valutions work and return that investment. That sucks for them, but that doesn't prove that its impossible to sustain an open source business to make a certain piece of software.
I use open source software because quality of certain things isn't very important to me, and I don't want to pay for them. If push really came to shove, I could replace large portions of my stack myself using something handrolled. If enough people who want something for free and are willing to build it themselves come together, they can make something that competes with large companies. The large companies in turn can start releasing their product for free in order to maintain market dominance, or they can let themselves be replaced. There's no "free lunch" here, its all simple econmics.
Youtube has largely the same struture: for a while, videos were being made by people doing it as a hobby, then by people doing it as a job, but alone in their bedroom. Now some of them have large production teams and expensive facilities. It sure would suck for them if they stopped being able to make payroll, but I can go back to watching amateurs anytime. Your business model is your problem, not mine.
I use open source software because quality of certain things isn't very important to me, and I don't want to pay for them. If push really came to shove, I could replace large portions of my stack myself using something handrolled. If enough people who want something for free and are willing to build it themselves come together, they can make something that competes with large companies. The large companies in turn can start releasing their product for free in order to maintain market dominance, or they can let themselves be replaced. There's no "free lunch" here, its all simple econmics.
Youtube has largely the same struture: for a while, videos were being made by people doing it as a hobby, then by people doing it as a job, but alone in their bedroom. Now some of them have large production teams and expensive facilities. It sure would suck for them if they stopped being able to make payroll, but I can go back to watching amateurs anytime. Your business model is your problem, not mine.