They almost always start out this way then slowly become figured out and integrated into the corporate machine. And the ones that are centralization-resistant become demonized and/or suppressed by the media. Tor, bitcoin, etc.
The entire history of the internet is basically decentralized protocols being slowly transformed into corporate walled-gardens.
they are just failed business with above average marketing budgets. It would have sold to facebook just the same if it took over market as whatsapp did.
That seems very likely. My point wasn't to say that they were looking to make a revolutionary tool to fight a state, more that it makes me sad that the ones that catch on are rarely open source ones that have existed.
Do you know of any projects that tried to advertise how much it helps? Obviously quite a limited set of projects that would even have a budget to advertise, but I wonder if there is data on how much it helps to show folks there are other options.
there's ton of data. that's why most project want to use MIT. They dream with vc money so they can just dump it all in marketing and make bank. like moby, i mean docker. npm. etc.
hence why you either go GPLv3 or don't bother calling it open source.
Not only marketing but also the worst engineering, testing, design, accessibility ... budgets.
Financing open-source projects is hard because anybody can take them and build stuff on top of them to sell at a way higher margin (or they are restrictive i.e. AGPL so nobody builds anything on top of them)
Only well-financed major open source projects are the ones that existed at critical points of time where no strong proprietary alternative with abundant features existed (e.g. Linux kernel, GCC, Apache Web Server) or the ones that are created by major companies as part of their infrastructure and released as a way to shape markets (e.g. Kubernetes, Chromium, PyTorch, React, .NET Core) for the worse or the better.
