I know this is a dormant thread, but it just occurred to me that open source permits development of projects that would be s**tcanned in the purely commercial world for both good and bad reasons.

Wayland would have been killed by the 2nd or 3rd CEO to take the helm after the first few release failures, however, many other excellent projects would likely also have been killed off or not been attempted. However, I think it is safe to say that any project developed with an eye to either popularise, or commercialise linux, is unfortunately also bad for Linux as we know it. I used to really like Gnome - but then someone with "vision" took over and dumbed it down so simpletons would use it (and made it look more like windows) - news flash - instead of windows users adopting it, windows changed into something else, and gnome is still chasing that ghost.

The best projects have always been a developer scratching their own itch. Not someone "with a vision" for the OS as a whole.