Comment by kkfx
There are few points:
- there is no FLOSS culture in most people, so the classic model "I publish and maintain my code, others get it from free and give back their improvements equally for free" does not work anymore in most cases. Collaboration culture seems to be very diminished, some try be moral police, some simply do not care etc;
- mere widespread lack of competence mixing, in the past with usenet newcomers and gurus was together, interact and share visions, doubts etc, make all people involved learn. Today with Reddit and co people are divided, gurus with gurus, newcomers with newcomers, these are Indian castes with extremely little "social mobility" and that's a large part of why the mean culture is collapsed and almost all new projects not only in FLOSS but in the whole society are failures;
- lack of a good software base, modern software designed by commercial/managerial needs are CRAP, even the finest one, not because the code is crap, but because the environment is. An OS need to be a single application where anyone can automate their small bits at their competence level, this mode was killed because compartmentalizing anything means more products to sell, this is technically unsustainable and most modern people works in such environments and many young have no idea of the old mode and it's power, as a result good tools left behind, those who know them isolated, newcomers suffer from the lack of proper tooling and can't progress;
- finally the "slavery flat line with a dot on top", meaning only few nowadays do things, the giants, others are essentially their slaves. Most companies have no iron, no operation in house, just sitting on the shoulders of giants, using their iron and operation through their interfaces/services. This means the social FLOSS ecosystem does not exists anymore.
More and more people burned by this model try to go FLOSS, off the cloud etc, but they lack tools and competence and resurface from such disaster it's damn not easy since still the largest part of the world is in the barbaric land of the giants where even damn simple things are complicated because that's makes the money for someone.