People Can Change; Companies and countries and communities too
It may surprise you, but people can change. Towards the end of my screenplay Selina Mandrake - The Slayer I describe such changes among traditionally stubborn men and societies:
Q, who had been revealed to be a humanoid, decided to appear less blasé and show some compassion for fellow organisms, including his ex-wives and children.
Kahless returns on The Day of The Living Dead to guide the Klingons back into rationality and carefulness instead of what became their traditional stubbornness and haste.
We admit to ourselves that sometimes amateurs (being people who like what they do, people who don’t play by the rules, and finally people who are not professional) can compete with the large budgets and high discipline of professionals, and even exceed it, because they can deliver more and at greater capacity, tend to think outside the box, and simply tend to avoid the many invisible rules that plague more professional structures.
Linus Torvalds surprised quite a few people by admitting that being needlessly rude was detrimental to the growth of the Linux kernel’s development community rather than something that he believed was good for it. There were some conspiracy hypotheses about how exactly he came to that realisation, but it is not unthinkable for a person to change their mind.
Richard Stallman also decided to resign from his long term role as president of the Free Software Foundation, which also was a surprise to many. The exact impetus for that decision is irrelevant, and Dr. Stallman is planning to remain active. Furthermore, the new president will likely be better and more effective than him.
Companies can change too. Under its new leadership, Microsoft has open sourced many projects, or developed them as open source to begin with. It also acquired GitHub, and despite some predictions of doom and gloom from paranoid users, it seems that the user experience (= "UX") of GitHub has improved since the acquisition.
Naturally, there are some paranoid conspiracy hypotheses about evil Microsoft intentions to secretly take over and dominate the open source world. I, on the other hand, try to avoid worrying ("Hakuna Matata") about such farfetched scenarios before they have materialised. I still recall some clueless users of Microsoft software saying that "Microsoft will buy Linux!" in the mid-to-late 1990s, and that naturally didn't happen because of the FOSS nature of the licences (whether copyleft or permissive), and the superior amateur-based model of development. [Embrace, extend, and extinguish]
As the Chuck Norris factoid I came up with goes: “Chuck Norris' round house kicks are licensed under the public domain because no one else can successfully emulate them.”
[Embrace, extend, and extinguish] I believe these include fears of the "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy, which has also been unintentionally practised by many open-source projects, can usually be overcome using reverse engineering, and seems to have been falling out of favour by Microsoft anyway.