Why, thank you!

Redundancy of efforts in F/OSS is of course a bad thing. It's perhaps even more tragic in free software than in proprietary software, because in free software, developers have fewer formal barriers to drawing upon the work of others. But it's something free software projects can't simply disable by exerting brute control over their users and contributors. The point is that with tech like this, the hackers behind projects like Guix have triumphed in a tougher struggle than NeXT or Apple ever picked. And they've built technology that copes with a wider range of environments, not via ugly hacks on edge cases, but through a thoughtfully designed build system which renders the whole dependency tree of every program it builds transparent, reproducible, and portable. That they had to build a vehicle for such wild and varied terrain is not what I'm celebrating, the cool thing is that they _did_.

> Given the near-complete lack of non-oss software support Linux has, it seems like both developers and users rather prefer uniform common runtimes and a lack of diversity in their operating system components.

Alternatively, when you refuse to distribute source code, compatibility for you involves greater demands on your platform, because you can't leave downstream distributors to recompile and you refuse to allow your more capable users to fix your software's incompatibilities. It's almost like a whole lot of things get easier when you distribute source code with your application.

Regardless, I think there are a lot of factors that together explain the predominance of free software on free operating systems. Proprietary software companies aiming to hit as large a market as possible with a single codebase turning away from perceived fragmentation in the ‘Linux market’ is certainly one of those many factors.