I wonder if the mostly proprietary OSes and browsers has anything to do with the early internet's appeal. Open source invites you to improve and customize the software. Does the ability to do so change the psychology and put the focus more on the app itself? Is it related to entropy, where software has lots of other possible ways that it could have been done differently, all of which sit in ones mind like alternate timelines distracting from the present?
With open software software(Aside from ultra minimal software defined by a specific ideal) you can always improve it with some effort, so perhaps it's always disappointing to some degree especially to anyone who knows how to code?
It's one of the only things people do where there are frequent updates. A textbook might go years between editions. Painters will usually return to similar themes and subjects when they feel they could do better rather than redo a painting verbatim. Software is never done, and software people are never done thinking about it.
How can we get the same results in FOSS that we had on the early internet, when people just said "it works, lets use it!" without using ultra minimal stuff that once again is only interesting to tech tinkerers, and doesn't really do much?
