FOSS misconceptions, still in 2017

The lack of basic FOSS understanding in Telecom

Given that the Free and Open Source movement has been around at least
since the 1980ies, it puzzles me that people still seem to have such
fundamental misconceptions about it.

Something that really triggered me was
which quotes Ulf Ewaldsson, a leading Ericsson excecutive with

"I have yet to understand why we would open source something we think is
really good software"

This completely misses the point. FOSS is not about making a charity
donation of a finished product to the planet.

FOSS is about sharing the development costs among multiple players, and
avoiding that everyone has to reimplement the wheel.
Macro-Economically, it is complete and utter nonsense that each 3GPP
specification gets implemented two dozens of times, by at least a dozen
of different entities. As a result, products are way more expensive
than needed.

If large Telco players (whether operators or equipment manufacturers)
were to collaboratively develop code just as much as they
collaboratively develop the protocol specifications, there would be no
need for replicating all of this work.

As a result, everyone could produce cellular network elements at reduced
cost, sharing the R&D expenses, and competing in key areas, such as who
can come up with the most energy-efficient implementation, or can
produce the most reliable hardware, the best receiver sensitivity, the
best and most fair scheduling implementation, or whatever else. But
some 80% of the code could probably be shared, as e.g. encoding and
decoding messages according to a given publicly released 3GPP
specification document is not where those equipment suppliers actually
compete.

So my dear cellular operator executives: Next time you're cursing about
the prohibitively expensive pricing that your equipment suppliers quote
you: You only have to pay that much because everyone is reimplementing
the wheel over and over again.

Equally, my dear cellular infrastructure suppliers: You are all dying
one by one, as it's hard to develop everything from scratch. Over the
years, many of you have died. One wonders, if we might still have more
players left, if some of you had started to cooperate in developing FOSS
at least in those areas where you're not competing. You could replicate
what Linux is doing in the operating system market. There's no need in
having a phalanx of different proprietary flavors of Unix-like OSs. It's
way too expansive, and it's not an area in which most companies need to
or want to compete anyway.

Management Summary

You don't first develop and entire product until it is finished and
then release it as open source. This makes little economic sense in
a lot of cases, as you've already invested into developing 100% of it.
Instead, you actually develop a new product collaboratively as FOSS in
order to not have to invest 100% but maybe only 30% or even less. You
get a multitude of your R&D investment back, because you're not only
getting your own code, but all the other code that other community
members implemented. You of course also get other benefits, such as
peer review of the code, more ideas (not all bright people work inside
one given company), etc.