No, I agree that the open source movement and free software has helped immensely with organizations that create these environments. However, the key thing is those environments still need to be paid for in order to keep them operational and pay for improvements, etc.
This is why Facebook is inherently free except for the ads. Same with Google. People have not demonstrated a will to pay for a search engine, or for a social network for that matter. The closest thing that I've seen to a Social Network that is paid for by the users is one that is quite politically oriented and isolated, and honestly that's more of a political statement than actually the regular public paying for something.
What do you, the customer, allegedly willing to pay, get from a search provider? Especially once everyone else piles on?
What you get is a simple tool, that then requorements bloats as soon as the rest of the economy notices you're a growing centralized control point.
You start getting DMCA pipelines. You start getting hosting amd analytics, and monetization. You get your supplier suddenly weighing everyone else's interests against yours.
You start getting manipulated results streams when all you wanted wss reasonably consistent and well organized search results according to your query.
And in today's age? You, the customer, will always lose. So people are willing to pay for search engines, they exist, but just aren't willing to pay for "someone else's" search engine. Many may even go as far as starting their own, and not advertising or commercializing it to minimize the number of entrenched filters between them and the Net. As impractical as it sounds.
Not a lot of normal folks grok it enough to articulate yet, but nevertheless I see the pattern starting to coalesce.
For Search, you can deploy a meta search engine or use one someone else has deployed; you still have the mainstream indexes at your disposal that way, but you tend to get less filtered results. You get the truest representation of the rest of the Net via the set up of your own index by writing and cultivating a web crawler. No, I won't suggest it's easy because it isn't. Nor will I suggest any type of paid service, because to be honest, once the rest of the world figures out you've got a successful business model around something they find inconvenient, welcome to legal troubles.
Each and every internet staple started as a bunch of folks doing a project. Keep an eye out for those, or become one of them. Do it for you. Nobody can tell you not to, or hold you to task for doing so. It's only when you start building up enough network effect driven inertia that you start to become that leverage point ripe for the co-opting.
Knowledge asymmetry is big business. The only way to keep people from pulling the wool over your eyes is to build what you need and have a good ole look yourself.
Be warned it isn't for the light of heart, hard-drive, or net link, and your results are only as good as your crawler.
There are also a lot of risks by perniciously going out and connecting with everything under the sun. I'd recommend keeping your forays constrained, or at least on a well insulated network.
This is why Facebook is inherently free except for the ads. Same with Google. People have not demonstrated a will to pay for a search engine, or for a social network for that matter. The closest thing that I've seen to a Social Network that is paid for by the users is one that is quite politically oriented and isolated, and honestly that's more of a political statement than actually the regular public paying for something.