Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice

The whole point of open source software is that anyone can submit patches and ideas, and thus the plan gets corrected to be the best possible (assuming the maintainers are open to them).

Or you can also see it as competition on small patches and ideas, which is much more efficient than competition on whole implementations, which requires a ton of wasted work.

Again, the whole point of open source is that this model is more efficient than a traditional proprietary free market, as long as there is something that motivates people to contribute despite the inability to sell the software (such as need to use personally, or need to have good software to sell hardware or services).