I am totally pro-Bitcoin and a huge Bitcoin fan, but it's just not looking so great for mainstream adoption.
Here's a great article on how closed-source always beats open-source:
http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/07/cliche-open-source-is-secure.html#.U-Kj3Ui9KSN
The technologies you named are great for tech-savvy engineers, but not for the general public:
Linux - never made it to mainstream users. The general public uses OS X.
Firefox - surpassed in usability and security by Safari and Chrome. Apple's new web services don't even support Firefox anymore.
Wordpress and MySQL and Apache - arguably the 3 open source technologies that made it to mainstream users... BUT both are maintained & controlled by corporations (Wordpress and Oracle and Apache). Hence their success. Without these corporations funding the development of those products, they would likely not have taken off.
VLC - surpassed handily in functionality & features & ease of use by companies like LogMeIn. VLC stopped evolving years ago.
The other technologies you've named: not being used by any mainstream users, unless they were taken over by a corporation (e.g. how Apple used BSD for OS X).
I would LOVE for Bitcoin to go mainstream. I'm rooting for Bitcoin. But unless a for-profit corporation starts controlling & writing the code, it's looking increasingly unlikely that Bitcoin will go mainstream. The few developers working on the code can't even agree on a direction for its future! It's taken 5 years to get where we are today, which is... almost no progress. The Bitcoin Core client hasn't even reached version 1.0.
On the other hand, for example, look where Apple has come in 5 years with the iPhone: 5 major iOS releases, hundreds of millions of phones sold, rock solid stable OS with no security flaws, an entire worldwide ecosystem built around it.