Well... I'm not sure that's how boycotts work.
What if open source is like radio or YouTube acting as a free ad for a product that still has commercial value in other ways?
And if the OSS product doesn't "kill off" its competition it may simply appeal to a lower cost or price sensitive segment.
Once students learn the AI on free models they graduate to paid versions.
A boycott, "for the AI haters" would need to be against all AI, free or not, maybe?
Boycotts can absolutely mean looking for an equivalent alternative somewhere else. If you think the mainstream is unsustainable, there's nothing wrong with supporting an alternative business model.
OpenAI and Anthropic have billions of dollars in outstanding debt, and neither Fable nor Sol is pulling them out of the red. As the gap between Chinese and American benchmarks closes, it seems like the safest route is to let America's frontier labs default on their debt. The absolute worst-case scenario would be nationalizing America's labs and socializing the losses from their failure to compete.