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> they want other people's content to be available on the open web (not just their own content).

It’s precisely because of that the biggest corps of the current day came into existence. Is it even possible for Google, Amazon, Facebook to become this big without the free software that was available on the web?

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Facebooks success wasn't certain, but it did happen. You can start a better social network now, but success is far less likely than that of Facebook was previously.

Could free software exist without closed hardware and software? Was anything created in an ideologically pure vacuum?

Originally all software was free, it just wasn't called that because there was no closed software. It was shared like cooking recipes.

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