A couple decades ago, Linux started to get a lot of leverage -- partly due to a compatibility-unburdening created by the Web, partly due to all the libre or open source angle, partly due to technical merits, partly due to lots of people being thrilled to flee Microsoft, and partly due to Microsoft wanting an anti-antitrust alternative to point to.
At this point, many in Linux and related spheres could wield this leverage, to get, say, technology partners to meet them on the kind of terms that had freed everyone from the tyrrany of Microsoft, and showed promise for doing even more.
And if everyone in Linux did their part, Linux would have a stronger position.
However, some parties, for whatever reason (e.g., philosphical differences, personal enrichment, desperation, not knowing history), decided to compromise, and make it easy to combine closed blobs/drivers/etc. with Linux -- frittering away the leverage Linux had.
Bonus for compromising: the parties who remain committed to the principles that got Linux that far are at a disadvantage to you.
(Disclosure: At one point, I was one of the people who compromised, in that I made a specialized Debian Live-based distro that included closed blobs. In that particular case, it was just a pragmatic decision, since I needed an emergency USB stick that would work in whatever PC was handy, but no commercial motivation. But even that obscure distro arguably contributed to discarding leverage, at least in principle. And a couple years ago I compromised on drivers for GPU computing, but maybe I wouldn't have had to, had some before me wielded leverage better.)