Stallman told you so.
He has a ton of flaws, but we shouldn't ever forget his warnings nor his contributions to free software. The future he was telling us about is here, and it's going to get worse.
The user can go change the launcher.
Stallman and open source helped drive a lot of paid software out of the market because they could not compete with free versions.
For the most part, the paid consumer software market is dead.
Companies will always want to make money, so they “gave away” free software funded by ads and then used free open source software to run their servers serving and targeting ads.
>they “gave away” free software funded by ads
Proprietary software isn't free software. Free doesn't just mean free as in no cost to use.
There is an argument, and I sometimes wonder if it doesn't have legs, that a software developer who I just hand money to is more likely to be aligned with my interests than an advertiser's. (And yeah you can say "well bankroll free software!"--then you have to find somebody and be capable of evaluating the results and you've just hit the resource scarcity problem from the other side. A commercially-released application is a lot more concrete.)
What do you mean? Was it anytime alive? Also, don't people buy, for example, games more than ever? And I don't mean the micro-transaction stuff, I mean the more traditional, paying upfront stuff. And back then there were lot of demos, shareware, freeware and shitty DRMs that were easy to crack. I'm not seeing a healthy consumer software market - at any point of time.