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>Stallman and open source helped drive a lot of paid software out of the market because they could not compete with free versions.

>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.

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I feel like this post elides the functionally single-source nature of plenty of free and open-source software. "But you can fork it" means nothing when you, singularly or collectively, don't have the will or, far more frequently, the resources (time, money, knowledge, etc.) to do so in a sustainable and secure manner. It's the "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread--the rich as well as the poor" of tech.

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.)

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