Well I, like everybody, use the internet which mostly runs on Linux. But that wasn’t my point. Open Source probably hasn’t made things any worse, but the ideological battle was waged at the wrong end, resulting in a hollow victory.
Tell some open source advocate from 2001 or so that most people do most of their computing on Linux in 2019, and I think they’ll picture something quite different to what we have in Android and the cloud.
Tell that to a Free Software advocate and you might get interesting results :)
To be less obtuse: this is exactly what people who say GNU/Linux and Free Software rather than Open Source have been concerned about since the beginning.
Yes, indeed. I think that Richard Stallman and similar have a more balanced message in this respect. At some point the popular focus seemed to shift the notion that open source software needed to “win” in terms of market share, regardless of whether that was helping in the cause of computing freedom.
That argument was not dominant (though it existed) within the world of people who cared. It was primarily pushed by people who felt that ethics were in the way of business goals.
For point of reference, Linus Torvalds only half cares about ethics. He likes all the value of collaboration from a developer perspective and doesn't care so much about whether software treats people well and gives end users any freedom.
Perhaps not 2001. But there were certainly people starting to ask by the mid to late-2000s whether source code freedom was what we really needed to be worrying about the most, see e.g. Tim O'Reilly and Tim Bray here: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/28/Open-Data
Tell some open source advocate from 2001 or so that most people do most of their computing on Linux in 2019, and I think they’ll picture something quite different to what we have in Android and the cloud.