[zlatan_todoric]

RMS is an idealist. If people actually made what he proposed (envisioned), world would be much better place.

It is hard to see the entire impact of Free software and even harder to predict how the world would like if people actually stood up to it but I can say that I am sure we would have:

- more secure Internet - more decentralized/distributed Internet - no ISP blocks - much harder if not even impossible NSA spying - no disgusting DRM - no patents and patent trolls -> more inovation - no force updates, no abandoned users - more competition in hardware and software field - things being developed for people and not sheer profit - ... - add your points

[kevinchen]

You listed a bunch of things without substantiating. For example, how would free software prevent the NSA from spying? Internet backbone taps don't care if your HTTP implementation is running under Windows or Linux...

[vinceguidry]

> how would free software prevent the NSA from spying?

A lot of hard problems come from the fact that you need lots of developer attention to build and maintain solutions that just work. The domain is tricky and complex enough to where, you can make it zero-effort for one configuration, but making it zero-effort for all possible or even all likely configurations takes more resources than is available.

The example relevant here is cryptography software. It's not hard to encrypt stuff. It's hard to make end-to-end solutions that just work, for all possible uses and across all possible platforms.

Free software has a restrictive effect of only making software platforms that are open and extensible, vastly reducing the effort needed to maintain end-to-end, user-friendly encryption.

It would make it pretty much impossible for the NSA to spy on citizens if we only had free software platforms to support.

[zlatan_todoric]

Not all answer need to be pure technical ones - they don't go and search person by person via manpower but they use meta data and algorithms. Simple overflowing their meta data would force them to use other means. Also you forget social impact - if majority of people actually listened to RMS that means majority of people would be very privacy and security minded and would press the government to change the laws (NSA spying is illegal anyway but with majority of folks actually actively pursuing this would made their existence hard or at least not possible to just go and spy and ruing privacy of entire planet).