[mikekchar]

Thanks for clarifying. It definitely makes more sense to me than what I understood from the previous message. Personally, I think there is room for a variety of approaches. It's one of the reasons I'm happy that the OSI is around to champion open source methodologies as distinct from software freedom. Likely, as you say, there would be some benefit from people concentrating on building user-focussed end-to-end experiences.

Having said that, I don't think the FSF needs to get involved with that as the role of prioritising software freedom in an ever changing world is probably more important and also more difficult than ever.

One thing I would caution is assuming that encouraging non-free applications on a free operating system is always going to be win-win. I worked at Corel when they were doing their Linux distro. They misunderstood free software badly. They saw it as an opportunity to lock people into their proprietary applications by changing the underlying OS (without having to pay for developing it). This led to some pretty strange business decisions and ultimately wasted a huge amount of money.

There were a couple of spinoffs from ex-Corel employees who tried to maintain this way of thinking and it was always an uphill struggle. Probably the only one to make any kind of profit was TransGaming and I'll maintain that was substantially because Gav State is both a talented and genuinely nice guy.

I think in order to to make this kind of thing work, you need to understand free software (and the goals of free software) at a very deep level. From my experience, it's just no compatible in a natural way.

[no_wizard]

I agree they did misunderstand OSS/FOSS badly. The last thing a company like Corel needed (or needs) to do, and I know this i very opinionated; is to make their own Linux distro. This is kind of my entire point. A platform as such that is coherent and well evangelized (I know i keep coming back to this, but I was around for the 'we're going out of business in 90 days' Apple years. It took a huge level of evangelism to keep that ship moving) perhaps would have encouraged Corel to just make their software for Linux, which to me is the win. Yes, its a proprietary Word processor or Image manipulation tool, but the OS would still be free/libre, and Corel, at the time I'm assuming this happened, could have been a win with the platform.

I reject, as someone else mentioned, as an aside, that macOS is just free software with a non-free GUI on top. That is missing the boat completely.

[pjmlp]

Your story with Corel is my experience with the majority of companies I worked for, very few if any, did care for FOSS for anything else then cutting down costs without giving anything back.

This is why licenses like MIT are so loved by such companies, now with SaaS and Web UIs it is even better for them.